The Fintech Playbook for Latin America

**Santiago Suárez** (0:00)
Don't let your ambition fall prey of commercial wisdom. If you're a consensus play, there's just no alpha. We serve over 3 million consumers, over 50,000 merchant partners. We have incredible cost-to-serve economics. Over 200 agent production. We built a company on a monorepo as opposed to microservices. Monorepos today are all the rage. Anthropics built on a monorepo. Google obviously famously is a monorepo company. When we started the company, microservices was where it was at.

**Gabriel Vásquez** (0:23)
So why did you make that decision? What gave you the forethought to make it?

**Santiago Suárez** (0:27)
I hired the best CTO in the business.

**Gabriel Vásquez** (0:28)
How did you get your organization culturally moving as quickly as you have?

**Santiago Suárez** (0:33)
It's basically a combination of two things. We have a very clear view of where we are and where we want to be.
We have been extremely explicit with folks about standards and expectations. It's not going to be easy. It hasn't been easy, but...

**Angela Strange** (0:48)
Building a technology company in Latin America often means solving problems that don't exist elsewhere. Fragmented financial infrastructure, limited access to credit, and underdeveloped software systems create challenges, but also opportunities to rethink how commerce and financial services work.
Over the last several years, Addi has grown from a buy-now-pay-later product into a broader platform spanning payments, commerce, logistics, and banking. Angela Strange and Gabriel Vásquez speak with Addi founder and CEO Santiago Suárez about financial inclusion, technology infrastructure, AI, and building one of Latin America's most ambitious fintech companies.

**Gabriel Vásquez** (1:33)
We're here today with Santiago Suárez, the founder and CEO of Addi. Addi is a buy-now-pay-later marketplace and payments platform in Colombia, and now just recently a bank.
And Addi has served over 25 percent of the population. Welcome to the show.

**Santiago Suárez** (1:49)
Thrilled to be here. Amazing.

**Gabriel Vásquez** (1:52)
All right. So for those in our audience who may be less familiar with Addi, can you give us a sense of what does the company do now and what scale are you at?

**Santiago Suárez** (2:01)
Absolutely. So we provide consumers and merchants with financial solutions such as credit at the point of sale, instantaneous payments, logistics. We just got our banking license. So you should think of it as the kind of elemental fabric of commerce and financial services in one of the fastest growing Latin American economies, size-wise we serve over 3 million consumers or 50,000 merchant partners. That's a little bit about the scale of Addi and what we do today.

**Gabriel Vásquez** (2:27)
Okay. So we're going to talk a lot about Addi. I think it's interesting to talk about your career pre-Addi. So you're from Columbia. You came to the US to go to college.
You joined startup as a first employee and you're pretty public about being fired from set startup. And then left very surgically created a list of the 10 best operators in your mind and you wanted to go work for one of those. And you chose Jamie Dimit.
So maybe walk us through the lessons from those experiences that relate to what you're doing now.

**Santiago Suárez** (2:55)
Yeah. So it really starts with coming here for college. I think I've been increasingly open about this most recent years. But for a while I was like, no one needs to know this. But the first time I ever left Columbia was to come to college. And I came to the US for college on a full ride because my parents couldn't afford college in the US certainly, and most places in Columbia.
So that to me was probably the first time that I could really see doing something that no one thought was possible. I mean, to the degree that I wrote my college essays on a borrowed computer, because we didn't have a computer, because in that period of time, those years were pretty tough, we didn't have one. So I had to borrow someone's computer to write the college essays, and be able to go from doing that to just getting a scholarship to this incredible place. And it remains incredible, more so at the time, Yale, for an undergraduate education, it just really changes your definition of what's possible. I think that also led me to work at Navya, the first startup. Navya was doing probabilistic computing back in 2010 And we used to say, this is by the way, 16 years ago, we used to say, our programs are so special, because every time you run them, you get a different output.
It was back in 2010
And we were pre-Transformers, pre-ImageNet, pre-all these things. And we're out there talking to investors, being like, oh, our programs run and give you a different answer every time, because they're probabilistic. This is how AI is going to happen. That was about the one thing we had going for ourselves there. But I was so excited about the potential of that technology. We were just a couple of decades early. And then to your point, we had four co-founders.