# The Fintech Playbook for Latin America

Podcast: The a16z Show
Published: Jun 17, 2026
Reading time: 15 min
Canonical: https://podbrew.app/briefs/the-a16z-show-the-fintech-playbook-for-latin-america

Angela Strange and Gabriel Vásquez speak with Santiago Suárez, founder and CEO of Addi. Addi has evolved into one of Latin America's largest financial platforms, expanding from a buy now, pay later product into a comprehensive ecosystem spanning payments, commerce, logistics, and now banking.

The conversation covers the intricacies of building a business in Latin America, lessons learned from scaling through various market cycles, and the essential role of technology infrastructure. Topics also include AI, organizational design, and effective product strategy.

This discussion offers valuable insights into achieving financial inclusion and economic growth in the region. It highlights the unique challenges and strategies for building enduring companies outside traditional tech hubs like Silicon Valley, underscoring the deep connection between financial services and economic development.

## Key takeaways

- Addi functions as a comprehensive platform providing financial solutions, including credit, payments, and logistics, for over three million consumers and fifty thousand merchants in Latin America, recently securing a banking license.

- Addi was built using a monorepo architecture from the outset, a contrarian technical decision at the time that has since gained traction among leading technology companies.

- Colombia presented an overlooked market opportunity for Addi, challenging perceptions of it being too difficult due to high cash usage and limited credit card penetration.

- Key drivers for Addi's launch in Colombia included high smartphone adoption, creating a low-cost distribution channel for financial services with 75% of Colombians owning a smartphone.

- Prioritize direct customer feedback, such as listening to service calls and reviewing transcripts, over aggregate metrics like NPS for a more genuine understanding of customer experience, especially for smaller teams.

- Develop a strategic, focused product roadmap that avoids the temptation to launch many features simultaneously, even if this approach is counterintuitive to industry norms.

- Maintain strong conviction in an unusual business strategy and be prepared to disregard short-term equity investor skepticism for five to ten years to achieve long-term success.

- The company's advanced AI agents autonomously handle 100% of customer service queries, resolving close to 80% without human involvement, and manage merchant onboarding with a 100% handle rate, boosting conversion by over 20%.

- Addi's success is founded on a unified monorepo and data architecture, enabling scalable AI and proprietary payment infrastructure, essential in a market where external service providers are scarce.

- Addi's decision to use a monorepo provided a unified code base, improving readability for engineers, fostering automatic component reuse, and delivering economic efficiencies that support its large product surface and AI initiatives.

- The company's event sourcing architecture logs over ten million events daily, capturing every interaction, which, when integrated with Databricks, enables real-time data ingestion and transformation into formats suitable for diverse AI and machine learning models.

- Addi prioritized high-stakes legal compliance in Colombia as its initial AI application, addressing emergency constitutional actions with 48-hour response deadlines, thereby forcing the development of highly accurate and comprehensive RAG pipelines for critical data retrieval.

- Operating a company in English attracts global talent and elevates the professional standard and perceived premium for local Spanish-speaking employees.

- A remote-first company structure inherently creates explicit context and formal APIs, providing a competitive advantage for seamless AI agent integration.

- A CEO's personal, hands-on experience building an AI stack can generate crucial conviction and demonstrate the feasibility of company-wide AI adoption.

- Making AI a non-optional, top company priority with explicit standards is essential for driving rapid organizational and cultural change.

- Manage the pace of growth, especially early on, to avoid critical pitfalls like severe fraud, even when market conditions pressure rapid expansion.

- Cultivate big ambitions, but achieve them through contrarian strategies rather than following conventional wisdom, which typically yields no unique competitive advantage.

- Adopting a singular North Star Metric or a maximum of three key performance indicators (L1 metrics) provides company-wide focus and alignment, evolving with business needs.

- Writing down all decisions and processes, even seemingly obvious ones, promotes clarity, accountability, and a deeper understanding of the "why" behind actions.

## 00:00 - 03:03 Addi's Financial Inclusion Platform and Growth in Latin America

Addi, a Latin American fintech company, has expanded from a buy now, pay later product into a comprehensive platform providing financial solutions such as credit, instantaneous point-of-sale payments, and logistics to consumers and merchants. Having recently secured a banking license, Addi aims to establish itself as a fundamental provider of commerce and financial services in the region.

Operating at a significant scale, Addi serves over three million consumers and partners with over fifty thousand merchants. The company addresses the unique challenges prevalent in Latin America, which include fragmented financial infrastructure, limited access to credit, and underdeveloped software systems, by building essential services for the market.

From its inception, Addi made a strategic decision to build its technology on a monorepo architecture, a choice that diverged from the then-prevalent microservices trend. This forward-thinking engineering approach, now also adopted by major tech companies like Google and Anthropic, highlights a deliberate and effective technical strategy.

> You should think of it as the kind of elemental fabric of commerce.

## 03:03 - 06:01 Santiago Suárez Recounts Early Career Lessons on Organizational Structure and Leadership

Santiago Suárez's path from Colombia to a full scholarship at Yale profoundly shifted his understanding of possibility. Coming from a background where a computer for college essays was a borrowed luxury, attending an institution like Yale expanded his horizons and sense of achievable goals.

His first startup, Navi, focused on probabilistic computing around 2010, well before the modern AI boom. Santiago was captivated by the technology's potential, even if their concept of programs yielding different outputs each run was significantly ahead of its time, presenting challenges in investor conversations.

Navi's internal struggles included four or five CEOs in 12 months. Santiago, then 23, briefly served as CEO. After attempting to fire a co-founder he believed was underperforming, he was subsequently fired himself within 24 hours by the other co-founders.

This chaotic experience at Navi taught Santiago two critical lessons: the potential power of AI and, more importantly, the necessity of internal organization to pursue a goal effectively. This insight heavily influenced his approach to building Addi, where structured organization is a core strength.

> I talked to the right people supposedly to gather support, and then I fired him, and within twenty-four hours, the four co-founders were like, 'Yeah, that's cute, but you're out of here.'

## 06:01 - 12:02 Addi strategically launched in Colombia due to unique market opportunities.

Santiago Suárez, co-founder of Addi, made the strategic decision to launch his financial technology company in Colombia, defying conventional wisdom that suggested the market was too challenging due to a prevalence of cash transactions and low credit card penetration. His prior experience in the intricate U.S. financial system, ironically, made him more open to a fresh perspective in a less regulated environment, enabling him to identify overlooked opportunities.

One key factor was Colombia's rapid and widespread technological adoption, with 75% of its population owning smartphones. This phenomenon created an unprecedented opportunity for financial services, providing a distribution channel in nearly everyone's hands at a near-zero marginal cost, overcoming a traditional hurdle for banking expansion.

Additionally, Colombia possessed a strong cultural tradition of "pay over time" but lacked efficient and accessible mechanisms to facilitate this. Coupled with extremely poor existing user experiences (UX) in financial services, the market was ripe for disruption. Examples include a 22-minute process for a simple installment purchase requiring multiple verifications, and banks charging customers for accessing their online portals more than twice a month, forcing them into more expensive in-person channels.

These dynamics, including high smartphone penetration, an ingrained payment tradition, and widespread customer pain points, signaled a massive, underserved market. What Santiago initially perceived as a good test bed for Addi, later revealed itself to be a significantly larger opportunity than first imagined.

> Wow, we now have a distribution device in everyone's hands at zero marginal cost of distribution.

## 12:02 - 16:03 Learning from Kazakhstan's Casp on Customer Obsession and Product Strategy

After an investor introduced him to Casp, a successful fintech company in Kazakhstan, Santiago and his co-founder Daniel decided to learn from their unique single-country success story. They embarked on a trip to Central Asia, including Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, specifically to meet Casp's CEO. After multiple attempts via LinkedIn and other channels, Santiago secured a 90-minute meeting with the CEO.

During this meeting, Santiago identified two crucial lessons. The first centered on customer obsession beyond traditional metrics. The Casp CEO stated that NPS is a 'terrible metric' for companies with fewer than a thousand employees. Instead, they focus on listening to customer service calls, reviewing random transcripts, and monitoring a suite of customer experience KPIs in their weekly business reviews.

The second key lesson pertained to product roadmap development. The Casp CEO advised against trying to implement 'everything at once,' offering a counterintuitive approach to structuring product roadmaps that significantly influenced Santiago's company. This contrasted sharply with the common industry practice of announcing multiple products, like bank accounts, logistics, and POS integrations, in a single event.

A third piece of advice from the Casp CEO emphasized the importance of conviction: he told them to ignore equity investors for five to ten years when pursuing an unusual strategy. He explained that investors often won't understand such plays initially but will eventually seek to participate once success becomes evident, highlighting the necessity of clarity of purpose and high conviction.

> This is a very unusual play, equity investors won't understand this, just ignore them for five years to ten years, and then one day you'll come out and they'll be like, 'Why didn't you call me?'

## 16:03 - 20:03 Addi Achieves Global Fintech Recognition Through Strategic AI and Tech Investments

Addi was recently honored by Fast Company as the third most innovative fintech company globally, a recognition attributed to two years of significant long-term technology investments. Unlike environments where many services are outsourced, Addi's growth in Colombia necessitated building robust in-house solutions from the ground up.

The company's technological foundation is built on a monorepo-based, unified data architecture, which has enabled the scalable deployment of advanced AI. This infrastructure supports Addi's proprietary payment network, handling its own clearing and settlement across more than 1,000 cities in Colombia.

Addi has developed powerful in-house AI agents that fully manage 100% of customer service queries, resolving nearly 80% without any human intervention. Similarly, AI agents for merchant onboarding process 2,000 to 3,000 new merchants monthly, with a 100% handle rate and over 20% improvement in conversion. The company is also developing its own transformer model.

This emphasis on building advanced, internal systems, combined with a company culture that operates in English to attract top global talent, reflects Addi's commitment to benchmarking itself against the best in the world, leading to its current innovative standing.

> we built our own in-house agents that currently handle, oh, a hundred percent of all customer service queries. They handle a hundred percent, and they resolve close to eighty percent. So full resolution, no human in the loop.

## 20:03 - 26:05 Addi's foundational monorepo and event sourcing architecture, integrated with Databricks, laid the groundwork for an AI strategy, initially targeting high-stakes legal compliance.

Addi's seven-year-old architectural choices laid the groundwork for its current AI strategy. The company adopted a monorepo, where all code resides in a single repository, making it easier for engineers to read and promoting automatic component reuse, leading to significant economic advantages with its 60 product engineers.

Concurrently, Addi implemented an event sourcing architecture, logging over ten million events daily, from text messages and shopping cart additions to bureau scores and financial data. This comprehensive stream of real-time events, though challenging to query, became a critical asset.

Five years ago, Addi partnered with Databricks to ingest and transform these events into various formats—vector for LLMs, SQL for classical machine learning, and tabular for human review. This integration created a robust and versatile data foundation, essential for their AI development.

Addi deliberately began its AI application with high-stakes legal compliance in Colombia. The legal system mandates a 48-hour response to tutelas (emergency constitutional actions); failure to comply can lead to the CEO's imprisonment. This challenging environment forced Addi to build highly accurate RAG pipelines and in-house RLHF loops to process all customer service, financial, and transaction history data for junior lawyers.

> No, this is the harder problem, but this is the one that scales.

## 26:05 - 30:06 Addi's Strategies for Attracting Global Talent and Building an AI-Ready Culture

Santiago Suárez emphasizes a "selfish focus" on attracting top talent, stemming from past experiences with less effective teammates. His vision for Addi involved building an organization where he genuinely enjoyed working with his colleagues. This commitment to quality permeates Addi's unique cultural and operational strategies.

Addi operates primarily in English, a deliberate choice that serves two main purposes. It enables the company to recruit non-Spanish-speaking global talent, but crucially, it also elevates the bar for local Spanish-speaking professionals, who often view working in an English-speaking environment as a premium opportunity. This fosters a perception of "serious work" within the team.

The company maintains a very high hiring bar, employing an "editorial" process to select a few hundred exceptional individuals from a large talent pool. As a remote-first organization, Addi views this structure as a significant competitive advantage for AI adoption. The explicit context required for remote work inherently provides well-defined APIs that AI agents can leverage, making integration smoother than in less structured, in-person environments.

Addi also focuses on robust talent development by recruiting world-class leaders, often through extensive nine-month searches, to mentor and train promising young talent. This combination of experienced leadership and emerging professionals is powerful. However, cultivating an "AI-pilled" culture is a distinct challenge outside Silicon Valley, where constant exposure to AI discussions is not the norm, requiring intentional effort to adapt the organization culturally.

> we actually think being a remote company is a huge competitive advantage, because it ensures all the context is explicit and it allows agents to work on that context.

## 30:06 - 34:06 CEO's hands-on approach drives Addi's AI transformation

Addi has made AI adoption a top, non-optional priority, setting clear standards and expectations for its entire workforce. The company recognized that the world had changed and needed to adapt quickly to new technological realities.

Before pushing this mandate, CEO Santiago Suárez personally built his own end-to-end AI stack. He provisioned his own cloud, managed DevOps, and acquired API keys to deeply understand the core tooling. This hands-on experience convinced him that if he could master the technology between meetings, the entire company could integrate it effectively.

This initiative has led to significant developments. Addi is now building its own proprietary transformers, dubbed "IDNA," using GPUs to train its own GPT-like models, yielding impressive early results. The engineering codebase is also being refactored from reactive Java to more declarative languages, showing powerful initial outcomes.

The impact on product development is evident; a version of their web marketplace was shipped in two months with just two engineers, a task that previously required five engineers and six to nine months. The company's long-term goal is to transition its entire operating model to be "agent and AI first."

> I wanna build the whole end-to-end stack. I don't wanna just play, 'cause there's a lot of now agent wrappers, right? I was like, no, I wanna build my own.

## 34:06 - 38:06 Strategic Lessons for Entrepreneurs from Building a Fintech Company

For aspiring entrepreneurs, a foundational lesson is to always remember you are a technology company, especially in financial services. Investing early and consistently in technology, even on seemingly minor issues like code compile times, builds the core capabilities for efficiency and scale, like managing a large number of production agents and achieving favorable cost-to-service economics. Neglecting technology as an afterthought can hinder long-term equity value.

Another critical insight is to slow down at the beginning. Rushing can lead to costly near-death experiences, such as severe fraud, that could have been avoided with a more measured pace. While market pressures during

> If you're a consensus play, there's just no alpha.

## 38:06 - 42:06 Addi Employs Focused Metrics and Comprehensive Written Communication as Core Operating Principles

Addi shifted its operational focus to a singular North Star Metric, a strategic move initiated in mid-2022 when equity capital markets tightened. This principle emerged from the realization that true focus required identifying the single most important financial target to rally the entire organization.

The North Star Metric evolved from risk-adjusted margin to gross margin, then gross margin minus sales and marketing, eventually settling on EBITDA, and now even optimizing for net income. The company maintains that having one to three "L1 metrics" is crucial, as more than three makes it impossible for everyone in the company to recall and act upon them. Once profitability was achieved, it became a foundational expectation rather than a weekly discussion point.

Another core operating principle at Addi is the mandate for writing everything down, including seemingly obvious details. This practice was inspired by early Amazon's memo culture and observations from consulting where PowerPoint often led to unsolidified thinking. It forces individuals to articulate the "why" behind any decision or action.

This commitment to written communication ensures clarity, fosters accountability, and establishes a shared understanding across the organization. It proved particularly effective for Addi's remote-first engineering and product teams, even before the widespread shift to remote work, by providing a clear, documented record for all internal discussions and Standard Operating Procedures.

> If everybody at the company can't name them, then you've got too many.

## 42:06 - 48:07 Addi's Five-Year Vision for Inclusion, AI, and Innovation

Santiago Suárez lays out an ambitious five-year vision for Addi, focusing on exponential growth in financial inclusion and economic development. The goal is to scale their unique combination of retail, commerce technology, and financial services two to three orders of magnitude more, extending beyond Colombia into many countries. This approach has already shown massive impact, as exemplified by an 80-year-old merchant in the Amazon who increased sales from $1,000 to $30,000 per month with Addi, with the company facilitating 75% of those sales.

Another core pillar of Addi's future is its evolution into an "AI-native" organization. Suárez envisions a company where AI agents work alongside human employees, contributing significantly to productivity. He even considers renaming Human Resources to "Human and Agentic Resources," highlighting the integration of AI as a fundamental productive force. This focus allows Addi to operate at the forefront of technological innovation, even from Bogota.

The vision also emphasizes creating a joyful and inspiring workplace where employees do the best work of their lives. Addi aims to foster an environment driven by economic empowerment, inclusion, and growth, enabled by cutting-edge technology. Despite ambitious growth targets, the company is remarkably efficient, currently operating 150 heads below budget while exceeding growth, a testament to its efficiency and leveraging AI. The culture encourages continuous innovation and "pushing the envelope" from anywhere, ensuring ongoing wonder and progress.

> You don't have to be in San Francisco to push the envelope. Like we're in Bogota and we're pushing the envelope in interesting ways.

---

Get podcast briefs for shows you follow: https://podbrew.app/