Building a global FinTech startup from Uruguay

Sam. Foreign.

Welcome everyone, to another episode of the Nearshore Cafe podcast. I'm Brian Sampson, your host and if you're into fintech and how to build a fintech company out of Uruguay, you are going to love this episode. I have Javier Borkenstein, CEO of fitr, on the show. Before I introduce Javier, I want to thank our sponsor, Plug Technologies. Plugg Tech. Plug is a great way to connect all the talent from Latin America to growing US companies. Javier, thanks so much for being here on our show today.

Thank you for having me, Brian. It's a pleasure to be here.

And Javier, you're. You're dialing in from Montevideo, Uruguay, is that correct?

Yes, I'm. I'm from Uruguay. I live in Montevideo. Yes, I'm at the south.

Yeah, I've been there before and this time of year it's like summertime, you know, nice warm weather, people walking, you know, along that. I forgot what it's called. Like the Rambla. Right, Walking the Rambla. Walking with their mate. Cups. Yeah. Is that, is that what you'll be doing later today?

Absolutely, yes. Well, mate, we do every day. I have mine here just in case.

There's nothing like a beautiful Sunday afternoon walking the Rambla with mate.

Right, Well, a barbecue is better. Yeah, I can tell. Barbecue, yeah. Uruguay. And barbecue with the fire. The meat. Yeah, that's something that I know if you eat meat, but if you like meat, that is something that you can enjoy a lot here in Uruguay.

Javier, I'm really excited to talk about fintech today. Featur is a fintech company you've built right out of Latin America, right out of Uruguay. Let's just tell me, what is it? What is Featur? For those who don't know, you don't know the company. What is it? What are you building? Tell us more about your vision for it.

Absolutely. So Fitra's mission is to accelerate the adoption of open source solution in the financial industry. So today we are the number one implementers of Apache finirach in the world. Apache finirach, it's an open source core banking solution that provides solution for LMS loan management system accounts like transaction accounts, checking accounts, balance accounts, deposits, term deposits, things like that. The KYC of the client, the database of the client accounting, some basic accounting for the products. And it's really flexible, expandable and it's open source. So our mission currently we are a service company working on this space and our vision is to build a fintech distribution of different open source technologies that we can deliver to multiple clients around the world. So FIDR started in a non traditional way. FIDR was founded by myself and my partner Robert in 2017 while I was in Uruguay. He was in Mexico. Our first client in. Sorry, he was in Australia, our first client in Mexico and the delivery team for that client was in Uganda. And since then we've been growing and having clients in almost 30 countries around the world and teams in probably 25 or cities around the world or even more. So we are a remote company. We would like to say that we work from the world to the world and as a company that it's not bounded or limited by geographies or regions. We recognize and we see that the potential growth, it's, it's huge. So we have a lot that we can accomplish yet.

What was your background before you, you started the company?

Well, I, I am a mechanical engineer. I also did an mba. So I used to work like in a, in a mechanical engineering consulting company the first 10 years of my career. Then I start working in a fintech startup that back in the day we use SMS to pay. We did some sort of tokenization of credit cards and the link was the sms. So we created a lot of very interesting pilots of payments from taxi payments with using SMS tickets from buying tickets from, to the cinema. You could buy like a cinema ticket from your phone with a feature phone. Smartphones didn't exist back in the day. So that, that allowed me to understand some parts of the financial industry, the, the retail financial industry, the payment industry within the retail financial industry and, and, and and realized that there was a lot of opportunities there of improvement, of, of of modernization. There's a lot of friction within the industry. So there's a lot of opportunities over there. The payment ecosystem, it's one of that has a lot of fintechs and during a transition in my career when I decided to be an entrepreneur to start my own company, that was something that I always wanted to do. I found this technology, this open source technology that eventually peeling. I ended up like you know, connecting the dots backward. You know, you realize that all your experience it's somehow interconnected. You don't do things randomly. It just every steps allows you to do the next step. And sometimes, sometimes things that you did like 10, 15 years ago, it's experience that you have that allows you to explode and to use it. So in my background of project management of fintech and understanding of the industry, understanding of the financial landscape, understanding of complex project dealing with complex organizations allows me to manage fitter as a business organization. And now we are serving fintechs in the lending space, in the neobank space, providing them with the core banking solution.

Amazing. What did the banking system and the fintech ecosystem look like when you started the business back in 2017? What did that look like especially in Uruguay?

The landscape in Uruguay, it's similar to the landscaping everywhere in the world. You have a group of banks, typically global banks, that are a few that are monopolizing the entire industry. Back in the 2010-2015, the first big, big neo banks, the first huge new wave of fintechs, the, the Monzos, the N26, the Nubanks, the, you know those, all those big names of today were starting during those, during those years. So we realized that our vision back in the day was imagine that this is the early 2000s and you were selling software for supermarkets or for warehouses and your client number one would be Walmart. Everybody was already in the company was trying to sell to Walmart but suddenly there is this company called Amazon that wants to buy your software. But they don't have volume, they don't have nothing. It's just why they want build our software. We need to focus on Walmart. So Fast forwarding into 2020s it is clear that the Walmarts of the financial industry already here and serving them when they were small will allow us to grow with them and will allow us to understand and to exploit and to grow in a different landscape. Serving the big banks, it's very difficult but serving the new startups that are going to be the big banks of the future, that is our, our, our vision back in the days and we were, we were very lucky of, of having a few of them, Some of our clients now they expanded and have like millions of clients themselves. They're like big neo banks today. So somehow we were successful and in that direction we were successful and we are seeing now that the big banks, they all now want to see and they all want to implement this technology because they realize that it's more flexible, most cost effective, allows them to execute and to be nimble faster. It's a better solution for them today.

Yeah, I think so. I think so. You mentioned Robert earlier, your co founder. Tell us more about the story. How did you and Robert get together on this?

I used to work in a foundation that was the initial of this open source technology that's called mifos. And I had a client working within mifos and Robert was the contractor for that project. And I realized that he was amazing, he was doing an amazing job, he was really proactive, fast, you know, doing really an amazing job. I didn't do, I didn't have to do anything. He was just doing everything perfect. So. And we've been working like half a year, year and a half by his being contractor. And I was just part of the, of the, of the team. So when I decided to leave this organization and move to my next step, Robert contacted me and said, hey, why want to do something together? And I was saying, okay, let's try, let's see. We start thinking and was clear for us that there was the need of a global company serving fintech, serving this new wave of startups. And that need was clear for me and that was what I wanted to do. So I joined Robert. The funny part is that we've been working. We were working about two years, two years and a half and we haven't met each other face to face. We haven't been not even in the same country, in the same continent. So when Feeder started to grow and eventually we were able to pay ourselves a ticket and an Airbnb to see each other, we both fly to Dubai, we rented an Airbnb in Dubai and we spent the weekend planning the next six years of the company. And if it weren't by the COVID I think that that plan would be very, very, very precise. We are now executing that big plan, big idea, and things are getting together. But what's nice to finally being able to give us a hug and to see each other face to face after working together for many years, building a company, starting a company and never being in the same room.

Tell me more. And our audience is always very interested in this just the company building part, you know, building a company from Uruguay, you know, maybe if you could even talk about like your first couple of hires. Did you raise capital? Was that something that you needed? Tell us more about that.

Well, one of the things that makes me really proud about FIDR is that we bootstrap the company. We always been cash flow positive. It's like it's. We, we never wanted to raise external funding, although it's something that we always discuss because it's, it's something that it will allow you to accelerate and to grow faster, but also it will bring other complexities, you know, but being I always say that the best investor, it's a happy client paying every month. And I keep that as a motto because I truly believe that when you're building a company, yes, if you are in a startup and you need to accelerate and you are in a very competitive Landscape, of course you need capital. And I'm not saying that venture capital is something that shouldn't exist. It has to exceed, it provides a service. But it's not for everybody. And for us, we believe that bootstrapping is the best way. I'm very proud of being able to reach at this level without external funding, which I never absolutely discard. It's always a discussion, it's always a question of should we raise capital? Why? For what? And if you want, if one of the things that we are doing is transitioning to a product company, you know, our vision is to build this distribution so that it's having our own product and that will probably require more capital. But that's another discussion and something that we are executing but on the old way by bootstrapping it, by paying from our own capital. But yes, the first hires were technical people, developers. I truly believe that the talent, it's evenly distributed around the world. Opportunities are not. So you can find talented people everywhere in the world. Of course there's a huge concentration of talented people in some areas in the world, but it is because people travel to there from different parts of the world. Like Silicon Valley, you have people from every everywhere in the world. Israel, you have people from everywhere in the world. There's. So yes, you have a concentration of talented people because you have a unique concentration of people from different parts of the world that are taking a risk, that are going there, that are like wanting to go there. So that separates them apart. But for the rest of the humanity, there is probably a normal distribution that talent is normally distributed across the world and you can find talent everywhere in the world. And I think that we want to democratize the access of opportunities. So we try to hire people from places that companies do not normally hire, like Africa, South America, some parts of Asia, etc.

Yeah. Where, where in South America have you hired from?

Well, from Mexico to the south. We have people in Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Uruguay, of course. Yeah, we have people in Central America too. Like, yeah, Africa. We have people from Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, South Africa. We have, we have had teaming Cameroon, Ethiopia.

Think about how many different countries you're in. Even in just in Latin America, you know, different personalities, styles. How, how have you thought about just getting everybody on the same page and making sure that the collaboration was, was strong?

That's. It's always difficult, it's not simple and it always takes time and effort. One of the things that we try to do and when we realize that we are not doing, we try to just take a Quick decision is that we don't hire people that need to be micromanaged. If you need to be micromanaged, we can't, we can, we can't help you here because we are not in the same room, we're not in the same country. So you have a task, you have a goal, you need to do it. And if you can't with that, this is not the place for you to work with. So that's kind of trying to find the people that fits in our culture that doesn't have micromanagement, that is objectives oriented, that we define a task, an objective, and then you have to do it. And if you have a problem, you need to come back to us and say, okay, I have this issue. I cannot make this progress or try to find a workaround. Our values are simple. We say that we are humans, that we trust and we care. So we are humans because we all have realities, we all have issues. We live in the same planet and we understand that things need to be treated. And we realize as human, we care because we all have families, we all have responsibilities and we treat our world with care. That is something that we always do and we trust because we need to trust in our team and also trust. It's at the foundation of the financial industry. So trust is really important. Not for us trusting our team that they will do the work, they will behave, but also convey that we are a trustworthy company and we can help our clients build that trust that they need for the clients.

I think it's great your culture of autonomy, no micromanagement. As you think about your dispersed team across Latin America, daily standups or is there any management practice that you would recommend to maybe other founders that are building not just in one place, but across the continent?

We have small teams that are responsible for different phases or different parts of the process. We have. I always see, I always picture FIDR as a train with two engines. An engine on the front that is pushing, which is the delivery team, the team that, that does the project, et cetera. And an engineer behind that is pushing. In front it's pulling. And in back is pushing is a sales team. So every team behaves different because they have different needs. But yes, technical teams usually have daily standups. We, we are a lean company. We, we, we have like sprints, we have daily standouts. We have all the other ceremonies of, of lean management and development, modern technologies for development. But one thing that is really important in distributed environment, that you need to rely on text. Text is really important. You need to write everything down and just being able to make sure that everything is written so others can take it and understand it and continue the work. Because having meetings, an excess of meetings, it's not very productive in a remote environment.

Something I wanted to ask about that with the text is you have people in Africa, but you also have people in various countries in Latin America as we talked about where maybe English is not first language for most. How are you documenting that? Is it in Spanish? Is it in English? Is it a different language?

Our official language is English and we have a lot of tools that help us to do that. Now we have tools that record every meeting and transcribe the meeting and gives you like a, a report of the meaning the meeting, the to do list, the question that that is the, the. The. We use AI a lot in tools that embedded AI on, on themselves like GitHub, Copilot, of course ChatGPT, Gemini. But we use Read AI which is this, this tool that connects into our calls and transcribe every meeting. So with just a prompt you have an email with all the to do list. And you don't need to spend like hours taking notes as we used to do in the past and putting those notes together. Everything done now it's done automatically with just one prompt. And also we use a lot of AI for prospecting, cold email, cold contacting. So there is a lot of tools that are leveraging AI in ways that allows you to execute. Like if you were 100 team but with a team of two. Yeah.

Javier, have you had any issues recruiting this with the way your company set up? You mentioned senior talent can are fluent in English, can work without micromanagement, autonomy. Have you had any issues finding these types of people in Latin America?

Not really. You know, in Latin America, in the tech space at least the people that it's already willing to work for, for international companies, they do have a solid English level and they are really used to work for US companies or European companies. So in Latin America we have a pretty good level of people that can work with us. Of course it's, it's. You always made like bad choices and you need to correct some. Some mentor told me a few years ago that managing it's about hiring well and firing fast. When you realize that someone doesn't fit, you need to take a decision. It's, it's, it's two ways decision because I know fit. It's, it's, it's bad for both. So you need to take a quick decision and taking quick decision for entrepreneurs for founders is usually difficult. It takes time because you have an emotional attachment with the team that help you build part of your company. But it's really necessary when you're growing, when you're scaling. Sometimes you reach to a level and you are stuck in a level not because the market, not because the external condition, but because of the internal capabilities that you have. So you need to break that by bringing people that higher the bar, you know, move the bar a little bit high and that's really important. Continue bringing people that move the bar a little bit higher. It's where it's the best thing that you can do.

Javier, I wanted to just ask you a little more about your co founder relationship and because you don't see each other very often, how do you communicate that, that trust and you know, do you, do you bring any like gifts or anything special, you know, to when, when you guys see each other?

We try to see each other at least once a year. And some, some years we are lucky enough to see us like two or three times a year. We usually would try to treat us very well. Like we don't because we, we live in literally half of the world apart. Like I'm in Uruguay, he's in Australia. It's 13 hours. When it's my morning, it's his night, late night. Sorry. I used to walk my dog like at 10pm my night and I was talking with Robert on the phone like for an hour while I was walking the door, the dog around my home. And. But we try to see each other like we use like an opportunity for like there's a huge conference in New York. So let's go to that conference and so we can see each other and kill two birds with a stone. But also we try to stay. I remember that one of the first time that we see each other I gave him a present and I think which present can I give him? I need to take it half wall apart. So I took the first invoice that the company did. I frame it in a nice frame and I give him like, okay, this is a gift for you because this is the first invoice that started everything. And another day he sent me a gift like an NFT with the, with the video of the first email. The friend of us connected each other. I said, I have a friend that is Javier. I have friends, Robert connecting. And he. So we try to treat each other because the partnership is really important. Building a company, it's hard. There's always hard moments, there's always tension. There's Always moments that you want to. I know it's like roller coaster, Everybody knows that. But it's real. The struggle is real. So a good partner like Robert and myself, that we are really complementary, that we are. We have two different backgrounds, we have two different story. We focus on two different things. We see the world in different ways, but we know what we want to build. We have a clear vision of what we want to achieve. And that is the most important thing. And we complement each other. Sometimes I see things with a real optimistic and he's real pessimistic and I'm real pessimistic, but he's optimistic that that doesn't worry. That when we are worried is when we see the things in the same way. When we see the things in the same way. Okay, let's see that. Because something is happening, something is not wrong, something is not right. Because we are seeing the same thing.

That's great. I love it. My last question for you, Javier, a little more tourism related for those who are listening and they've never been to Montevideo before. What are your maybe like top one or two tips for them? And also the best time of year to visit.

For me this the best time of the year is February. The weather is nice and you have the carnival. Carnival, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a huge thing here in ui, especially in Montevideo where you have this popular stages all over the city that every night you have shows of local groups that are called Murgas or Gandombe and you have like big parades in the street of. Of black people with it, with drums, playing drums in a very, very heavy way, which is incredible because of the sound, the energy that you can see. It's like, it's like real but kind of different. Like not, not that like big thing, but more real. And, and you can have like you have a lot of places to eat good meat and you can go to the beach, you can enjoy the carnival. So for me, February is the best time of the year to come to Montevideo. Absolutely.

Javier, this has been a fantastic conversation. Love hearing how you built your company. Love the discussion around fintech. Before we go, let me thank our sponsor one more time. That's Plug Technologies, plugg Tech. Great way to connect talent from all over Latin America as Javier talked about to us companies. Thanks everyone for listening to the Nearshore Cafe podcast. Thanks again Javier and we'll see you all next time.