Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Gerry Giacom\u00e1n Colyer worked in a start-up, management consultancy and a family business before he noticed one consistency: controlling company spending was tough.He and his business partner Diego Iv\u00e1n Garc\u00eda saw staff deal with reams of paperwork, spend hours filling in expenses claims and struggle with various IT systems. No process existed that was sophisticated enough for a fast-growing company to work across Latin America\u2019s borders.\u201cIt was clear that it wasn\u2019t just high-growth start-ups,\u201d Giacom\u00e1n Colyer says, \u201cbut companies across the entire spectrum that needed something. We saw this opportunity to be able to, with the proper technology, not have that trade-off between agility and control.\u201dFintech groups have cropped up across Latin America, with market leader Brazil setting an example on regulation, leading to success that countries such as Mexico, Colombia and Argentina are seeking to emulate.Carlos Costa, partner at venture capital firm Valor Capital, which has invested in more than 100 companies, says countries in the region are moving at different speeds but still in the same direction.The next wave \u201cis going to be a mix of disruption and financial inclusion\u201d, he says. \u201cThat\u2019s what gets us very excited. Even Brazil is still in the earliest stages [while] Mexico is one step behind. But that\u2019s how value creation happens.\u201dClara, the business payments group Giacom\u00e1n Colyer and Garc\u00eda set up five years ago, issues corporate credit cards and uses a software system that generates invoices and allows managers to see transactions immediately.In their first year they had 26 employees and $102,000 in revenue. By 2023 the group had generated $28.3mn in revenue with 340 employees across Mexico, Brazil and Colombia, making it the second fastest-growing company in the Americas, according to a list of 300 companies compiled by the Financial Times with data research company Statista. Brazil\u2019s Inter & Co and Sicoob Credip as well as Colombia\u2019s Quantum Loyalty Banking are also on the list.Clara became the ninth Mexican start-up to raise money with a valuation above $1bn, joining other \u201cunicorns\u201d, companies such as Plata, Stori and Clip.The businesses\u2019 operating environment though is challenging. A law passed in 2018, seen as groundbreaking at the time because it offered a regulatory framework for fintech start-ups, has failed to live up to the hype it created.Regulation brought in then has not been updated seven years on while conservative, under-resourced regulators struggle to keep up with the fast-moving sector.\u201cThey understand the challenge,\u201d says Alvaro V\u00e9rtiz, head of Latin America at Washington-based advisory consultancy DGA Group. \u201cThey would like to help make the sector evolve but, at the same time, they\u2019re trying to manage and to drive a car that is at full speed. \u201dMany industries in Mexico are highly concentrated, including banking where three institutions hold half the system\u2019s assets. Small and medium-sized groups struggle to get credit while even successful founders often say it is hard to sell their businesses.V\u00e9rtiz says the number of unicorns shows that funding is no longer such a limitation on growth, but adds that the country has problems that extend to the \u201centire economy\u201d. Mexico, for example, has had no significant new listings on its stock exchange in years. National companies such as Aeromexico in fact delisted to move to the US, where discount retailer Tiendas 3B did its initial public offering.Fintech\u2019s potential to bring people into the financial system has shown sluggish progress over the past decade while, according to government data, more than one-third of Mexicans have no bank account.Many Mexicans lived through financial crises in the 1980s and 1990s and now distrust their banks, which have historically charged high fees even for basic services. More than half the economy is informal \u2014 with one of the biggest retailers saying three-quarters of transactions are in cash.The founders of Plata, a digital bank, hope to make a difference. The group of former executives from the Russian bank now called T-Bank, who left Moscow after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, liked Mexico\u2019s potential as an advanced economy with room to grow.\u201cWe felt like we could come in and build something quite different, better, faster and stand out,\u201d says Italian-born co-founder Neri Tollardo.He believes a recent shift to deposit-taking by fintechs can help solve the problem of low financial inclusion, which some blame on the expensive and slow legal system that makes debt recovery difficult.\u201cYou can start giving everyone a reason to ditch cash, go online and to use their digital banking,\u201d he says, adding that was not the case until two years ago \u201cwhen all of these players were limited to credit cards or a credit product\u201d.Many fintech companies are pushing for Mexico to update its 2018 legislation. Any new law though will \u201cneed to be more flexible and more open\u201d, says DGA\u2019s V\u00e9rtiz.\u201cWe really are at this inflection point where we are finally seeing fintech that can offer all the relevant products to make a difference,\u201d says Tollardo.Meanwhile, Giacom\u00e1n Colyer says that, at a time of market volatility unleashed by tariff threats from the Trump administration, he is focusing on longer term trends.\u201cA lot of the pieces have been coming into place over the past decade or so,\u201d he says of Mexico\u2019s fintech sector. \u201cThe evolution is happening. It\u2019s a question of how much faster can it happen?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Gerry Giacom\u00e1n Colyer worked in a start-up, management consultancy and a family business before he noticed one consistency: controlling company spending was tough.He and his business partner Diego Iv\u00e1n Garc\u00eda saw staff deal with reams of paperwork, spend hours filling in expenses claims and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-290076","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-tech"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290076"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290076\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}