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Chapter 1: What is Addi and how did it evolve in the fintech landscape?
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 agents in production. We built a company on a monorepo as opposed to microservices. Monorepos today are all the rage. Anthropix built on a monorepo.
Google obviously famously is a monorepo company. When we started the company, microservices was where it was at.
So why did you make the decision? What gave you the forethought to make it?
I hired the best CTO in the business.
How did you get your organization culturally moving as quickly as you have?
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. 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, Adi has grown from a buy-now-pay-later product into a broader platform spanning payments, commerce, logistics, and banking. Angela Strange and Gabriel Vasquez speak with Adi founder and CEO Santiago Suarez about financial inclusion, technology infrastructure, AI, and building one of Latin America's most ambitious fintech companies.
We're here today with Santiago Suarez, the founder and CEO of Adi. Adi is a buy now, pay later marketplace and payments platform in Colombia, and now just recently a bank. And Adi has served over 25% of the population. Welcome to the show.
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Chapter 2: What challenges does Addi face in the Colombian market?
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 particular case, 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 everything your definition of what's possible. I think that also led me to work at Navia, the first startup.
Navia 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.
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Chapter 3: How does technology infrastructure impact Addi's growth?
We were just a couple decades early. And then to your point, we had four co-founders. And in the 12 months I was there, we had four or five CEOs. And I was the CEO for 35 days at the end of that stint. And then I decided that what we needed was to fire a co-founder because he wasn't doing a good job in my 23-year-old head. So I talked to the right people supposedly to gather support.
And then I fired him. And within 24 hours, the four co-founders were like, yeah, that's cute, but you're out of here. And I think the lessons there, one was, I mean, there's a non-obvious one, which is obvious, which is, well, the power of AI. The second was the power of getting organized internally to pursue a goal.
And I think one of the things that we've been able to do at Addy well, in spite of some challenges through the years, is being very good at organizing ourselves. I was just having breakfast with one of our board members, and we brought our new CFO. And The new CFO has an 11-year career at Melly. And this board member asked him, hey, what is the thing that surprised you the most?
And he's like, how well organized the company is. So I think that was one of the core insights was like, there's got to be a better way. And that speaks to then, okay, how do I want to do this? And there were two things I knew about starting a company. One, I wanted to do it. Two, I never wanted to do it on a visa.
Because one of the challenges in Navia was like for a while, the government denied my H1B, then I had to re-get it. So I was like, I need a green card if I'm ever going to do that in the US. That automatically means bigger company, lower upside, but lower downside, you can stay there. And then the third thing, to your point, I was like...
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Chapter 4: What role does artificial intelligence play in Addi's operations?
well, I want to go see how great CEOs operate. Because clearly, I have no idea what I was doing in my 35 days as a CEO of a five-person company, but someone else did not. So I wrote a list and we had Costco in it. I had Amazon in it. I had Wynn Casinos in it. It wasn't even financial services related. It was just who are these incredible people and how do they operate?
And I basically leveraging... And McKinsey, Yale, everyone I knew, I just tried to get in a position to get a job somewhere close to these people. And the first one that came up with this kind of legendary strategy group back at the time, which was 10 people at J.P. Morgan because Jamie hated consultants. So he had banned all consultants, but he had a strategy group of 10 people.
And I was like, okay, well, then that feels like a good place to go learn. And I was there for six years and it was incredible. It was like a whole university in how to run companies and how to think about financial services.
Amazing. All right, so I want to fast forward to starting Adi. And I think... You've done a few things that are usual, but most founders, when they look at Latin America, most investors, when they look at Latin America, they expect founders to start in Brazil, which is the largest market, then Mexico. Obviously, you're from Colombia, but decided you were going to do Colombia.
And I think the view at the time was Colombia is just too hard. Like, payments are mostly cash, 65%, 70%. Less than 20% of people even have a credit card. And then a small number of banks own everything. And so what did you see that gave you the confidence to enter this market? And what do you think the outside observers get wrong?
So the answer is on why Columbia. Hindsight is wonderful and there's so many reasons, but part of it was I was in Columbia. And I had landed in Colombia because I had followed my girlfriend and wife. And I refused to be employed in Colombia. And I actually think being in Colombia was instrumental for being an entrepreneur because I knew too much about U.S. financial services.
And every time someone would give me an idea in the U.S., I'd be like, the Bank Holding Company Act of 1960 actually makes this unworkable. Or... You know, Durbin will make sure this doesn't work or here's how you don't understand Swift. And I had just been so into the matrix here that all I could see was the 10 ways in which your startup is going to fail.
Had I been that into the matrix in Colombia, I would have been like, yeah, your company is never going to work out. I'm doing what I know now, but I didn't. So I think a little bit of ignorance is always bliss. A little bit of being the right place, right time and refusing to be an employee. But there were two things that I saw that were very, very important. The first one is,
extreme amounts of technological adoption. And, you know, you're on our board, so, you know, see, we have these metrics and we say, hey, there's more smartphone per capita than Brazil and Mexico, which is incredibly powerful, right? 75% of Colombians have a smartphone.
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Chapter 5: How did Santiago Suárez's background influence his entrepreneurial journey?
And then the second thing to your point was, this is a country that has this very strong pay over time tradition, but no real work around it. The only thing was Visa and MasterCard had actually changed their switches and rails to enable installments handful of countries, right? Brazil, Korea, Turkey, us, where that is the default. So it was like those two things. I was just like, you know what?
There is a great opportunity here. And the last and most important one, the UX. At the end day, UX really matters. And when I say UX, I mean UX not in the
black turtleneck beautifully designed thing but you're actually in customer pain and I always give two examples one is I went to buy a t-shirt on installments and it took me 22 minutes because they had to fingerprint me they had to take two photos of me they had to call two of my friends and then they would only do this during working hours so pause on that for a second that's I think it's very unintuitive like why are they calling your friends
That's basically a way of like, what's your personal reference, right? So the banker is literally just making sure they exist.
So you're trying to buy a retail purchase. A $10. And the KYC is literally phone a friend.
Two friends. Yeah. Not one, two. And then fingerprinting you and taking photos of you and all these things. And you're just sitting there like, there's got to be a, And the other thing that I found asinine was that banks would charge you to use their online banking and not to use them to like wire money to access it.
So my original bank account in Colombia, I was able to enter my online bank portal twice in a month. But after the third time, they would charge me like 20 cents. And I was like, this makes, first of all, why? Secondly, now it means I have to go to the branch where I am more expensive to serve than if I'm self-serving myself or call you. Like any other channel service is more expensive.
Why are you charging me to use the channel that for you is this expensive? But that just gives you a little bit of that dynamics of the market. Now, I think that's what we saw originally. And I thought, wow, this is a great test bit. I will confess what I didn't see was how big the opportunity was. Like even like nowadays, I'm like, it's huge.
But even at the time, it was like, okay, we'll be able to build a good base. But then we got to go abroad, which we did eventually. But nowadays, I'm like, no, this is a massive market.
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Chapter 6: What lessons can be learned from building a company in Latin America?
In this section of like three FinTech unicorns, Oliver Hughes, who was the long term think of CEO now runs, what's the name TBC Uzbekistan for like, let's go. But obviously, you know, the big price is Caspi. So I started, like, trying to get in front of this guy. In many ways, I pinged one of their investors. I got sent to their IR team.
But the way it worked was after, like, three or four cold LinkedIn emails, he was like, okay, fine. I'm like, come. And then we go meet him, and he was so generous. But she sat there. He's like, what questions do you have? I was like, okay, great. Well, I shall ask you some questions. And then Danny and I just spent 90 minutes with him.
And he was extremely, you know, obviously public company CEO, but it's just like, just the way he thinks. And there were two important lessons for us. Number one, NPS. And when I say NPS, I don't mean it. He's actually been public about this where he's like, I think NPS for a company with less than a thousand employees is a terrible metric. You should just listen to customer service calls.
So, you know, weekly business reviews, we always start with what happened to the customer last week. And we have two transcripts pulled at random in addition to a number of battery of KPIs just on customer experience. And he was like, the first thing you need to think about is NPS. And in fact, they measure all their product managers on NPS alone these days. They don't have a P&L.
And then the second thing that he said, and it was very useful, particularly as we think about our own product roadmap, he was like, everyone thinks you got to do everything at once. But he literally got on a board and he's like, that's not quite the way it works. Here's how we thought about structuring our roadmap, potentially think about it. And
that informs a lot of our product roadmap decisions because it's very counterintuitive, the work we do. You know, we had an event last week and we announced in the same event a bank account, next day shipping, and an integration with a third of the country's entire POS device fleet. I was like, in the same event, to the same audience. That's just not very intuitive.
And then the third piece which he gave us, which, you know, we always take to heart, he was like, look, this is a very unusual play Equity investors will not understand this. Just ignore them for five years to 10 years. And then one day you'll come out and they'll be like, why didn't you call me? And you'll say, I tried many times.
And it was just this clarity of purpose, lighter focus, high conviction, serving a market in a different way. And then on the marketplace in particular, Caspi has an incredible job at owning e-commerce without logistics. And it's not because we're tourists. It's because you wouldn't build a social network today like you built Facebook in 2004. You wouldn't build a marketplace like you built.
And we even said, and we were a tiny company and smaller, but like, You know, when we built Addy in the first iteration, we had to do all of our ID checks in-house. You remember this? Yep. Nowadays, we modularize some of it. We keep, like, the real valuable part, the algorithms, the software. But, like, for a commodity run-of-the-mill biometric check, there's great providers that'll do it.
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Chapter 7: How does Addi ensure financial inclusion and economic growth?
Yeah, very productive. And that leads you to the next trip. You're here in New York. You're receiving an award from the Fast Company, most innovative fintech companies in the world. How do you achieve that from Colombia?
Yeah, this was... This is... This is a big deal. And we were talking before the podcast that we travel very rarely these days. But this was worth the exception.
So, yeah, we've been named... The investors in the world finally woke up past five years to your earlier point.
Exactly. So we've been named the third most innovative company in fintech by Fast Company globally. Look, I think... There's obviously a little bit of our being a little more disciplined in telling our story, but the real story is in the last 24 months, a lot of our long-term investments have really paid off and have allowed us to ship extremely exciting product, right?
So, you know, we built a monorepo-based unified data architecture company that once LLMs became workable,
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Chapter 8: What is the vision for Addi in the next five years?
made it, I'm not going to say very easy, but made it feasible to like drive them at scale. So, you know, today we have a company that has the fastest market place, has one of the most viable and at scale closed loop payment networks in the country. We are in over a thousand cities and a country with 1100 cities with our own payment rails.
We do our own clearing, our own settlement, all in our own tech. And then I think, obviously, because we live in the year 2026, we've done extremely attractive and powerful things in AI. So we built our own in-house agents that currently handle 100% of all customer service queries. They handle 100%. And they resolve close to 80%. So full resolution, no human in the loop.
So there's not a lot of dispatching. Oh, the human, no, no. Full resolution, no. The same thing on a merchant onboarding. We have a merchant onboarding agent that allows us to board over 2,000 to 3,000 merchants a month. Same stuff, 100% handle rate, over 20% improvement in conversion. We're launching our own transformer later this year. So a number of these things that I think when you see it,
uh, we've always, you know, we've always benchmarked ourselves against the best. And there are a number of things we've done that I think are now putting us in that direction. I mean, there's a reason we run the company in English, which is we always want a stallion, even though we're now in Colombia.
It's very counterintuitive that you run a company in Colombian English, but it is not once you think about where the world class mark is. So I think we're very grateful and it's pretty humbling to be in such a company. But it's also just, I think, the recognition of four or five years of incredible investments panning out.
Maybe just to stick on AI, I think one of the things I learned when we first started working together is, unlike in the U.S., where you can build financial services and then every piece of the stack, there's some other company doing it as a service. Like, none of that existed in Colombia, right? To your point, like, KYC might be undefensible, but it's not like there was another...
service that you could just bolt in there. And so I think Addy has got a real history. You had to build your own loan management system of just having to build every layer of that stack. And so maybe talk about how did you approach, like, I think you were very fast on, we need to rethink Addy to be very AI forward. How did you, how did you decide where to start?
So I would say we actually started seven years ago when we made two foundational decisions that to this day help us. The first one was we built a company on a monorepo as opposed to microservices. Monorepos today are all the rage. Anthropix built on a monorepo. Google obviously famously is a monorepo company. But when we started the company, microservices was where it was at.
So why did you make that decision? What gave you the forethought to make it?
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