Latinia, a software vendor specializing in real-time event processing for financial institutions has recently announced its investment in the SaaS fintech company Ábaco, which operates in Colombia and Mexico and provides financial access to unbanked individuals. Ábaco develops a groundbreaking software for the generation of credit histories, the lack of which is a barrier preventing millions of workers from gaining access to credit.
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In the words of Latinia’s Corporate Development Director Oriol Ros, “We believe in Ábaco’s model, and find it interesting, because it is a project with a purpose: to make a market of hundreds of millions of people, who have never had access to bank credit, visible to traditional banking.” According to McKinsey, last year approximately 70 percent of the population over 15 years old lacked full or partial access to banking services.
Ábaco is a start-up with high social impact focused on the gig economy, which identifies the behavior of delivery platform workers and freelancers using an innovative analysis of their financial profile to build a credit report. Based on this information, it grants them microloans ranging between $100.000 and $1.000.000 pesos with low rates or no interest. The software studies their conduct to refine and optimize different indicators like the default rate, and then projects these to wider segments based on sociodemographic groups and behavior.
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The impact of COVID has doubled the number of workers in the gig economy, and delivery has become an essential business that is here to stay due to its ease and convenience. Ábaco already works with Rappi, Denario, Picap and Mensajeros Urbanos. Reaching this segment of the population means serving the heart of many countries’ economies,” explains Ábaco CEO and founder Victoria Blanco Alegría.
“Traditional banking uses credit scoring models that lack sufficient information to assess this segment of customers and allow them access to credit. Financial inclusion will only be possible with personalized scoring that adapts to people’s actual labor models and economic activities, to be able to understand their needs,” Blanco Alegría concluded.
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