The Nearshore Cafe
Hear from Nearshoring veterans about what it's like living and doing business in LATAM. Join our hosts and numerous guests from LATAM & the U.S. with interesting real life experiences. This podcast is full of great stories and useful advice on how to navigate the world's most untapped talent market along with travel tips.
The Nearshore Cafe
Building a global FinTech startup from Uruguay
What if traditional banking as we know it is on the verge of a massive transformation?
Join us on the Nearshore Cafe podcast as we promise an eye-opening look into the fintech revolution in Latin America with our guest, Javier Borkenztain.
Discover how this mechanical engineer from Montevideo turned fintech entrepreneur is challenging banking norms with his company, Fiter. As a leading implementer of Apache Fineract, Fiter is spearheading the global adoption of open-source core banking solutions. Javier takes us through his inspiring journey from engineering to fintech, detailing the growth and evolution of the fintech ecosystem in Latin America since 2017, and highlights the strategic innovations that have positioned Fiter as a game-changer in the industry.
Our conversation with Javier also unlocks the secrets to managing a high-performing global remote team and the untapped potential of connecting Latin American talent with U.S. companies. We discuss the critical role of fostering autonomy, trust, and diversity in international teams, and the strategies that help bridge geographic and cultural divides. Javier offers a fresh perspective on the power of AI tools to streamline productivity and communication, highlighting how small teams can achieve remarkable efficiency on a global stage.
Tune in to explore how cross-border collaboration is reshaping the business landscape and learn from Javier's insightful experiences and innovative strategies.
🔗🔗Connect with Javier Borkenztain 🔗🔗
Linkedin: Javier Borkenztain | LinkedIn
Company: Fiter: Overview | LinkedIn
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We'll see you next time. 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, our sponsor Plug Technologies. Plugtech 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.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me, Brian. It's a pleasure to be here.
Speaker 1:And Javier, you're dialing in from Montevideo, uruguay, is that correct?
Speaker 2:Yes, I'm from Uruguay. I live in Montevideo.
Speaker 1:Yes, the south. I've been there before this time of year. It's like summertime Nice, warm weather, people walking along that I forgot what it's called like the Rambla right Walking the Rambla with their mate cups. Yeah, is that what you'll be doing later today?
Speaker 2:Absolutely yes, mate, we do every day. I have mine here, just in case.
Speaker 1:There's nothing like a beautiful Sunday afternoon walking the Rambla with mate right.
Speaker 2:Well, a barbecue is better. Yeah, I can tell Barbecue. Yeah, uruguayan 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.
Speaker 1:Javier, I'm really excited to talk about FinTech today. Fiter 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 Fiter? 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.
Speaker 2:Absolutely so. Feetor'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 Finirac in the world. Apache Finirac, it's an open source core banking solution that provides solutions 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 is 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.
Speaker 2:So Feeder started in a non-traditional way. Feeder 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 cities around the world or even more. So we are a remote company. We'd like to say that we work from the world to the world and and as a company, that that it's not uh, bounded or limited by by geographies or regions. Uh, we, we recognize that, the we see that the potential growth it's, it's huge. So we have a lot that we can accomplish yet.
Speaker 1:What was your background before you started the company?
Speaker 2:Well, I am a mechanical engineer. I also did an MBA, so I used to work in a mechanical engineering consulting company the first 10 years of my career consulting company, the first 10 years of my career. Then I started working in a in a fintech startup that back in the day we, we we use sms to to pay. We we did, uh, some sort of tokenization of credit card and the link was the SMS. So we created a lot of very interesting pilots of payments from taxi payments using SMS. Buying tickets from the cinema you could buy a cinema ticket from your phone.
Speaker 2:A feature phone Smartphones didn't exist back in the day. So that allowed me to understand some parts of the financial industry the retail financial industry, the payment industry within the retail financial industry and realized that there was a lot of opportunities there of improvement, of modernization. There's a lot of friction within the industry, so 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 doing a transition in my career when, I decided to be an entrepreneur to start my own company.
Speaker 2:That was something that I always wanted to do. I found this technology, this open source technology, that eventually, peter, I ended up, like you know, connecting the docs backward. You know, you realize that all your experience is somehow interconnected. You don't do things randomly. Every step allows you to do the next step and 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 FITR as a business organization. And now we are serving Finechs in the lending space, in the neobank space, providing them with the core banking solution.
Speaker 1: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?
Speaker 2:especially in Uruguay. The landscape in Uruguay it's similar to the landscape everywhere in the world. You have a group of banks typically global banks that are few that are monopolizing the entire industry. Back in the 2010, the 2015,. The first big, big new banks, the first huge new wave of fintechs the Monzos, the N26, the Nubank you know, those big names of today were starting during those years.
Speaker 2: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 in the company was trying to sell to Walmart. Early 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. That's why they want to build our software. We need to focus on Walmart so fast forwarding into 2020s.
Speaker 2:It is clear that the Walmarts of the financial industry are 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 vision back in the days and we were very lucky of having a few of them, some of our clients. Now they expanded and have millions of clients themselves. They're like big neobanks today. 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, more cost-effective, allows them to execute and to be nimble faster. It's a better solution for them today.
Speaker 1: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?
Speaker 2:I used to work in a foundation that was the initial of this open-source technology that's called NIFOS. That's called NIFOS, and I had a client working within NIFOS 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. No, he was doing really an amazing job. I didn't have to do anything, he was just doing everything. Perfect.
Speaker 2: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 team. So when I decided to leave this organization and move to my next step, robert contacted me and said, hey, why don't you want to do something together? And I was saying, okay, let's try it and see. We started thinking and it was clear for us that there was the need of a global company serving fintechs, 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.
Speaker 2:The funny part is that we were working about two years, two 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 country. 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 like planning the next six years of the company and if it weren't by the COVID, I think that that plan will be very, very precise. We are now executing that big plan, big idea and things are getting together, but it was nice to finally be 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.
Speaker 1:Tell me more and our audience is always very interested in this just the company building part building a company from Uruguay, maybe if you could even talk about your first couple of hires. Did you raise capital? Was that something that you needed? Tell us more about that.
Speaker 2:Well, one of the things that makes me really proud about Feeder is that we boosted the company. We've always been cash flow positive. It's like 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, the best investor, it's a happy client paying every month, and I keep that as a motto because I truly believe that you, when you're building a company yes, you just 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 exist. It provides a service, but it's not for everybody and for us, we believe that bootstrapping is the best way.
Speaker 2: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? And if one of the things that we are doing is transitioning to a product company, 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 were technical people, developers.
Speaker 2:I truly believe that the talent it's evenly distributed around the world.
Speaker 2: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 in some areas in the world, but it is because people travel there from different parts of the world. Like Silicon Valley, you have people from everywhere in the world. Israel, you have people from everywhere in the world there. 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 has like a separates them apart. But for the rest of the humanity that there is a, probably a normal distribution, that talent is normally distributed across the world, and, and, and, and and. You can find talent everywhere in the world, and I think that we want to democratize the access of opportunities, so we would try to hire people from places that companies do not normally hire, like Africa, south America, some parts of Asia, et cetera.
Speaker 1:Yeah, where in South America have you hired from?
Speaker 2:Well, from Mexico to the South, we have people in Mexico, colombia, argentina, brazil, bolivia, uruguay, of course. Yeah, we had people in Central America too. Yeah, africa, we have people from Nigeria, kenya, uganda, rwanda, south Africa. Yeah, we have had team in Cameroon, ethiopia.
Speaker 1:Think about how many different countries you're in, even just in Latin America Different personalities, styles. How have you thought about just getting everybody on the same page and making sure that the collaboration was strong?
Speaker 2: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're 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 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 do that, this is not a place for you to work. 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.
Speaker 2: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. We realize as humans, we care because we all have families, we all have responsibilities and we all have responsibilities and we treat our work with care. That is something that we always do and we trust because we need to trust in our team and also trust is 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.
Speaker 1:I think it's great, your culture of autonomy, no micromanagement. As you think about your dispersed team across Latin America in like 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?
Speaker 2:We have small teams that are responsible for different phases or different parts of the process. You know we have. I always see, I always picture FITR as a train with two engines An engine on the front that is pushing, which is the delivery team, the team that does the project, et cetera, and an engine behind that is pushing In front it's pulling and in back it's pushing, it's a sales team. So every team behaves different because they have different needs. But, yes, technical teams usually have daily stand-ups. We are a lean company. We have like sprints. We have daily stand-ups. We have like sprints, we have daily stand-up. We have all the ceremonies of lean management and development. Modern technologies for development. Important in distributed environment is 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, a nexus of meetings, it's not very productive in a remote environment.
Speaker 1: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?
Speaker 2: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 report of the meeting, the to-do list. The question that is, we use AI. A lot in tools that embedded AI on themselves, like GitHub, Copilot, of course, ChatGPT, Gemini but we use Read AI, which is 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 lists and you don't need to spend 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, called email call 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, javier.
Speaker 1:Have you had any issues recruiting this with the way your company is set up? You mentioned senior talent. Are fluent in English. Can work without micromanagement autonomy. Have you had any issues finding these types of people in Latin America?
Speaker 2:Not really. You know, in Latin America, in the tech space at least, the people that are already willing to work 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, you always make bad choices and you need to correct.
Speaker 2:Some mentor told me a few years ago that managing is about hiring well and firing fast. When you realize that someone doesn't fit, you need to take a decision. It's a two-way decision because I know fit is bad for both. So you need to take a quick decision. And taking a quick decision for entrepreneurs, for founders's usually difficult. It takes time, you know, because you have like an emotional attachment with the team that helps 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. Hires the bar 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 the best thing that you can do.
Speaker 1: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 you guys see each other?
Speaker 2:We try to see each other at least once a year and some years we are lucky enough to see us like two or three times a year. We usually we try to treat us very well, like we don't, because we live in literally half of the world apart. Like I'm in Uruguay, in Australiaia it's 13 hours. When it's my morning it's his name a light, not late night, sorry. Um, I used to walk my dog like at 10 pm my night and I was talking with robert on the phone like for an hour while I was walking the dog around my home. We tried to see each other. We used an opportunity for a huge conference in New York. Let's go to that conference so we can see each other and kill two birds with a stone. Also, we tried to stay.
Speaker 2:I remember that one of the first times 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 a wall, so so I I took the first invoice that the company did, I frame it in a nice frame and and I give him like, okay, this is a gift for you, because this is a, the first invoice that started everything, and and, and another day he sent me a gift like an NFT 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 tried to treat each other because the partnership is really important. The partnership is really important.
Speaker 2:The building a company is hard. There's always hard moments. There's always tension. There's always moments that you want to. I know it's like a roller coaster, everybody knows that, but it's real. The struggle is real. So a good partner that, like Robert and myself, that we are really complementary. That we have two different backgrounds, we have two different stories, 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 doesn't worry. When we are worried is when we see the things in the same way, when we see the things in the same ways. Okay, let's think that because something is happening, something is not wrong, something is not right, because we are seeing the same thing not wrong.
Speaker 1: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?
Speaker 2:For me, the best time of the year is February. The weather is nice and you have the carnival. Carnival it's a huge thing here in Uruguay, especially in Montevideo, where you have these popular stages all over the city and you have like big parades in the street of black people 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 real, but kind of different, like not that big thing but more real, 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.
Speaker 1:Javier, this has been a fantastic conversation. Loved hearing how you built your company. Loved the discussion around FinTech. Before we go, let me thank our sponsor one more time. That's Plug Technologies P-L-U-G-Gtech 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.