The Fintech Playbook for Latin America
Santiago Suarez, founder and CEO of Addy, discusses building one of Latin America's most ambitious fintech companies in Colombia, covering topics from the company's origin story and technology architecture decisions to AI adoption and financial inclusion. The conversation explores how Addy grew from a buy-now-pay-later product into a full banking and commerce platform serving over 3 million consumers. Suarez shares lessons on contrarian thinking, talent acquisition, and the role of foundational technology decisions in enabling future AI capabilities.
Summary
Santiago Suarez, founder and CEO of Addy, joins Angela Strange and Gabriel Vasquez of a16z to discuss building a fintech company in Colombia that has grown to serve over 3 million consumers and 50,000 merchant partners. The conversation begins with Suarez's personal background — coming from Colombia on a full scholarship to Yale, working at an early AI startup called Navia, being fired as CEO after 35 days, and then spending six years at JPMorgan in a small strategy group close to Jamie Dimon to learn how great CEOs operate.
Suarez explains why he chose Colombia over Brazil or Mexico as his primary market. He cites two key insights: rapid smartphone adoption (75% penetration, faster than Brazil and Mexico) creating a zero-marginal-cost distribution channel, and a strong cultural tradition of installment payments without adequate infrastructure to support it. He also notes that his relative unfamiliarity with Colombian financial regulations allowed him to see opportunity rather than obstacles.
A significant portion of the conversation covers Addy's foundational technology decisions. Suarez credits his CTO for insisting on a monorepo architecture at a time when microservices was the industry standard, and for adopting an event-sourcing architecture using Kafka, which logs every single event across the platform — over 10 million per day. These decisions, combined with a Databricks partnership for real-time data ingestion, created the infrastructure foundation that later enabled aggressive AI adoption.
On AI, Suarez describes Addy's approach as starting counterintuitively with legal automation rather than customer service. In Colombia, companies face 'tutelas' — emergency constitutional actions requiring 48-hour responses or the CEO faces personal liability. Building AI pipelines for this high-stakes, accuracy-demanding use case forced rigorous development of RAG pipelines and feedback loops that then transferred directly to customer service. Their AI agents now handle 100% of customer service queries with close to 80% full resolution and no human in the loop, and a merchant onboarding agent boards 2,000–3,000 merchants per month with over 20% improvement in conversion.
Suarez discusses a visit to Kazakhstan to meet the CEO of Caspi, a company he views as a comparable model — a highly focused fintech succeeding in a single country. Key lessons from that meeting included prioritizing NPS and customer experience, thinking modularly about product roadmaps, and ignoring equity investor skepticism for years while building conviction around a contrarian geographic strategy.
On organizational culture, Suarez emphasizes running the company in English (to attract global talent and raise internal standards), maintaining a written-first culture for all decisions (which proved prescient for AI agent context), and organizing around a North Star metric rather than cascading OKRs. He describes the company running 150 heads below budget while exceeding growth targets, attributing this to AI-driven productivity gains.
Looking ahead five years, Suarez envisions Addy as a force for financial inclusion across multiple Latin American countries, a mostly AI-native organization where agents and humans collaborate under a unified 'human and agentic resources' function, and a place where a few hundred people do the best work of their lives while pushing technological boundaries from Bogotá.
About this episode
Angela Strange and Gabriel Vásquez speak with Addi founder and CEO Santiago Suárez about building one of Latin America's largest financial platforms. What began as a buy now, pay later product has evolved into a broader ecosystem spanning payments, commerce, logistics, and now banking. Serving millions of consumers and tens of thousands of merchants, Addi sits at the intersection of financial services and commerce in Colombia. The conversation covers building in Latin America, lessons from scaling through multiple market cycles, the importance of technology infrastructure, and why Suárez believes financial inclusion and economic growth are deeply connected. They also discuss AI, organizational design, product strategy, and what it takes to build enduring companies outside Silicon Valley.
Key Insights
- Suarez argues that building on a monorepo architecture seven years ago — when microservices was the dominant paradigm — directly enabled Addy's AI capabilities today, because a single codebase is far easier for LLM agents to read and traverse than fragmented microservices.
- Suarez claims that starting AI deployment with legal automation (responding to Colombian 'tutelas' with 48-hour deadlines under CEO personal liability) rather than customer service forced higher accuracy standards and better pipeline development, which then made customer service AI easier to build.
- Suarez argues that running the company in English — despite being based in Bogotá — counterintuitively attracts more local Colombian talent, because Spanish-speaking engineers associate the English-language environment with higher professional standards and serious ambition.
- Caspi CEO advised Suarez that equity investors will not understand a deeply focused single-country fintech strategy for 5–10 years, and that founders should essentially ignore them for that period and let results speak eventually.
- Suarez contends that being 'too inside the matrix' of U.S. financial services regulation actually prevented him from seeing startup opportunities in the U.S., while relative ignorance of Colombian financial infrastructure allowed him to see the opportunity clearly rather than the obstacles.
- Addy is currently running 150 heads below its hiring budget while still exceeding its growth targets, which Suarez attributes to AI-driven productivity gains — suggesting that AI is enabling the company to grow without proportional headcount increases.
- Suarez argues that profitability, once achieved, should become an unstated baseline expectation rather than an ongoing weekly focus — analogous to 'wearing appropriate clothing to work' — freeing organizational attention for higher-order goals.
- Suarez claims that a written-first culture — requiring articulation of the 'why' behind every decision, even obvious ones — proved prescient for AI adoption because all SOPs and context are already explicit and machine-readable, making it easier for agents to operate within the organization.
Topics
Transcript
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 agent 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.…
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