Pierpaolo Barbieri knows what the banking of the future looks like: more open, more innovative and, above all, fairer. “Ualá is the dream of my life,” says the founder and CEO, who started as a fintech in Argentina and shortly after extended its operations to Mexico and Colombia. But its objective has always been clear, to be the center of users’ financial lives, and it knew that to achieve this you had to have a banking license.
“Today we operate as a bank, both in Argentina, where we are by far the largest digital bank, we have more than 6 million clients and more than 20% of the country has Ualá, but also in Mexico and Colombia, (where it operates as a bank ). That was difficult and long, but we believe that it builds the final entities that will allow us to be one of the largest institutions in Latin America,” says the CEO of the unicorn in an interview.
Furthermore, he argues that they combine a 100% digital product with the benefits and accessibility of a fintech, but with the banking licenses that allow the creation of a complete financial ecosystem. “Today we have payments, collections, credit, investments and that allows us to differentiate ourselves because we make completely free accounts with the best performance of any financial institution in any country,” adds Pierpaolo.
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However, he recognizes that the biggest challenge he faces in Mexico is the use of cash. “80% of transactions in this country take place in cash, which is expensive, inefficient, insecure and problematic for the State. I think that digitalization in that sense is inexorable, but in Mexico it has been slower than in other countries. We are in the right place, at the right time,” he says.
At the regional level, the biggest challenge has been learning to operate as a regulated entity. “We learned to operate as a bank. That means changing certain ways we build technology. This does not mean being less agile, but understanding that there are different regulatory needs in each of our markets,” he explains.
Ualá has a monthly customer growth of 10% and has more than 8 million customers in the markets where it operates. They recently raised a $300 million Series E capital round, which values the company at $2.75 billion.
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This capital will be used to launch new business units, continue growing and “achieve the scale we dream of in Mexico, we believe that the country will eventually be larger than Argentina. For that we are going to continue investing and growing,” says the businessman who was recognized, in the “Forbes Economy and Business Forum: Smart and Sustainable Future”, with the “2024 Business Excellence Award”. The door is open to grow in new markets and promote the banking of the future.
