The co-founder and CEO of the Chilean fintech payment company revealed their plans and referred to Suite, the digital checking account for companies that they set up in Mexico and that will soon arrive in Chile.
With 40,000 clients in Mexico and Chile, the year looks set to be profitable again for Xepelin.
“In 2023 we are preparing the company to be very efficient. In 2024 we will continue the second phase, which is to create a digital bank for companies,” Sebastián Kreis, co-founder and CEO of the fintech company that finances SMEs, tells AméricaEconomía .
Since the firm landed in Mexico, it has declared total success in three aspects.
“On the one hand, we have continued to grow in the number of clients, but also the number of new products we have for clients is fundamental. Not only in the financing business, but also in the software business, or SaaS, which allows them to solve problems in their business process. And thirdly, the banking business, which we started in Mexico with a smart checking account for companies,” explains the founder .
For the company, the focus is always on B2B. Today, its software ecosystem “allows companies to execute their business processes in a very simple way, and Xepelin Suite put us in the banking business,” he adds.
The executive describes their recent growth as impressive. “We are the largest B2B fintech in Chile by far. In fact, if we add Xepelin, we are one of the largest in Latin America from the fintech startup point of view,” he says.
Today, its focus in Chile is twofold: to continue growing the number of clients, and to continue expanding its software products, which allow SMEs to manage their accounts receivable and payable, accessing information in real time and receiving alerts that report things like non-compliance or due dates.
All of this, Kreis says, allows the information that each company has to empower them to make their business smarter.
A year ago, for example, Xepelin claimed that in Mexico and thanks to AI, they can offer more personalized financial products tailored to the needs and potential of each company based on its financial ecosystem.
This innovative approach not only benefits SMEs, but also contributes to a healthier and more diverse local supply ecosystem. “By democratising access to financing, we are empowering a sector that is crucial to the Mexican economy, fostering innovation and entrepreneurship,” the company states.
XEPELIN AS A BANK
To date, the fintech has raised US$4 billion in financing and received US$230 million in A rounds of investment in 2021. The most recent round was US$111 million in its Series B financing round, led by Avenir and Kaszek, with the participation of PayPal Ventures, Wellington, DST Global, Battery Ventures, MSA Novo, Endeavor Catalyst, FJ Labs, Picus, Amarena, Gunderson, Carlos García Otatti, Cathay-Seaya Latam and Gilgamesh, among others.
The fintech company does not hide its desire to grow. “We want to be the CFO - financial manager - of companies and help resolve a series of business processes, financing or other services. From helping them improve collections, cash flow, to having adequate working capital. In other words, it is much more than just financing.”
For months they have been advertising their plans to obtain a banking license, as a logical consequence of their stated desire to be the CFO of companies.
“It is essential to move towards the idea of a bank, because otherwise the legislation does not allow you to do things that are important,” Kreus said in a Chilean media outlet a couple of months ago.
In March of this year, it launched its current account for Mexican clients, called Xepelin Suite, with more than 500 accounts opened to date.
Whether or not this same service will be available in Chile depends not only on whether the local regulator, the Financial Market Commission (CMF), gives them approval. They must also decide on the format in which they will do so.
“We are evaluating several alternatives here. We may form a partnership with a financial institution, we may do it ourselves…we are studying it,” says Kreis, who is a commercial engineer from UC and has an MBA from Berkeley and has participated in the digital transformation of some banks in Latin America with the Boston Consulting Group before founding Xepelin in 2018, together with his partner, Nicolás de Camino.
MEETING WITH ENTREPRENEURS
In the software field, Xepelin introduced this year XData, a tool designed to assess the financial health of customers and suppliers, detecting suspicious financial behavior using more than 70 assessment variables. The idea is to prevent fraud and mitigate risks, offering a comprehensive view of business behavior and allowing informed decision-making.
During June of this year, XData analysed more than 12,000 companies, alerting 30% of them as high risk. During this period, 1,358 invoices were identified with highly suspicious behaviour, such as unpaid invoices, cancelled invoices, cross-invoicing and high concentration of clients, among others.
But fintech is also connecting with the world of SMEs and entrepreneurs through events such as Xepelin Money Talks in Mexico in June, or Xepelin Women in Tech during the Chilean summer.
This Wednesday, Xepelin led a discussion in Santiago de Chile under the name Xepelin Insights, focused on the financing difficulties of SMEs and the entrepreneurial environment.
“We realized that companies have many problems that they want to solve and often they don’t know where to go to talk about these issues. And since there is so much technology available in the company, when we started in Mexico doing this event it was phenomenal because the same companies began to share their positive evaluations with us (…) and we wanted to replicate it here in Chile as well to be a company that not only generates solutions, financial services and solutions for companies, but that really is a reference for how companies can solve their problems.”
Xepelin's thesis is that SMEs have the same problems with human resources, treasury and others, and that through dialogue and networking they can connect with other firms that can help them solve these problems.
There may also be opportunities for training on current issues such as artificial intelligence or the challenges posed by certain legislation, such as the fintech law, already in force in Chile, says Kreis.
“The innovation that is happening in technology for companies, in fintech , is brutal,” he highlights.
Within the fintech law we have open finance and open banking , Kreis and the audience analyzed the regulations and the deadlines given for their validity.
“I think that the implementation period that was given is quite long for what the country needs. (…) What open banking does is give access, give opportunities for companies and people to really use their information and use other things to really access more services. And we need that now. We can't wait three years for that to happen, so I think that the implementation periods are a bit long and we have to see how we can shorten it,” he concludes.
