Happy New Year! Happy first Wednesday of 2024!
I am a firm believer of the quote “we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” (Will Durant, NOT Aristotles). Consistency is the name of the game and I try to practice it in every aspect of my life. Therefore, I could not let the first Wednesday pass by without a Startup to Watch to kick-off the year on a high note!
Look out - my Sunday LatAm Tech Weekly will be a complete piece full of predictions for 2024! But for those who are new, however, this specific series is dedicated to early stage startups from LatAm that are under the radar – and have a good story to tell. I send it out every other Wednesday (sometimes every week)- and it is separate from my traditional newsletter.
The basic criteria is a company that is not on the spotlight and is NOT actively raising proceeds. There is also no bias – apart from the fact that I like the story. I am not an investor or get any financial compensation to promote startups featured. This is intended for informational purposes only, using my solid base of subscribers to share intel of good people doing cool things, thus fostering the ecosystem.
Since launch, featured startups in aggregate were connected 99 times, to 43 different investors/strategic partners/companies globally.
Finally, if you are a founder and want to be considered for this series - it is very simple:
Please fill out a one-pager, in English, about your company using the topics and themes outlined in the posts. Please write it in 3rd person.
Reply to this e-mail with your one-pager attached.
I will review and reach out if I need more information.
It will be posted if I believe the startup fills the profile and audience of this newsletter.
Good Luck!!!!!!
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Opinions expressed here are solely my own and does not represent those of people, institutions, organizations that I may or may not be associated with in any capacity, unless explicitly stated.
urbanobank.com
Have you ever heard about Urbano Bank? There you go, me neither until I personally met Tayguara Helou, Urbano Bank's CEO and its top executives, Antonio Carbonari and Jefferson Pastuszak (Zak).
Urbano Bank is a startup founded by Tayguara within a large logistics corporation in Brazil, the BRASPRESS Group, which is a leading parcel transportation and logistics corporation operating in Brazil and in several other countries in South America.
The Group supplies a range of logistics services for thousands of businesses in the region, most of them being SMEs. Braspress roughly completes 150 deliveries per minute during commercial hours in Brazil. They have handled $ 85 billion (BRL) worth of goods in 2023 alone.
Urbano Bank improves financial services for a company's ecosystem in the last mile by providing a full range of financial services for suppliers, employees and customers. They improve and tropicalize according to the specific needs of each company's ecosystem, solving financial problems and filling in the gaps.
They do not compete with banks. Urbano Bank is a fintech that collaborates with those institutions by having the banks supplying financial services on top of their platform, while Urbano focusses on the last mile, thus providing certain conditions & prices that the SMB could not obtain if it were to access the solutions independently. The result is that at the end the banks, Urbano and the SMB is winning, as everyone gets a cut with the creation of a new P&L for each one of the SMBs.
Urbano has developed a great amount of technologies and integrations with many financial solutions which are all in turn centralized in one single platform. To get a sense of scale, the firm is currently slightly below the mark of BRL 1bn in TPV.
"We use technology to gain efficiency and scale our services for our customers" Tayguara Helou
URBANO BANK SERVICES:
● Checking Account for both businesses (PJs) and customers (PFs);
● Pix 24/7 - (Brazilian Instant Payment);
● P2P QRCode money transfer;
● Prepaid international contactless credit card;
● International ATM withdraw;
● No-name international contactless prepaid credit card for external personnel;
● Credit card reimbursement and expense management;
● Diversified credit and loans;
● Diversified payments solutions
● Investments through FIDIC (Credit Rights Investment Fund);
● Asset management for FIDICs;
● Insurances;
● Benefits and discounts on thousands of establishments;
● Billing Management;
● Integration architecture for ERPs through APIs and CNAB;
● Backoffice platforms with many different KPYs;
● Customized technology for financial solutions though own core bank;
● POS (Point of sales), bank cards payment links and payment gateways;