Changing the Face of Finance in LatAm

While fintech is arguably the most popular VC topic in Latin America right now, Vilash Poovala realized the LatAm advantage well before most investors. Since 1999 he has been focused on emerging markets and the LatAm opportunity. He has worked at payment giants like Visa and PayPal drafting the blueprints for their emerging market strategies. Poovala also completed multiple investment fellowships at prestigious companies in Berlin, and co-founded SVLC’s very first unicorn, Clip. Throughout all of these experiences, Poovala has built a deep reservoir of knowledge, making him a renowned expert on the fintech landscape in Mexico and greater LatAm.

Mexico’s archaic banking system leaves billions of dollars on the table every year, effectively blocking it and other Latin American countries from participating in the internet economy

In payments and especially in e-commerce, Poovala explains, Mexican infrastructure is set up in such a way that market acceptance is very poor. This is because the unilateral banking system created opportunities for rampant fraud, and wary banks responded by declining legitimate transactions that would have been easily accepted elsewhere. To put this problem into perspective, market acceptance is higher than 90% in the US and Europe, whereas in Mexico it’s very common even for high-net-worth individuals to get declined on e-commerce transactions.

“All of this is related to the archaic system,” says Poovala. “It’s not just a payments business, it’s fraud management, it’s underwriting, and it’s an acceptance business.” This leaves billions of dollars on the table every year as Mexico and other Latin American countries are effectively blocked from participating in the internet economy. Complex regulation and legacy banking infrastructure restrain businesses, so that only 9% of LatAm’s commerce is happening online today.

Oyster Financial, Poovala’s most recent venture, perfectly leverages his expertise to create a solution for Mexican businesses in the services sector, the nation’s fastest-growing industry. The platform enables startups and large businesses to provide payments and modern management solutions to their customers. The system, which Poovala and co-founder Gabriel León built from scratch, is poised to become the next-generation financial infrastructure for Mexico and all of LatAm.

Oyster Financial, which Vilash Poovala and Gabriel León built from scratch, is poised to become the next-generation financial infrastructure for Mexico and all of LatAm

Despite the competition created by the white-hot LatAm fintech market, Poovala is confident that Oyster has what it takes to succeed. “Having that knowledge and understanding the core depths of the product has allowed us to create this overhang,” he explains. “That’s also what's keenly different about Oyster.”