This year, FinTech Sandbox Demo Day[s] will take place across two days, April 9 & April 11. The presentations will be virtual and the event, as always, is free. Demo Days are exciting because we get to showcase startups that are on the very cutting edge of innovation and you get to see what they’re up to before they’re discovered.
This week and next we’ll continue highlighting this year’s presenting entrepreneurs. Today, we’re talking to Nicholas Yepes, Co-Founder & COO of Moffin, which is based in the city of Guadalajara, in the state of Jalisco in Mexico. Moffin is a data integration platform-as-a-service that helps companies digitize client screening in LatAm. Moffin is presenting on Tuesday, April 9.
Q. Nico, tell us a bit about Moffin. What problems are you solving?
A. We provide companies with access to data, technological infrastructure, and software tools to screen clients.
Q. What is your company’s origin story?
A. Moffin’s story begins when my two co-founders, Santiago and Victor, were working at a Mexican fintech that provided loans to refinance credit card debt. They spent most of their time developing from scratch the fintech’s core banking system, connections with data providers, client screening tools, and other pieces of technological infrastructure necessary prior to being able to provide digital credit products. They had a stronger interest in developing software and financial infrastructure than in operating a lending business.
They were offered a sponsorship to start Moffin by a Mexican non-bank financial institution (NBFI) to resolve similar data integration issues. That financial institution then entered into a sale process with the private equity firm I used to work for. I interviewed my co-founder, who was then the head of technology. Following the sale process, my co-founders lost their sponsorship at the NBFI, but they fortunately found their first angel investor that helped them get Moffin off the ground.
After working as an investor in financial institutions in LatAm for more than three years, I understood very well the need for what Santiago and Victor were building. I became an advisor to Moffin shortly afterwards and joined as their third co-founder in April 2023.
Q. Can you describe what it’s been like to be part of the Fintech Sandbox community?
A. I am relatively new to the Fintech Sandbox community, but I love its mission to aggregate financial data and make it available to fintech entrepreneurs to build applications and services. I am also excited for the opportunity to partake in Empire Startups’ New York Fintech Week this year with Fintech Sandbox.
Q. Why is data access important to your startup?
A. Data access is central to our product as we are a data integration platform as a service. We take care of the engineering work to connect with data providers, standardize the information, and create tooling to work with and analyze the data.
Q. What milestones has Moffin achieved so far?
A. Our first product was an API to access Mexico’s credit bureau data. Now we have 10 different data sources integrated via both API and our no-code platform and a suite of software tools to help work with and analyze the data. We’ve reached 73 active monthly corporate clients and sold more than 500,000 data reports in 2023.
Q. What trends in fintech are you most excited about?
A. We are excited about digital lending, buy-now-pay-later, embedded finance, biometrics, neobanking, and AI-based solutions. Moffin helps about 70 companies today access and power these types of solutions through its platform.
Q. How does Moffin think about leveraging AI in a differentiated way?
A. AI applications tend to require a lot of data and that data must be clean and easy to use. When our clients use Moffin, the data is available for consumption in multiple ways and is easy to integrate with AI applications.
Q. What’s next for Moffin?
A. We are consistently broadening our data offering and improving software tools to help our clients increase productivity. This year we are releasing tools for monitoring and fraud prevention.
To hear more about Moffin and 11 other exciting fintech startups, be sure to register for FinTech Sandbox Demo Day[s] 10!