Can fintech bridge Colombia’s financial gap? Recent policy shifts and new leadership suggest it can.
This article appears in the July/August issue of Global Finance Magazine.
After several years of subdued growth, weighed down by weak fixed investment, high borrowing costs, persistent productivity constraints, and a complex political environment, Colombia’s next growth story is taking shape, centered on technology, particularly fintech and payments.
But first, the country must reckon with a paradox it has so far failed to resolve.
Over the past decade, Colombia has built one of Latin America’s largest fintech ecosystems, incubating more than 400 active companies. Their combined revenues have tripled over the past four years and are projected to double again by 2027, according to Finnovista’s Fintech Radar Colombia 2025.
Yet the country’s underlying financial system remains shallow. Fewer than one in six microenterprises have access to formal credit. Insurance penetration is just 3.3% of GDP and the financing gap for small and medium-sized enterprises is estimated at 13% of GDP, according to the World Bank.
“For years, we celebrated open accounts while ignoring that millions of people cannot use them to save, pay, or finance their projects without falling into informality,” notes Gabriel Santos, president of Colombia Fintech.
But with the narrow victory in June of right-wing, Trump-backed outsider Abelardo de la Espriella, whose presidential campaign promised deregulation and a more business-friendly stance, Colombia’s industry — and the opportunity for foreign investors — appears to be entering a new era.
“Colombia is selling at a discount to its fundamentals,” says Juan Manuel Quintero, CEO of Precia, a leading provider of valuation services and financial information in Latin America. “For investors willing to look past the headline political noise, the risk-adjusted opportunity is more attractive than the country’s reputation currently suggests.”
Large Ecosystem, Shallow Financial Base
At first glance, Colombia appears well-banked. In 2024, 95.8% of Colombian adults held a deposit product, according to Banca de las Oportunidades, and bank-led digital wallets such as Nequi and DaviPlata have driven much of that expansion.
But deposit access and financial depth are not the same thing. Only 35.5% of adults had access to any credit product in 2024, according to the Superintendencia Financiera de Colombia. The gap is even wider among businesses; just 15.3% of microenterprises had access to credit, compared with 74.8% of medium-sized enterprises, according to a report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Domestic credit to the private sector stands at about 50% of GDP, below the Latin American average of 54% and a fraction of Chile’s 116%, according to the World Bank.
“This is a powerful story of growth,” argues José Ignacio López, president of the National Association of Financial Institutions of Colombia (ANIF). “Colombia is lagging in many regards in terms of financial inclusion compared to peers in the region,” not just in credit but also in insurance and investment products. “The whole agenda of financial inclusion as an engine of growth is there.”
Start-ups are not the only leaders in Colombia’s fintech development; established banks have been among the most aggressive builders. Nequi, created by Bancolombia, and DaviPlata, from Banco Davivienda, highlight how the country’s largest financial institutions were willing to bet early on digital. DaviPlata alone reached 18.5 million customers by the end of 2024.
“The talent, the regulatory openness, the incumbent institutions willing to innovate, and a large, underserved population that represents both a social imperative and a commercial opportunity” are all there, says Quintero. What Colombia lacks is “the institutional architecture to convert those ingredients into compounding, systemic change. That gap is not a market failure; it is a policy choice. And it remains reversible.”
Payments Become Credit Data
Colombia is building the plumbing to make that possible, and some of it is already functioning.
Bre-B, the country’s interoperable instant-payment system modeled on Brazil’s Pix, went fully live last October. Within months, it had registered 99 million aliases for more than 33 million customers and 2.8 million merchants.
Cash still accounts for 77.8% of transactions in Colombia, but Bre-B aims to change that by allowing anyone to send and receive money instantly across any bank, wallet, or fintech, using nothing more than a phone number or national ID.
Decree 368 of 2026, handed down in April by the outgoing administration of President Gustavo Petro, added a second layer, making open finance mandatory for supervised institutions and replacing an earlier voluntary framework that had seen limited adoption. Its significance goes beyond convenience. Most of Colombia’s small businesses have no credit history, operate on cash, and lack collateral or audited accounts. The formal credit system was not built to serve them.
But a business that processes payments through Bre-B immediately starts producing something it never did before: a timestamped, verifiable record of money moving in and out. Quintero calls it simply the “credit file” for businesses that have never had one. If open-finance rules allow lenders to access that data, the underwriting equation shifts from asking whether a borrower has the right documents to asking whether it generates enough cash to repay a loan.
The deeper opportunity, López argues, lies in open data: extending the logic to commercial records, utility payments, and supply-chain relationships that fall entirely outside formal finance. “The ultimate goal is to roll out open finance and then move on to open data. That combination of payments and open data could be a powerful tool,” he says.
The Policy Test
When he takes office in August, De la Espriella’s government will inherit a fintech sector with solid private-sector momentum, but one that is still short on tax clarity, regulatory continuity, capital formation, data governance, and trust.
His win prompted an immediate rally in Colombian bonds and equities as investors priced in a more business-friendly policy environment. But the harder question remains: whether that agenda can reduce the structural frictions that keep isolated success stories from evolving into deeper financial infrastructure.
The fiscal framework is central to the problem. Early-stage companies face tax obligations disproportionate to their cash generation, while the treatment of reinvested capital, equity incentives, and technology investment does not reflect how digital businesses actually scale.
“A fiscal architecture not designed for innovation-stage businesses creates disproportionate burdens at exactly the moment when companies need to reinvest capital to scale,” Quintero notes.
López anticipates continuity despite political polarization. Financial inclusion and fintech are “not really controversial” areas, he says, even in a politically divided country. But investors still need “clear signals, especially long-term ones, so fintech firms and the broader financial sector can put their bets on the country.”
Financial inclusion alone will not solve Colombia’s growth problem. But if the country can turn payment data into access to credit and fintech momentum into deeper financial markets, it could show that parts of the informal economy can become more visible, financeable, and productive.
Thomas Monteiro is a contributing writer based in Spain.
