Owning the LatAm Finance Workflow
René Saul and Fernando Sandoval, co-founders at Kapital, on the fintech opportunity in LatAm
This reveals that Kapital is not trying to win LatAm through card economics, it is using cards to pull customers into a much larger operating system for cash flow. In the US, corporate card companies can build around interchange first, then add software later. In LatAm, lower interchange and higher funding costs make that math weaker, so Kapital uses the card as a doorway into accounts, payables, receivables, lending, and the dashboard that customers open every day.
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The card only shows a slice of company spend. Kapital keeps saying the real job is to show the whole money picture, who owes you, who you owe, what invoices are due, and whether cash is tightening. That is why the sticky product is the dashboard and workflow layer, not the card itself.
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That is also why lending matters more than cards in Kapital's model. The loan or Kapital Flex solves an immediate cash crunch, then the customer starts running payments and collections through the platform. By 2025, Kapital's revenue mix was still led by lending, while cards sat inside a broader banking and software bundle.
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The contrast with Ramp and Brex is useful. In the US, the category started with card volume and later shifted toward bill pay and SaaS as the main battleground. Kapital effectively started from that later playbook because LatAm card margins were not rich enough to support a pure card strategy in the first place.
Going forward, the winner in LatAm SMB fintech is likely to be the company that owns the operating account and the daily finance workflow, then keeps attaching credit, treasury, payroll, and AI tools around it. In that setup, cards remain important, but mainly as one feature inside a denser and more defensible financial back office.