Kapital Building LatAm Finance Copilot
Fernando Sandoval, co-founder of Kapital, on tropicalizing Brex for LatAm
The core lesson is that fintech stops being defensible when it only sells a cheaper card or account. Kapital is trying to anchor itself in the customer’s daily operating system instead, with a paid dashboard, payments, lending, treasury, and AI tools that show cash in, cash out, invoices, and working capital needs in one place. That turns a bank from a transaction endpoint into software a business uses every day.
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Kapital says usage moved from about once a month to daily, often for one to two hours, after it built around real time visibility into receivables, payables, sales, and margins. That is the practical difference between a commodity financial product and a sticky workflow product.
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This is the same direction the broader category has taken. Ramp grew by expanding from card into bill pay and software, and Brex shifted focus from raw card volume toward deposits, software, and profitability. The market reward moved away from pure spend volume and toward deeper workflow ownership.
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Kapital’s LatAm version goes one step further because the pain is sharper. Its Flex product finances supplier payments in a few clicks, stablecoins help businesses hold dollars, and deposits grew from $241M in Q1 2024 to $569M in Q4 2024. Those are not cosmetic features, they solve cash flow shocks that can kill an SME.
The next wave of fintech winners will look less like standalone banking apps and more like finance copilots for specific business segments. The companies that win will own the data, automate decisions, and attach lending, payments, and treasury at the exact moment a customer needs them. In that market, price matters less because the product is helping run the business, not just moving money.