Kapital's countercyclical LatAm bank model
Fernando Sandoval, co-founder of Kapital, on tropicalizing Brex for LatAm
The core advantage is that Kapital can make money when customers are cautious and when they are borrowing aggressively. A licensed bank balance sheet lets it gather deposits and treasury balances when rates are high and companies want yield and safety, then push more credit like Flex when rates fall and demand for working capital picks up. That is very different from a card first fintech like Brex, where revenue is tied much more tightly to spend volume and interchange.
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Kapital is built as a bank plus operating system for SMBs, with deposits, lending, cards, bill pay, and treasury in one account. By 2024, deposits had grown from $241M in Q1 to $569M in Q4, and revenue reached $184M annualized, showing the deposit side had become a real business line, not just a funding source for loans.
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In LatAm, cash flow pain is sharper than in the U.S., which makes lending more central. Kapital describes Flex as the star product because many SMBs are waiting 120 days or more to get paid by big customers, so Kapital steps in to pay suppliers up front and collects later. That makes lower rate periods a tailwind, not a headwind.
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The bank license matters because it gives Kapital direct control of deposits and more regulatory durability. That contrasts with many U.S. fintechs that depend on partner banks, and even Brex has had to keep evolving its model beyond interchange and card spend to reduce cyclicality and build a broader software business.
Going forward, the winners in SMB fintech will look less like single product card companies and more like compact banks with software attached. Kapital is moving in that direction fastest in LatAm, using deposits for resilience, lending for growth, and treasury products like stablecoins to keep more of a business's money flows inside one system.