Rappi's Fintech-Driven Multi-Vertical Strategy
Sebastian Mejia, co-founder of Rappi, on building for multi-verticality in on-demand
Fintech matters to Rappi because it turns a delivery app into a higher frequency money app with better economics on every transaction. When payments and credit sit inside the same app as food, grocery, and retail, Rappi can get customers to open the app more often, steer spend onto its own financial products, and keep more of the payment fee stack instead of handing it to outside card issuers and processors.
-
Rappi already had the base for this strategy in 2021. Its model combined marketplace traffic, last mile logistics, subscriptions, advertising, and payments in one app, and more than 90% of customers were buying from at least two categories, which shows why adding money movement can lift lifetime value across the whole ecosystem.
-
The merchant side matters too. Rappi has long aimed to be more deeply embedded in merchant operations through payments and other tools, not just order aggregation. That makes the platform harder to replace, because the merchant is not only buying delivery demand, but also using Rappi for checkout and financial workflows.
-
The strategy has stayed important even as the structure changed by market. In Mexico, Banorte bought the RappiCard operating entity in December 2025 and signed a 15 year exclusive partnership with Rappi. In Colombia, RappiPay remained an in house financial arm, with assets rising to COP 442.9B and deposits to COP 319.6B by September 2025.
This is heading toward a model where delivery, merchant software, and consumer finance reinforce each other. The winning version of Rappi is not the app with the most orders, it is the one that owns the customer wallet, processes more merchant payments, and uses those flows to make logistics margins and customer retention structurally better over time.