Bank license makes Kapital system of record

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Fernando Sandoval, co-founder of Kapital, on tropicalizing Brex for LatAm

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we acquired the banking license, because we now have complete visibility into businesses’ cash flow
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Owning the bank account is what turns Kapital from a finance app into the system of record for an SME’s money. Once customer deposits, bill payments, collections, cards, and financing all run through one regulated stack, Kapital can see the full inflow and outflow of cash, underwrite loans off real operating data, and use payment counterparties as warm acquisition targets for new customers.

  • Before the bank license, Kapital already pulled in e invoice data and sold a dashboard plus credit. The license made that data much richer, because now the same business also keeps deposits and executes payments inside Kapital, instead of splitting activity across outside banks and software tools.
  • That is the practical difference from U.S. players like Brex and Mercury. Brex is strongest in cards and spend, Mercury in banking with partner banks, while Kapital is trying to combine banking, AP and AR, expense control, treasury, and lending in one workflow built for LatAm SMEs that often still run finance in Excel.
  • The acquisition mattered financially as well as strategically. Banco Autofin added about $45M of annualized revenue in 2023, and by 2024 Kapital had grown deposits from $241M in Q1 to $569M in Q4, showing that the license was not just compliance infrastructure, it was the core asset behind product expansion and trust.

From here, the same visibility should keep pushing Kapital deeper into automation and cross sell. The more of an SME’s cash movement sits inside the bank, the easier it becomes to sell lending, treasury, payroll, and AI tools that do finance work automatically, making the bank account the entry point to the whole back office.