Subscription Hook Fuels Kapital Growth
René Saul and Fernando Sandoval, co-founders at Kapital, on the fintech opportunity in LatAm
Kapital is using software fees to make a lending business behave like a workflow product. The monthly dashboard fee is not the biggest revenue line, but it is the piece that gets an SMB to run payments, receivables, payables, and cash tracking inside Kapital every day. Once that happens, wires, payment fees, interchange, and credit usage rise on top of the subscription, which makes the customer harder to dislodge than a standalone card or loan provider.
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The software is concrete, not abstract. A customer logs in and sees what came in, what needs to be paid, which invoices are overdue, and can pay suppliers or collect from buyers in a few clicks. That is why Kapital can charge a monthly or annual dashboard fee in a market where many SMBs historically ran finance from Excel or memory.
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This model fits LatAm better than the U.S. card led playbook. Interchange in the region is roughly 0.4% to 0.9%, much lower than U.S. levels, so giving away software and living on card economics is less attractive. Kapital instead uses credit and the dashboard together, then layers on transaction fees and treasury tools.
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The hook compounds because the product sits at the operating account. Customers started with a handful of payments on the platform and later were doing far more, with reported revenue retention around 450%. More recently, deposits grew from $241M in Q1 2024 to $569M in Q4 2024 as Kapital kept bundling more back office functions into the bank relationship.
The next step is a deeper rollup of the SME back office. As Kapital adds AI, treasury, payroll adjacent tools, and more ways to automate routine finance work, the subscription layer should become an even stronger entry point for higher margin lending and payments revenue. The company is moving toward being the daily operating system for an SME's money, not just its bank.