Kapital's Mexican bank license advantage
René Saul and Fernando Sandoval, co-founders at Kapital, on the fintech opportunity in LatAm
Owning a bank license turns Kapital from a fintech riding on someone else’s rails into a regulated operator with direct control over money movement. In practice, that means it can connect straight to Mexico’s central bank infrastructure for wires, hold the primary operating account for SMBs, and bundle lending, bill pay, cards, and treasury tools inside one system, which is a much stronger position than stitching together third party banking as a service vendors.
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Before becoming a bank, Kapital relied on outside providers for pieces like card BINs and payment connectivity. After acquiring a bank license in Mexico, it could bypass those intermediaries for core payment rails, which improves control, reliability, and economics on every transfer flowing through the platform.
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The license also changes how customers and regulators see the company. For an SMB deciding where to keep its main operating cash, a regulated bank can look safer than a fintech front end, and Fernando Sandoval ties that directly to trust, especially as fintech rules tighten across Latin America.
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This is a real strategic split from U.S. players like Mercury and Brex, which grew on sponsor bank models and layered software on top. Kapital is closer to a full stack bank plus ERP for SMBs, and that vertical integration helped deposits rise from $241M in Q1 2024 to $569M in Q4 2024 while revenue scaled to $184M annualized in 2024.
The next step is using the bank charter as the anchor for a broader Latin American financial stack. As more fintech activity gets regulated, the winners are likely to be the companies that already own the license, the deposit relationship, and the daily workflow, because they can add cross border payments, treasury, and credit without handing the customer back to a partner bank.