Consolidation advances between fintechs with the purchase of companies

The fintech sector has gone from its boom in 2020 to a period of consolidation in 2022. This year, due to changing global financial conditions, some of the companies that had just launched two years earlier had to reshape your business or directly lower the blinds.

However, in this context, two local market players announced their expansion through the acquisition of new companies.

On the one hand, the unicorn Ualá bought the business of Ceibo Creditos, an Argentine startup focused on the business of “buy now, pay later” (BNPL). As the company founded by Pierpaolo Barbieri explains, Ceibo Credits was created in 2015 and was present in more than 1,000 stores across the country.

The business model it offers is to generate Loans aimed at financing the purchase of durable goodsfrom household appliances, to cars and motorcycles to the point of sale.

Through technology, the loan is requested, approved and qualified in almost an instant and allows users, generally people with little access to bank financing, Pay for these purchases in installments.

In dialogue with ClarioneJoaquín Domínguez, Credit Director of Ualá, explained that this acquisition “completes Ualá’s suite of credit products, which already has the option of corporate loans, with credits of up to $ 200,000 and a duration of up to 18 months. , and personal loans, where Ualá users can withdraw up to $ 1 million and finance it in six, 12, 18 or 24 months. “

Domínguez added: “We also have the quote optionwith which you can finance purchases already made up to 9 installments. The incorporation of Ceibo credits will allow us to add another channel and reach another type of public, non-banking and that needs timely funding for some kind of consumption. The bet is that this is a new gateway to the Ualá ecosystem. ”

This is the third merger and acquisition transaction (acronym in English for mergers and acquisitions) that this fintech has completed in the last twelve months. Last June the Central Bank approved the purchase that the fintech had made of the digital bank Wilobank from Corporación América and a month earlier the company formalized the acquisition of the e-commerce platform. “Undertake”.

Domínguez explained that the growth opportunity of the loan segment is very great in Argentina. “We have granted more than 2 million loans, in a country where access to bank financing is just 16% of GDP, a very low percentage if we take as a reference countries such as the United States, where this ratio is above 100. % of the product”.

salary advances

Around the same time, fintech Nubi came out to announce the purchase of the startup Salary Flex, a solution that allows people to request salary advances 100% online.

It is a platform that allows people who work in the company, the possibility to anticipate up to half of their assets whenever they wish, making their request in a simple and agile way.

Nubi’s general manager, Gabriel Gutiérrez, said Clarin: “At Nubi we are committed to a long-term growth strategy. For some time we have been strongly focused on Nubi Z, which is a digital wallet associated with a prepaid card that offers benefits to users. employees of certain companies. We felt that the Salary Flex proposal allows us to bring an innovative option to the world of corporate benefits. ”

Beyond the benefits for employees, Gutiérrez highlighted that this solution adds value to companies, since “the money from all requests registered during the month is always made available by the platform, that is does not affect the company’s cash flow and eliminates all the internal processes that are generated every time a collaborator needs a salary advance ”.

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