Building Trustworthy Transactions
By Bob Gulla
May 2024
“We are very excited,” says a breathless Silvia Schwartz, the co-founder and COO of Fiado. “We feel we are finally at a turning point, where it will become easy to use our platform and convenient for the set of clients we are focused on.”
Fiado is a fintech platform that facilitates financial transactions between the immigrant population in the United States and their families in Latin America — mainly Mexico. There are roughly $60 billion worth of transfers between the U.S. and Mexico every year, conducted by the first-, second- and third-generation immigrants (regardless of legal status) who live here. While that $60 billion represents approximately 20% of their income, the process of sending that money home is inefficient, fragmented, and rife with greed, leaving users vulnerable to abuse.
Fiado’s goal is to provide a way for them to regain trust in these transactions. “The total wealth of this group is large,” says CEO Jaime Roblesgil, who came to Fiado from Citibank. “We are providing a trustworthy financial platform for that wealth.”
The premise may sound simple, but execution is not. What, for example, is the best way to overcome the migrant population’s lack of trust in technology? How will these transactions happen when one or both of the parties — potentially spanning three generations — are not technologically literate?
Annually, immigrants in the U.S. send about $60 billion to Mexico, approximately 20% of their income, through a process that’s inefficient, fragmented, and rife with greed.
“We ask ourselves these questions every day,” says Silvia, who co-founded the company with CTO Deirdre Bobadilla. “We work with the engineering team daily to make sure Fiado overcomes that technological skepticism and is as simple and reliable as possible.”
Immigrants themselves, the Fiado team draws on its own experiences to come up with solutions. Although the Fiado app is simple, intuitive and easy to use, it has still proven challenging for some end users. “We have resorted to a process of trial and error to help us through it, and we find ourselves solving problems as they arise,” Jaime says.
Despite the “whack-a-mole” approach — one familiar to many app-based startups — the Fiado team has made significant progress. Their technology crew is agile and open-minded, and together they’ve managed to navigate a way forward without many setbacks. “It would be difficult for a bigger company to do this at the speed with which we do it,” says Jaime. “A company as small as ours can pivot quickly and come out with a new version of the app very fast.”
The challenge, explains Silvia, is to maintain a fast rate of growth without leaving customers behind. “We don’t want to overgrow too quickly,” she says. “We just want to be smarter so we don’t lose control of what we’re trying to accomplish.”
For now, the sales team hits the streets, literally, every day. “Technology companies don’t typically rely on getting out on the street to meet people,” says Jaime. “We are on the street connecting with people. That’s the first phase of our marketing, and one that Hispanics in the U.S. respond to.”