:quality(75)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/bloomberglinea/QL3FNDVF5RCITEYNSLTOMFNDNY.jpg "Left to right: John Grundstörm, Max Latorre, Alfonso Maira, Felipe Respaldiza, Tomas Contreras (sitting on the floor), Delfina Peña, Ninoska Gacitua, Juan Jimenez")
Miami — Floid, an open banking platform based in Chile, but also operating in Colombia and Peru, announced today the close of a $2.25 million seed round lead by the Santander Group, and with participation from Amarena and Carao VC.
“Basically what we do is we give the possibility to consumers and companies to share their information from the bank with a third party, so they can have access to all kinds of online products,” said Alfonso Maira, co-founder and CEO of Floid. One of these products could be a loan, for example.
Open Banking allows users to present their dataset to a banker who they may not have a relationship with, in order to get a loan. Because the banker has access to the person’s entire financial position, it makes it more secure for a bank to lend to a new client. There are a myriad of other applications as well.
“We provide technology so companies can evaluate a consumer based on their financial history,” Maira said.
The company makes money by charging a monthly SaaS fee to its institutional members, and then also charging an API call fee on each transaction. Most of their clients are banks, fintechs and investment apps.
The company launched in September 2019, and now they have 12 employees and 50 clients.
Maira, who used to work in lending, was very familiar with how that side worked. He then met his co-founder John Grundström, who had built Instantor, an open banking platform in Sweden which was acquired by Tink. Considering their complementary backgrounds, they decided to start a company together.
The company plans to use the money to expand to Mexico and Costa Rica, and ramp up sales in Colombia.
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