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The Bankinter Innovation Foundation recently launched a new series called “Coffee with Entrepreneurs,” designed to connect audiences with influential leaders in the startup ecosystem. The inaugural session featured Pablo Viguera, CEO and founder of Belvo, Latin America’s leading Open Banking API platform. Viguera, a business graduate with an MBA from the University of Chicago, brings extensive international experience in scaling tech companies. Previously, he co-founded Groopify, managed Revolut in Spain, and led VERSE through restructuring and sale to Square. Sharing insights from his diverse career, Viguera emphasized key entrepreneurial lessons: prioritize speed over perfection, aim for significant ownership, target large markets, and recognize fintech’s robust future. He highlighted the growing need for B2B platforms amidst fierce competition for customers.
Belvo, Viguera’s current venture, aims to democratize financial product access and promote inclusion, especially in Latin America where over half the population remains unbanked. Backed by top investors like Kaszek Ventures and Founders Fund, Belvo empowers fintechs to innovate faster and more inclusively. Viguera advises entrepreneurs to surround themselves with talented teams, embrace discomfort as a sign of growth, value multicultural perspectives, and persist despite rejection. He stresses learning from both successes and failures, comparing entrepreneurship to a marathon requiring gradual preparation. The Bankinter Innovation Foundation continues to foster Spanish startups through investment and support, reinforcing its commitment to entrepreneurial growth.
As part of the new "Coffee with Entrepreneurs" cycle, Pablo Viguera, CEO and founder of Belvo, tells us about his experience and learnings as an entrepreneur.
The Bankinter Innovation Foundation has organised a new cycle of “Coffee with Entrepreneurs”, an initiative to bring you closer to leaders in the entrepreneurial ecosystem to learn from their experience and career. In the first session, we had Pablo Viguera, CEO and founder of Belvo, the leading API platform for Open Banking and Financial Information in Latin America.
Pablo Viguera, a graduate in Business Administration and Management, complemented his training with an MBA at the University of Chicago. He has lived half his life abroad and has spent the last eight years creating, scaling and consolidating technology companies in various parts of the world.
Among other initiatives, he co-founded Groopify and later held the position of General Manager of Revolut in Spain, before leading VERSE, restructuring it and making its sale to the US fintech Square possible.
Here are the lessons and recommendations that Pablo Viguera gave us. In his multiple and international professional experience, he has been learning certain keys, very necessary for any entrepreneur and that always have a double aspect: what do you get out of positive and what you should not repeat.
Pablo Viguera’s advice for entrepreneurs:
- Time is the scarcest factor. Better made than perfect. Better yesterday than today.
- To be an entrepreneur, it is better to have an important part of the pie.
- For a company to be viable, it has to target a large enough market.
- The fintech sector is one of the sectors with the most strength and power, today and in the immediate future.
- It is becoming increasingly difficult to compete for end customers and there is an increasing need for platforms: to focus on B2B (business-to-business) initiatives.
What is better to avoid when starting a business?
- Limited ownwership. To paraphrase Taleb, it is better to “risk your skin” and take greater risks.
- May the wave not be your wave, but that of others. If you’re not motivated enough, and you don’t feel very connected, give up.
From these keys, BELVO emerged, which offers banks, fintechs and tax agencies its products, to reach a wider audience.
Pablo Viguera’s idea with BELVO is to democratize access to financial products. It aims to enable fintechs to create better products, faster, that are more accessible and also more inclusive. One of the driving forces behind BELVO is to promote financial inclusion. In Latin America, more than 50% of the population is unbanked.
Pablo has secured funding from world-class investors such as Kaszek Ventures, the leading venture capital fund in Latin America, and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, co-founder of PayPal.
Pablo Viguera’s recommendations:
- Always surround yourself with people better than you.
- If you’re not uncomfortable on a day-to-day basis and it seems like everything is under control: either you’re not going fast enough or you’re not going in the right direction.
- Great power and value of experimentation.
- The value of multidisciplinary and multicultural teams. Creating the best products requires a very broad context and a team where there are many different points of view. At BELVO there are currently 50 people of 14 nationalities
- Don’t take “no” for an answer: One of the greatest keys to the entrepreneur. Pablo testifies to the enormous number of “no’s” he has received in the search for funding. His recommendation: Persevere and move forward with the conviction of creating something that will change the world.
- Prepare yourself and incorporate the baggage of positive and negative experiences: To run a marathon, first finish 5K, then 10K, etc.
- The “asymmetry of emotions” when undertaking. Many times you fall, you make mistakes, you fail, and you also get it right, you win, you do it well, you are an entrepreneur or you are an employee. In the entrepreneurship sector, if you fall, you fall 10 times deeper, but when you get it right, you rise 1,000 times deeper.
Here is the video of Pablo Viguera’s webinar:
The Bankinter Innovation Foundation, through its Startups Programme, supports Spanish entrepreneurship through investment by Bankinter Venture Capital in seed capital phases, with more than 38 investments since 2013.
