How Javier Borkenztaim Built a Global Fintech from Uruguay | Nearshore Cafe

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**Brian:** Welcome, everyone, to another episode of the Nearshore Cafe podcast. I’m Brian Samson, your host. If you’re into fintech and how to build a fintech company out of Uruguay, you are going to love this episode. I have Javier Borenstein, CEO of Fiter, on the show. Before I introduce Javier, I want to thank our sponsor, Plug Technologies. Plug.gg.te. Plug is a great way to connect talent from Latin America to growing U.S. companies. Javier, thanks so much for being here on our show today.

**Javier:** Thank you for having me, Brian. It’s a pleasure to be here.

**Brian:** And Javier, you’re dialing in from Montevideo, Uruguay. Is that correct?

**Javier:** Yes, I’m from Uruguay. I live in Montevideo. Yes, I’m in the South.

**Brian:** I’ve been there before, and this time of year, it’s like summertime, you know, nice warm weather, people walking, you know, along that, I forgot what it’s called, the rambla, right? Walking the rambla with their mate cups. Yeah.

**Javier:** Absolutely. Yes, mate, we do every day. I have mine here just in case. There’s nothing like a beautiful Sunday afternoon walking the rambla with mate, right?

**Brian:** Well, a barbecue is better. Yeah, I can tell. Barbecue, yeah. And barbecue with the fire, the meat. Yeah, that’s something that, I don’t know if you eat meat, but if you like meat, that is something that you can enjoy a lot here in Uruguay.

**Brian:** Javier, I’m really excited to talk about fintech today. Fiter is a fintech company you’ve built right out of Latin America, right out of Uruguay. Let’s just tell me, what is it? What is Fiter for those who don’t know you, don’t know the company? What is it? What are you building? Tell us more about your vision for it.

**Javier:** Absolutely. So, Fiter’s mission is to accelerate the adoption of open-source solutions in the financial industry. Today, we are the number one implementers of Apache Fineract in the world. Apache Fineract is an open-source core banking solution that provides solutions for LMS (loan management systems), accounts like transaction accounts, checking accounts, balance accounts, deposits, term deposits, things like that. The KYC of the client, the database of the client, accounting, some basic accounting for the products. And it’s really flexible, expandable, and it’s open source. So, our mission currently is, we are a service company working in this space, and our vision is to build a fintech distribution of different open-source technologies that we can deliver to multiple clients around the world. So, Fiter started in a non-traditional way. Fiter was founded by myself and my partner Robert in 2017. While I was in Uruguay, he was in Australia. Our first client was in Mexico, and the delivery team for that client was in Uganda. Since then, we’ve been growing and having clients in almost 30 countries around the world, and teams in probably 25 or more cities around the world, or even more. So, we are a remote company. We like to say that we work from the world to the world. And as a company that is not bounded or limited by geographies or regions, we recognize that, and we see that the potential growth, it’s huge. So, we have a lot that we can accomplish yet.

**Brian:** What was your background before you started the company?

**Javier:** Well, I am a mechanical engineer. I also did an MBA. So, I used to work in a mechanical engineering consulting company the first 10 years of my career. Then I started working in a fintech startup that, back in the day, we used SMS to pay. We did some sort of tokenization of credit cards, and the link was the SMS. So, we created a lot of very interesting pilots of payments, from taxi payments using SMS, to buying tickets to the cinema. You could buy a cinema ticket from your phone with a feature phone. Smartphones didn’t exist back then. So, that allowed me to understand some parts of the financial industry, the retail financial industry, the payment industry within the retail financial industry. And I realized that there were a lot of opportunities there for improvement, for modernization. There’s a lot of friction within the industry, so there are a lot of opportunities over there. The payment ecosystem is one that has a lot of fintechs. And during a transition in my career, when I decided to be an entrepreneur, to start my own company, that was something that I always wanted to do. I found this technology, this open-source technology that, eventually leading to, I ended up, you know, connecting the dots backward. You realize that all your experience is somehow interconnected. You don’t do things randomly; every step allows you to do the next step. And sometimes, things that you did like 10, 15 years ago, it’s experience that you have that allows you to, you know, leverage and to use it. So, in my background of project management, of fintech and understanding of the industry, understanding of the financial landscape, understanding of complex projects, dealing with complex organizations, allows me to manage Fiter as a business organization. And now, we are serving fintechs in the lending space, in the Neo Bank space, providing them with the core banking solution. Amazing.

**Brian:** What did the banking system and the fintech ecosystem look like when you started the business back in 2017? What did that look like, especially in Uruguay?

**Javier:** The landscape in Uruguay is similar to the landscape everywhere in the world. You have a group of banks, typically global banks, that are few, that are monopolizing the entire industry. Back in the 2010 to 2015, the first big Neo Banks, the first huge new wave of fintechs — the Monzos, the N26s, the New Banks, you know, all those big names of today — were starting during those years. So, we realized that our vision back in the day was, imagine that this is the early 2000s, and you were selling software for supermarkets or for warehouses. And your client number one would be Walmart. Everybody in the company was trying to sell to Walmart. But suddenly, there is this company called Amazon that wants to buy a software, but they don’t have volume, they don’t have anything. It’s just, why do they want to build our software? We need to focus on Walmart. So, fast forward into the 2020s, it is clear that the Walmarts of the financial industry are already here. And serving them when they were small will allow us to grow with them and will allow us to understand and to leverage and to grow in a different landscape. Serving the big banks is very difficult, but serving the new startups that are going to be the big banks of the future, that is our vision back in those days. And we were very lucky to have a few of them. Some of our clients now have expanded and have millions of clients themselves. They’re like big Neo Banks today. So, in somehow, we were successful, and in that direction, we were successful. And we are seeing now that the big banks, they all now want to see, and they all want to implement this technology because they realize that it’s more flexible, more cost-effective, allows them to execute and to be nimble faster, you know. It’s a very valuable solution for them today.

**Brian:** Yeah, I think so. I think so. You mentioned Robert earlier, your co-founder. Tell us more about the story. How did you and Robert get together on this?

**Javier:** I used to work in a foundation that was the initial of this open-source technology called Mifos. And I had a client working within Mifos, and Robert was the contractor for that project. And I realized that he was amazing. He was doing an amazing job. He was really proactive, fast, you know, doing a really amazing job. I didn’t have to do anything; he was just doing everything perfect. So, we’d been working like half a year, a year and a half, him being a contractor, and I was just part of the team. So, when I decided to leave this organization and move to my next step, Robert contacted me and said, “Hey, why don’t we do something together?” And I was saying, “Okay, let’s try. Let’s see.” We started thinking, and it was clear for us that there was the need for a global company serving fintechs, serving this new wave of startups. And that need was clear for me, and that was what I wanted to do. So, I joined Robert. The funny part is that we’d been working, we were working about two years, two years and a half, and we hadn’t met each other face-to-face. We hadn’t been not even in the same country, in the same continent. So, when Fiter started to grow and eventually we were able to pay ourselves a ticket, and then eventually to see each other, we both flew to Dubai. We rented an Airbnb in Dubai and we spent the weekend planning the next six years of the company. And if it weren’t for COVID, I think that plan would be very, very, very precise. We are now executing that big plan, big idea, and things are getting together. But it was nice to finally be able to give each other a hug and to see each other face-to-face after working together for many years, building a company, starting a company, and never being in the same room.

**Brian:** Tell me more. Our audience is always very interested in this: the company-building part, building a company from Uruguay. Maybe if you could even talk about your first couple of hires. Did you raise capital? Was that something that you needed? Tell us more about that.

**Javier:** Well, one of the things that makes me really proud about Fiter is that we bootstrapped the company. We’ve always been cash flow positive. We never wanted to raise external funding, although it’s something that we always discuss because it will allow you to accelerate and to grow faster. But also, it will bring other complexities, you know. But being, I always say that the best investor is a happy client paying every month. And I keep that as a motto because I truly believe that when you’re building a company, yes, if you are in a startup and you need to accelerate, and you are in an incredibly competitive landscape, of course, you need capital. And I’m not saying that venture capital is something that shouldn’t exist; it has to exist. It provides a service, but it’s not for everybody. And for us, we believe that bootstrapping is the best way. I’m very proud of being able to reach this level without external funding, which I never absolutely discard. It’s always a discussion. It’s always a question of, “Should we raise capital? Why? For what?” If one of the things that we are doing is transitioning to a product company, you know, our vision is to build this distribution, so it’s having our own product. And that will probably require more capital, but that’s another discussion and something that we are executing. But in the old way, you know, by bootstrapping it, by paying from our own capital. But yes, the first hires were technical people, developers. I truly believe that talent is evenly distributed around the world. Opportunities are not. So, you can find talented people everywhere in the world. Of course, there’s a huge concentration of talented people in some areas in the world, but it is because people travel there from different parts of the world. Like Silicon Valley, you have people from everywhere in the world. Israel, you have people from everywhere in the world there. So, yes, you have a concentration of talented people because you have a unique concentration of people from different parts of the world that are taking a risk, that are going there, that are wanting to go there. So, that separates them apart. But for the rest of humanity, there is probably a normal distribution that talent is normally distributed across the world. And you can find talent everywhere in the world. And I think that we want to democratize the access to opportunities, so we try to hire people from places that companies do not normally hire, like Africa, South America, some parts of Asia, etc.

**Brian:** Where in South America have you hired from?

**Javier:** Well, from Mexico to the South, we have people in Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Uruguay, of course. Yeah, we had people in Central America, too. Yeah. Africa, we have people from Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, South Africa. We’ve had teams in Cameroon, Ethiopia.

**Brian:** Think about how many different countries you’re in, even just in Latin America, different personalities, styles. How have you thought about getting everybody on the same page and making sure that the collaboration was strong?

**Javier:** That’s always difficult. It’s not simple, and it always takes time and effort. One of the things that we try to do, and when we realize that we’re not doing it, try to just take a quick decision, is that we don’t hire people that need to be micromanaged. If you need to be micromanaged, we can’t help you here because we are not in the same room, we’re not in the same country. So, you have a task, you have a goal, you need to do it. And if you can’t, this is not the place for you to work. So, that’s kind of trying to find the people that fit our culture, that don’t require micromanagement, that are objective-oriented, that we define a task, an objective, and then you have to do it. And if you have a problem, you need to come back to us and say, “Okay, I’m having this issue, I cannot make this progress,” or make it or try to find a workaround. Our values are simple. We say that we are humans, that we trust and we care. So, we are humans because we all have realities, we all have issues. We live on the same planet, and we understand that things need to be treated. And we realize, as humans, we care because we all have families, we all have responsibilities, and we treat our work with care. That is something that we always do. And we trust because we need to trust in our team, and also trust is the foundation of the financial industry. So, trust is really important, not just for us trusting our team that they will do the work, they will behave, but also to convey that we are a trustworthy company, and we can help our clients build that trust that they need for their clients.

**Brian:** I think it’s great, your culture of autonomy, no micromanagement. As you think about your dispersed team across Latin America, daily standups? Or is there any management practice that you would recommend to other founders that are building not just in one place, but across the continent?

**Javier:** We have small teams that are responsible for different phases or different parts of the process. You know, I always picture Fiter as a train with two engines: an engine on the front that is pulling, which is the delivery team, the team that does the project, etc. And an engine behind that is pushing. It’s a sales team. So, every team behaves differently because they have different needs. But yes, technical teams usually have daily standups. We are a lean company. We have Sprints. We have daily standups. We have all the ceremonies of lean management and modern technologies for development. But one thing that is really important in a distributed environment is that you need to rely on text. Text is really important. You need to write everything down and just be able to make sure that everything is written so others can take it and understand it and continue the work, because having an excess of meetings is not very productive in a remote environment.

**Brian:** Something I want to ask about that with the text is, you have people in Africa, but you also have people in various countries in Latin America as we talked about, where maybe English is not the first language for most. How are you documenting that? Is it in Spanish? Is it in English? Is it a different language?

**Javier:** Our official language is English. And we have a lot of tools that help us to do that. Now we have tools that record every meeting and transcribe the meeting and give you a report of the meeting, the action items, the questions. We use AI a lot in tools that embed AI on themselves, like GitHub Copilot, of course, ChatGPT, Gemini. But we use Read AI, which is this tool that connects into our calls and transcribes every meeting. So, with just a prompt, you have an email with all the to-do list, and you don’t need to spend hours taking notes as we used to do in the past and putting those notes together. Everything now is done automatically with just one prompt. And also, we use a lot of AI for prospecting, call email, call contacts, things like that. So, there’s a lot of tools that are leveraging AI in ways that allow you to execute like if you were a 100-person team, but with a team of two. Yeah.

**Brian:** Javier, have you had any issues recruiting with the way your company’s set up? You mention senior talent, are fluent in English, can work without micromanagement, autonomy. Have you had any issues finding these types of people in Latin America?

**Javier:** Not really, you know. In Latin America, in the tech space, at least the people that are already willing to work for international companies, they do have a solid English level, and they are really used to working for U.S. companies or European companies. So, in Latin America, we have a pretty good level of people that can work with us. Of course, you always make some choices, and you need to correct. Some mentor told me a few years ago that managing is about hiring well and firing fast. When you realize that someone doesn’t fit, you need to take a decision. It’s a two-way decision because a no-fit is bad for both. So, you need to take a quick decision. And taking quick decisions for entrepreneurs, for founders, is usually difficult. It takes time, you know, because you have an emotional attachment with a team that helped you build part of your company. But it’s really necessary when you’re growing, when you’re scaling. Sometimes you reach a level, and you are stuck in a level not because of the market, not because of the external condition, but because of the internal capabilities that you have. So, you need to break that by bringing people that raise the bar, you know, move the bar a little bit higher. And that’s really important, continuing bringing people that move the bar a little bit higher. That’s the best thing that you can do.

**Brian:** Javier, I wanted to just ask you a little more about your co-founder relationship. Because you don’t see each other very often, how do you communicate that trust? And do you bring any gifts or anything special when you guys see each other?

**Javier:** We try to see each other at least once a year, and some years we are lucky enough to see each other two or three times a year. We usually try to treat ourselves very well, because we live literally half of the world apart. I’m in Uruguay, he’s in Australia. He’s 13 hours ahead. When it’s my morning, it’s his late night. Sorry, I used to walk my dog at 10 p.m. at night and I was talking with Robert on the phone for an hour while I was walking the dog around my home. But we try to see each other. We use an opportunity, like, “There’s a huge conference in New York, so let’s go to that conference,” and so we can see each other and kill two birds with one stone. But also, we try to stay… I remember that one of the first times that we saw each other, I gave him a present. And I thought, “Which present can I give him?” I need to take it half a world apart. So, I took the first invoice that the company did, I framed it in a nice frame, and I gave him, “Okay, this is a gift for you because this is the first invoice that started everything.” And another day, he sent me a gift, an NFT with the video of the first email that a friend of ours used to connect us, saying, “I have a friend that is Javier, I have a friend who is Robert, connecting.” So, we try to treat each other because the partnership is really important. Building a company is hard. There’s always hard moments, there’s always tension, there’s always moments that you want to, I don’t know, it’s like a roller coaster. Everybody knows that, but the struggle is real. So, a good partner, like Robert and myself, that we are really complimentary, that we have two different backgrounds, we have two different stories. We focus on two different things. We see the world in different ways, but we know what we want to build. We have a clear vision of what we want to achieve, and that is the most important thing. And we complement each other. Sometimes I see things with a really optimistic view, and he’s really pessimistic. And I’m really pessimistic, but he’s optimistic. That doesn’t worry me. What worries us is when we see things in the same way. When we see things in the same way, it’s like, “Okay, let’s think about that because something is not right.”

**Brian:** That’s great. I love it. My last question for you, Javier, a little more tourism-related. For those who are listening and they’ve never been to Montevideo before, what are your top one or two tips for them? And also, the best time of year to visit?

**Javier:** For me, the best time of the year is February. The weather is nice, and you have the Carnival. Carnival is a huge thing here in Uruguay, especially in Montevideo, where you have these popular stages all over the city that every night you have shows of local groups that are called Murgas or Candombe. And you have big parades in the street of black people with drums, playing drums in a very, very heavy way, which is incredible because of the sound, the energy that you can see. It’s like, it’s like real but kind of different, not that big thing, but more real. And you have a lot of places to eat good meat, and you can go to the beach. You can enjoy the Carnival. So, for me, February is the best time of the year to come to Montevideo. Absolutely.

**Brian:** Javier, this has been a fantastic conversation. Loved hearing how you built your company, love the discussion around fintech. Before we go, let me thank our sponsor one more time. That’s Plug Technology, plug.gg.te. Great way to connect talent from all over Latin America, as Javier talked about, to U.S. companies. Thanks everyone for listening to the Nearshore Cafe podcast. Thanks again, Javier, and we’ll see you all next time. Bye.
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