Bringing Latin American micro-business into the fintech age

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   Listen to the podcast (duration: 30:43) >  On this episode of McKinsey on Start-ups, we speak with Lluís Cañadell, the co-founder and CEO of Treinta, a Colombia-based fintech startup focused on helping Latin American microbusinesses transition into the digital era. Across Latin America, there are some 50 million micro-merchants or microbusinesses, typically sole proprietors or those with less than 10 employees, the vast majority of which are still relying on pen and paper for record-keeping and inventory management. Treinta’s super-app helps this class of merchants use their smartphones to take on those tasks, as well as receive digital payments, create online stores, and access a B2B marketplace; the company’s name comes from its original selling point of saving micro-merchants 30 minutes a day and increasing efficiency 30 percent. Launched by Cañadell and co-founder Man Hei Lou in 2020, Treinta now has around 5 million active users across 18 countries; earlier this year, it raised $46 million in a Series A round, one of the largest such raises in Latin America, bringing its total funding to $60 million. The company has a goal of expanding its micro-business ecosystem to one day include lending and additional fintech services, all enabled by and part of what Canadell calls “the democratization of financial services.”

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