2020 was a year of exponential growth for this Colombian startup, one of the first fintech companies supported by Innpulsa and Apps.co. Its goal is to finance more than a trillion dollars by 2025.
A cow where many put to invest. This is how it works, literally, part of the base of this Colombian company that connects companies that have invoices receivable, with investors who buy them, offering them a double-digit profitability and allowing those companies that have liquidity problems to continue operating because they do not have sufficient cash flow to maintain your business. Something very frequent in Colombia, where despite the effort made with the Fair Payments Law, there are providers who receive their money up to two months after delivering their product or service.
At the beginning of last year, when in Colombia we registered the first cases of COVID-19 and with it the closings of businesses, witnessing the crisis of many companies, it was said that Mesfix was “the first and only financial crowdfunding in Colombia operating today” . It was born in 2014 and in line with many of the companies that have used technology as the center of their business, it has just announced record figures in its operation: throughout 2020 it managed to finance $ 100 billion and managed to cross the goal of $ 200 thousand million since 2014. This means that they helped “more than 500 companies to obtain liquidity and serving as a bridge so that more than 5000 investors can make their money profitable at rates higher than those of traditional products, obtaining more than $ 5 billion in profits. All this from alternative assets, in this case invoices receivable as a security, ”says the company in a press release.
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Felipe Tascón, founder & CEO Mesfix assures that “despite how challenging 2020 was in terms of the crisis, as a consequence of the global pandemic, Mesfix managed to double the effective financing serving almost three times more clients and our goal for 2025 it remains intact: financing more than a trillion dollars annually to the business base of the economy ”. A pretty aggressive goal. In conversation with El Espectador , Tascón believes that “it is completely viable only in Colombia”, but reveals that they hope to “have an operation abroad in the next two years” with “Mexico in the forefront”.
The type of investors, which are those who make a void to buy invoices, can be natural or legal persons, they can invest in one or more invoices “under the logic of a Dutch auction (the auctioneer begins by auctioning with a rate or cap, which is negotiated until a participant is willing to accept the auctioneer’s price), a mechanism that allows them to diversify their risk in different short-term assets (invoices) and from low amounts with different debtor companies ”. Already, in numbers, providers quickly receive the money they need and investors earn “a return of up to 14% effective per year,” the company details.
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In a past interview, Tascón had told El Espectador that part of the success of his proposal within the factoring business is that “we generate financing for companies that do not have access to traditional banking, and we also generate access to people, because the The question we solve here is: what do you do with $ 3 million? That is a problem that 97% of the population has, and there is nothing attractive in the market for that 97% of the population ”.
The new focus of this type of company is on electronic invoicing, since it is enough to review the Chilean case: “Based on what happened in Chile with the entry into circulation of electronic invoicing as a security, factoring grew seven times in the first five years, ”says Tascón. It is expected that in Colombia, “in the next three years this market will jump from about 15 billion dollars to about 50 billion dollars,” he added.
Ignacio Gaitán, president of iNNpulsa Colombia, had already told El Espectador that “companies like Mesfix are an example of everything that is happening in Colombia in terms of entrepreneurship. It is also a leader in the fintech sector in Colombia, a sector that currently attracts the largest investments and where the most successful ventures are being generated in the country ”.
According to Colombia Fintech and the study of trends for 2021, “a development of crowdfunding is expected with regard to investment in innovative companies and startups, thereby achieving the impulse of a significant percentage of initiatives.” And they project that “the year 2021 shows to be a promising year for the fintech industry.”
