Fintech in Colombia: How Latin America's Third-Largest Fintech Market Keeps Growing

Fintech in Colombia in numbers (2025–2026)

The Finnovista Fintech Radar Colombia 2025 counts startups incorporated in Colombia or with a local founding team that offer financial products with a fully digital customer journey. The financial figures in the Colombia Fintech sector report come from 2024 financial statements, in Colombian pesos.

Where Colombia sits in Latin American fintech

The latest regional study by the Inter-American Development Bank and Finnovista, released in 2024, counted 3,069 fintech startups in 26 Latin American and Caribbean countries in 2023, a 340% increase from 703 companies in 18 countries in 2017. Brazil hosts 24% of them, Mexico 20% and Colombia 13%, ahead of Argentina and Chile at 10% each. The same study found that 57% of regional fintechs now target underbanked or unbanked people and businesses, up from 36% in 2021.

Colombia is also an expansion market. Mexico leads the list of foreign fintechs operating there with 62, followed by Chile with 57 and the United States with 43, according to the Radar. For US fintechs and investors, the country is already a tested entry point into the Andean region.

The segments driving the market

According to Colombia Fintech, digital lending accounts for 39.4% of the country's fintech companies, digital payments for 33.0% and crypto and blockchain for 8.2%.

Digital lending

Lending is the largest vertical, with 115 fintechs in 2025, up from 79 in 2021. Growth is slowing as large and midsize players consolidate, funding for loan books gets scarcer and the legal interest rate cap, known as the usury rate, limits pricing.

Digital payments

Fewer players, more volume. Decree 1692 of 2020 opened merchant acquiring to non-bank players and triggered a wave of local payment gateways and mobile card readers for small businesses. By 2024 Colombia had 1.5 million active card terminals, more than double the early-2020 figure, according to Financial Superintendence data cited in the Radar.

Business finance and AI

B2B financial management tools keep gaining ground as companies digitize invoicing and treasury. Meanwhile, AI has moved past experimentation: 66% of Colombian fintechs already use it, and among those that do, 86% report lower operating costs, with an average reduction of 44%. If you are evaluating automation for support or risk operations, see these AI agent examples.

Bre-B and mandatory open finance

Bre-B, instant payments for everyone

Bre-B is the interoperable instant payment system built by Banco de la República, Colombia's central bank. It reached full operation on October 6, 2025, and lets people and businesses move money between different institutions in seconds, 24/7, using aliases such as a mobile number. According to the central bank's technical paper from February 2026:

• Between October 6, 2025, and January 31, 2026, Bre-B settled 370.4 million transactions worth COP 59 trillion.
• From July 2025 to January 2026, users registered 99 million aliases belonging to 33.9 million customers.
• As of January 2026, 218 participating institutions were connected, including banks, cooperatives, specialized electronic deposit and payment companies (SEDPEs) and digital wallets.

For payment fintechs, Bre-B lowers the interoperability barrier. For lenders, it opens a cheaper rail to disburse and collect.

Open finance becomes mandatory

Decree 0368, issued on April 7, 2026, created a mandatory open finance system. According to Colombia's Financial Regulation Unit, institutions supervised by the Financial Superintendence must share data through standardized APIs, always with the account holder's authorization, and register in a participants directory. The Superintendence has six months to publish an implementation schedule, and once standards are set, institutions have up to twelve months, extendable once by six more, to enable access.

The market is partly ready: two out of three fintechs already use open finance models, although 43.8% believe users are not yet prepared for it, according to the Radar.

What slows Colombian fintechs down

• Profitability over growth. Customer acquisition and retention, operating efficiency and partnerships now outrank fundraising and new product launches.
• Bank partnerships. 81% of fintechs collaborate, or are about to, with financial institutions, but nine out of ten cite bureaucracy as an obstacle.
• Churn in the market. The exit rate was 19.3% between 2024 and 2025.
• Financial literacy. Open finance moves slowly when users do not see the value of sharing their data.

What it takes to build a fintech product in Colombia

At DataLab we have spent more than ten years talking about money in digital, and in fintech we work on two fronts: the technology that moves money and the communication that builds trust.

On technology, we build custom transaction cores. For Educapital, an edtech and fintech for schools, we developed a SaaS core for billing, payments and credit risk that reached more than 50 schools and more than 80,000 successful transactions a month, and helped the company raise more than USD 5 million. For Starkapital, which finances income-generating vehicles, the origination-to-servicing core handles more than COP 1 billion a month in lending operations.

For +Tendero, a microlending core with weekly cycles has served more than 600 neighborhood shopkeepers and issued more than COP 3 billion in loans.

On communication, we have worked with Latam Fintech Hub since the project began more than six years ago, growing its social media users by 159% and engagement by 342%, and we have supported Colombia Fintech's communications strategy for four years.

That experience boils down to a short checklist for anyone building a fintech in Colombia:

1. A modular core (origination, disbursement, collection and servicing) with an audit trail for every movement.
2. APIs ready to connect to Bre-B and the open finance system.
3. Security by design: credentials and tokens only on the server, strong authentication and audit logs.
4. Clear data-processing authorizations under Colombia's data protection law, Law 1581 of 2012.
5. Customer acquisition cost measured by channel from the first dollar spent.
6. Content that explains the product. In finance, trust is built by teaching.

For US teams, a Bogotá-based squad adds one more advantage: Colombia runs on UTC−5 all year, the same clock as US Eastern time in winter and Central time in summer, and its developers already know the local rules. Building a lending core or a payments platform? Tell us where you are and we will propose the architecture and the team. Explore our nearshore software development for fintech or see why companies choose nearshore software development in Colombia.