INTERVIEW
Ximena Aleman is an MBA graduate of Escuela de Postgrados en Negocios, Universidad ORT Uruguay. She won the AMBA & BGA Excellence Award for MBA Entrepreneur of the Year 2022 for her company Prometeo Open Banking. Aleman is Co-Founder and Co-CEO at Prometeo, the largest open banking platform in Latin America, providing access to information
In a little over two years, Prometeo has been able to gain the trust of major financial institutions, such as Santander and Citibank and has received the support of investors from Silicon Valley, Europe and Asia. Over the past six years, Aleman has built three fintech startups and pioneered open banking adoption across the region. She has also used her voice to create awareness of the funding gap for female-led startups.
and payments across 80 APIs from 35 financial institutions in 10 countries.
Could you tell us a little about yourself and your career to date? I majored in journalism for a couple of years and worked in the media – initially as a journalist, and then creating a digital platform for newspapers. That was my first entrepreneurial experience because I was building that inside another company. I left that job and started my own company with my co-founders in the fintech space. It was our first startup seven years ago – a digital wallet. For the past seven years of my life, I have been building fintech solutions across Latin America and for the past three years, I have been pioneering open banking adoption across the region. You won Entrepreneur of the Year at the AMBA & BGA Excellence
awards 2022, for your company Prometeo OpenBanking. Could you tell us more about it? Open banking is an innovation trend disrupting the financial sector. Basically, all the banking information that a user has in the bank (inside the banking system and from regulatory perspective) belongs to the user. The user can provide that information to other financial institutions, so that other financial institutions can, in turn, provide users with better financial products and services, and users can have a better financial experience. This was born in the UK, and was designed to create more transparency and competition within the financial sector, which – around the globe – is a very conservative sector or industry.
What regulators were trying to create was a more open ecosystem within the banking sector. This trend has been quite disruptive in Europe, and of course in the UK, but especially in regions such as Latin America or Southeast Asia. In Latin America, between 50% and 70% of the population is financially excluded – meaning that these people do not have access to a bank account; 90% of the small and medium businesses don’t have access to credit, and 70% of transactions are still cash-based. There is an enormous opportunity for fintech solutions to leapfrog the financial sector to address these hugely unserved populations. There’s an enormous gap to be addressed here in terms of financial products and services addressing the needs of the people in Latin America.
40 |
Ambition | BE IN BRILLIANT COMPANY
Made with FlippingBook - Share PDF online