Ignite Startups: How Embedded Finance Is Fixing SME Credit in Latin America with Nicolás Villa | Ep232

Episode notes

Most small businesses don’t fail because the founders are lazy or the ideas are bad. They fail because money moves at the wrong speed. Imagine running a perfectly healthy business, customers want what you sell, employees show up every day, orders keep coming in. Then a large client tells you, “We’ll pay you in 60 or 90 days.” Your employees, your rent, and your suppliers, they still want to get paid this month. That timing mismatch is where growth quietly dies. This is the world Nicolás Villa knows well. Before becoming CEO of Platam , he lived it as a founder. His first company waited years for something as basic as a corporate credit card. Banks looked at his personal credit and shrugged at the company’s, even though the business itself was healthier on paper. That contradiction became the seed of Platam. The credit paradox no one talks about Zoom out and you see a strange picture across Latin America. On one side, institutional capital is piling up, funds actively looking for places to deploy money. On the other, small and mid-sized businesses are starved of working capital. Not because they’re reckless, but because the system was never built for them.