AI Summary
5 min readSantiago Suárez, founder and CEO of Addi, built his company in Colombia at a time when most outside observers considered the market too difficult: payments were mostly cash, less than 20% of people had credit cards, and a handful of banks controlled everything. But Suárez saw something others missed. Smartphone penetration had jumped from three years behind U.S. models to near-universal in just two years, putting a zero-marginal-cost distribution device in everyone's hands. And Colombia had a strong pay-over-time tradition with no real infrastructure around it—only Visa and Mastercard had enabled installment rails in a handful of countries. The clincher was the user experience. Suárez once spent 22 minutes trying to buy a T‑shirt on installments: the merchant fingerprinted him, took two photos, and called two of his friends during working hours for reference checks. Banks charged customers to use online banking but not to visit branches. "Why are you charging me to use the channel that for you is least expensive?" he recalls thinking. That gap between technological potential and actual customer pain became Addi's wedge.
Early operating choices that compound
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:33) **Organizational Culture & Speed** - Santiago explains how Adi drives rapid cultural transformation through explicit standards and expectations.
- 2 (02:01) **Company Overview & Scale** - Santiago describes Adi's current footprint as a commerce and financial services platform in Colombia.
- 3 (02:56) **Biographical Foundation & Early Lessons** - Santiago shares his journey from Colombia to Yale, being fired from his first startup, and learning from Jamie Dimon.
- 4 (07:03) **Why Colombia?** - Santiago explains the counterintuitive decision to start in Colombia despite market challenges.
- 5 (11:57) **The Kaspi Trip & Strategic Lessons** - Santiago details how studying Kazakhstan's Kaspi.kz shaped Adi's strategy.
- 6 (16:49) **Recognition & Technology Foundation** - Santiago discusses Adi being named most innovative fintech by Fast Company and the tech bets that paid off.
- 7 (18:28) **AI in Production** - Santiago reveals Adi's AI agents handle 100% of customer service and merchant onboarding.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
Angela Strange and Gabriel Vásquez speak with Addi founder and CEO Santiago Suárez about building one of Latin America's largest financial platforms.
What began as a buy now, pay later product has evolved into a broader ecosystem spanning payments, commerce, logistics, and now banking. Serving millions of consumers and tens of thousands of merchants, Addi sits at the intersection of financial services and commerce in Colombia.
The conversation covers building in Latin America, lessons from scaling through multiple market cycles, the importance of technology infrastructure, and why Suárez believes financial inclusion and economic growth are deeply connected. They also discuss AI, organizational design, product strategy, and what it takes to build enduring companies outside Silicon Valley.
Resources:
Follow Santiago Suárez on X: https://x.com/SantiaSua
Follow Angela Strange on X: https://x.com/astrange
Follow Gabriel Vásquez on X: https://x.com/GEVS94
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