Mono

Digital banking for SMEs & startups in Latam

In the short-term, Mono is providing a digital bank account for Latam startups and SMEs, that can be opened 100% through WhatsApp in 17 minutes, and that integrates to third-party SaaS (i.e. accounting, payroll, or taxes).

In the long-term, we're building a 'bankingless bank'. This is, a bank that automatizes operational, accounting and financial processes in order to let the entrepreneur focus on their business.

Sebastian, Jose Tomas and Salomon have been working on this full-time since August, 2020, and Juan Camilo since September, 2020.

Sebastian and Salomon have known each other since 2017, when Salomon started working as the Head of Legal at Tpaga. In 2018-2019, Sebastian and Salomon worked hand-on-hand when they launched Tpaga in Mexico, creating the product from scratch and building the initial team.

After being in Tpaga, Salomon went to do a master’s degree to the London School of Economics, where he met Jose. Salomon introduced Jose to Sebastian in March, 2020.

As of June, 2020, Jose, Sebastian and Salomon started looking for a Head of Product for Mono and one of the investors introduced Juan Camilo. After several conversations he quit Nubank and joined as the team as fourth founder.

Since November, 2020, we've been doing two things mainly:

1. Integrating with a local bank partner. Because we are the first ones in Colombia operating under a BaaS model, we had to design all the integration wit the bank and develop all the APIs for them from scratch. We already released the platform into production.
2. Running a closed pilot: we started issuing debit cards from our Mercury bank account, 're branding' the cards and distributing them in Colombia. Although we can't grow our current 50 customers user base, we've processed $150k per month, up from the $4k of the first month. We are soon starting to migrate the users from the pilot to our platform.