When a person pays with a credit or debit card, they tend to believe that the money is going directly from their pocket to the store where they made the purchase, but the reality is different. Money travels through an invisible toll road: issuing and acquiring banks, card brands, processors; between six and twelve intermediaries take a share. So, if the user pays 100 pesos, the commercial or sales platform can receive between 95 and 93 pesos. The remainder remains at these checkpoints, a percentage that may seem insignificant, but which translates into a figure of several million dollars.
This rule, which has prevailed for more than 50 years, is so solid that, even though many companies considered this discount – or commission – high, they resigned themselves because they believed or still believe that this is the only way to manage payments. Alejandro Pinzón, business administrator, and Simón Pinilla, chemical engineer, became aware of this problem, which the world of banking and card and online payments ended up bringing together.
Pinzón had significant experience in the development of technological products: he had created digital products for large companies such as Casa Editorial El Tiempo, El Dorado Airport or Denver Airport, and had developed projects for Coca-Cola and the Olympic Games. Pinilla, for his part, after graduating, decided that neither laboratories nor pharmaceuticals were for him and he tried his luck in investment banking. He then dedicated himself to the consolidation of technology companies such as Uber Eats and Tembici, of which he served as general manager in Colombia. Likewise, he participated in the arrival in the country of SumUp, a European company that opened operations in Bogotá to offer dataphones to small businesses and facilitate their payments.
There, Pinilla gave Pinzón a job interview for a position at the fledgling company. From that moment on, they struck up a friendship which, over time, cemented itself into a partnership. During their business travels and their professional experience, they realized the difficulty that these “tolls” represented for commerce. What surprised them most was that almost no one was looking for a solution. “I think many people saw the problem, but few dared to do something, especially if we know that behind this business there are multinational companies and banks”, Pinzon said.
Pinilla explains: “There are two types of problems. Those that are relatively easy to identify, and there are thousands of people figuring out how to solve them, and those that seem so difficult to solve that no one is up to the task. I think we come to play in that second group. It’s such a big and difficult problem that very few companies or people are measured to solve it.”
Toward the end of 2021, they said, “Hey, let’s come together, let’s solve the big problems.” This is how Druo was born, a technology platform that eliminates intermediaries and allows direct payment between companies and international bank accounts. It reduces the cost of the transaction to a commission of 0.5% of the operation, the percentage charged by Druo, with an additional advantage: its development increases the protection against fraud up to 25 times and also extends the coverage of users, from those who have a credit card, to those who have bank accounts or digital wallets. Pinzón, 35, was in charge of product development and Pinilla, 32, was responsible for managing finances and growing the company.
The product offered is two-way: they have large commercial customers, but anyone who wants to pay for their purchases through Druo only needs to go to the page and register their bank account. The advantage of the service, according to its creators, is that its development offers security mechanisms based on encryption and real-time monitoring, in addition to not revealing the user’s information to the merchant.
The two businessmen also took into account that solutions to major problems cannot be local, but rather global. When they created Druo, they didn’t do it just to solve the payment problems of the Colombian commercial and financial system. “Our experiences building payment systems around the world have shown us that this problem is global,” says Pinzón. “So the solution had to be too. We never thought ‘let’s try our luck in Colombia first and see how it goes’, but instead we created a solution that could be sold worldwide.” Thanks to this philosophy, between December 2021 and the end of 2025 the company established itself, in addition to Colombia, in Mexico, Peru and the United States.
According to the EFE Agency service specializing in communication services for businesses and institutions (EFE Comunica), “Druo is already the preferred payment method for almost a million end users (…) Its network makes it possible to directly debit more than a billion bank accounts in around 10,000 financial institutions. As of September, Druo reached approximately $294 million in total transaction volume processed since its launch in 2022, including $57.8 million in the third quarter of 2025 alone, representing an annual growth of 188%.
These figures allowed Druo to announce the closing of a seed investment round led by Global PayTech Ventures (GPT), a venture capital fund focused on innovative payment solutions led by Javier Pérez, former president of Mastercard in Europe and Latin America. With these resources, the company is preparing to expand to more than 30 countries in 2026. “Our goal is to reach the majority of G20 countries, the largest economies in the world, and we find that we really have no obstacles in fulfilling this mission,” Pinilla says proudly.
With Druo, these entrepreneurs have shown that Colombians are also here to solve global problems, and that it is not necessary to try your luck in the country and then go abroad, but that from the start, you can dream big. “Our vision is 100% global and that is what we aim for: to demonstrate that Colombians can build a global business and change a system that has lasted for many years without real or structural change,” concludes Pinzón.
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