The data is conclusive: in Colombia, 99% of companies registered in the Single Registry of Companies and Enterprises (Rues) are micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs). They generate 79% of the country’s employment, 53% of formal employment and contribute nearly 40% to GDP. Despite this, their access to formal credit is insufficient. A BBVA Research study indicates that “78% of medium-sized businesses have access to formal credit, 64% of small businesses and only 16% of micro-businesses, compared to 84% of large businesses.” In practice, this means that, in the case of microenterprises, financing comes mainly from personal savings, informal loans at usury rates or, simply, the inability to take on debt, which ultimately slows down their growth opportunities.
In this abysmal gap in financial inclusion and access to credit – similar in the rest of Latin America, since according to the CAF-Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean, one in three SMEs reports restrictions in access to credit – José Vélez (Bogotá, 47) saw a multi-million dollar business and an opportunity for MSMEs and microenterprises to have the opportunity to grow through access to products financial.
So, in 2018, Bold was born, a financial technology or financial and technological services platform whose main client is “this base of activity that the banking sector has neglected a little,” explains Vélez. The venture was risky, but with a clear commitment to the future. Today, Bold has almost 600,000 linked customers, 6% of everything processed with cards in Colombia already goes through its platform and, by December 2025, it plans to process almost 1.7 trillion pesos. It all started with making dataphones easier to access.
Boldness is not Vélez’s first big gamble. In fact, throughout his life, he was always one step ahead of his peers. As a teenager, while still in school, this Bogotá native born in 1978 already knew how to program, he gave lessons to university students, he sold computers and, at a time when very few people knew the subject, he designed web pages.
In 1997, he entered university to study economics and systems engineering in a double major, but decided to abandon the latter and focus on the former. He hadn’t yet graduated when in 2002, with a group of friends, he created Pagosonline.net, an online payment gateway. For its time, the venture was a risky and profoundly revolutionary bet: Internet penetration was minimal, people were wary of online commerce, few companies dared to offer this type of payment, and very few buyers used it for fear of fraud. Pagosonline was a success – and continues to be a success under the PayU name. We can say that Vélez and his partners are among the precursors of financial technology in Colombia.
In the early 2010s, Pagosonline sold a majority stake to Naspers Group, a South African online payments giant, which in 2012 acquired the entire company. From this transaction PayU Latam was born. Vélez worked there for another five years, until his retirement in 2018. This is where the Bold story begins. Around 2017, he and his wife, Ana Sandoval, Bold’s chief business officer and co-founder, traveled to Brazil to continue growing PayU; There, they closely observed the gap in access to financial services between MSMEs and large businesses, as well as the rapid growth of financial technology. From this analysis came the idea of creating a financial services platform for micro and small and medium-sized businesses: “It was very clear to us that there was a similar opportunity in Colombia and in 2019 we returned to Colombia to create Bold,” he says.
With savings from his work at PayU and capital from other investors, he began to realize his dream: building the one-stop shop (platform that offers a diverse range of services grouped in one place) for the largest MSMEs in the country. Vélez and Sandoval were joined by two other entrepreneurs, Sergio Vergara and Jorge Ulloa. With just 20 employees, Bold began offering payment services, installing dataphones in companies that previously considered the device unthinkable. Starting there made perfect sense. According to Vélez, the big card payment companies had left out MSMEs and micro-businesses, and getting one was a tedious task: “When we started, we did a study that showed it took SMEs a month to get a card machine. With Bold, the customer can get it within an hour.
From the beginning, Vélez saw Bold as a financial technology it went beyond payments. They entered this market due to the great need for access to dataphones, “but from the beginning we have always considered ourselves a financial company to support small entrepreneurs and SMEs. Dataphones have been the gateway to offer them other services, which over time have been consolidated”. Today, Bold offers digital accounts to businesses so they can manage the assets they enter through the platform.
He has also already ventured into credit. “It is very difficult for a bank to analyze the risk of a small business because the vast majority are informal and work with the identity of the owner; they do not create a formal business. It is very difficult for the bank to assess this client: they do not have an accountant or formal financial statements. We analyze the transactions of the dataphones, so we get to know them and we can offer them credit,” he explains. This transactional history shows whether the business is growing or declining, how many repeat customers it has, what volumes of money it moves, how many complaints it receives, and generally provides a clear picture of the business. Thanks to this data analysis, loans can be approved without paperwork and Bold has already granted almost 20,000 loans with a total value close to 100,000 million pesos. To support some of this business, the company also launched a CDT line.
After six years of constant expansion in Colombia, reaching around 1,300 employees (700 in the commercial area, 250 engineers and the rest in administrative positions) and consolidating in the main cities of the country, Bold begins to conquer the Latin American market. In September of this year, it landed in Peru by buying from Niubiz, leader of the payments ecosystem in this country, its VendeMás unit, responsible for managing payments for microentrepreneurs.
For Vélez, beyond the excellent business he has built in just over five years, his great satisfaction is seeing his clients grow: “What we are doing here is something very beautiful, because the financial and credit inclusion that we promote helps entrepreneurs grow exponentially and this has a very great social impact.
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