Mauricio Osorio was born in 1979 in Buenavista, a municipality of only eighty houses belonging to the municipality of Ocaña, Norte de Santander. Like many other residents of rural Colombia, he grew up in an environment where access to education, health and other services was limited. When he finished the fifth grade, he had to move to Ocaña to finish his secondary education and, later, to Bucaramanga, thanks to a loan from Icetex, to study industrial engineering at the Industrial University of Santander.
With his university diploma under his arm, and without having previously worked in a financial institution, Osorio discovered the world of microcredit. This caught his attention for a simple reason: it could be the basis for closing the country’s deep financial deficits, those he had experienced in Buenavista.
“I thought that microcredit would be an excellent opportunity in rural areas, where the supply of credit is insufficient. In many regions of the country, the closest thing to a legal loan is a cooperative, but you have to save first. From there was born the idea of serving this rural sector, which is much more diversified than we think. Not everyone is dedicated to agriculture: there are people who own hardware stores, bakeries or restaurants, who also need credit to start or develop their business,” he emphasizes.
With few resources, Osorio decided in 2006 to carry out a pilot project in Aguachica, Cesar, to see if it was possible to provide financial services to rural families who had never had access to formal credit. The experiment was a success. Credit applications exceeded expectations. This is how Crezcamos was born, designed to break the barriers of financial exclusion and open up opportunities where traditional banks did not reach.
In 2009, Osorio managed to convince the Luxembourg Rural Impulse Fund – an entity backed by the European Investment Bank and dedicated to financing microfinance institutions that provide services to low-income rural populations – to invest 4 billion pesos in Crezcamos. Three years later, he obtained that Desjardins Développement international and ASN Microkredietpool (a fund created by ASN Bank and Oxfam Novib) make an additional contribution of 12 billion pesos. These resources allowed him to quickly grow his business: between 2011 and 2013, the entity grew from 16 to 49 offices throughout Colombia. Towards the end of this period, Crezcamos had more than 66,000 clients and a portfolio of more than 124,000 million pesos.
In 2019, it took another decisive step: it obtained authorization to raise funds from the public, thus becoming an entity supervised by the Financial Superintendence. Its solidity has allowed it constant access to international investments. In 2020, Crezcamos received a $6.5 million injection from the MEF fund and Swedish bank SEB, aimed at increasing financial inclusion in Colombia. For all this management, Osorio received the EY™ Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2023 in the Social category.
Today, Crezcamos customers have a comprehensive product portfolio including savings accounts, loans and insurance. True to his innovative spirit, Osorio promoted unusual solutions in the Colombian financial system, designed to meet the specific needs of rural areas. Aware that the climate is one of the most unpredictable and determining factors in agricultural activity, he promoted the creation of climate insurance which protects producers against excessive rains or droughts. “When you’re working in the fields,” he explains, “the weather is the thing you can least control. »
Crezcamos has consolidated a significant territorial presence in the country, with 98 offices, 70% of which are in municipalities with less than 100,000 inhabitants. Throughout its almost 20 years of existence, the entity has granted more than 1,300,000 loans and supported more than 600,000 rural families. Currently, its coverage reaches almost 500 municipalities, making it one of the microfinance institutions with the greatest reach in rural areas of Colombia.
With the dream he had more than 20 years ago, when he was just a graduate, Osorio helped bridge the financial gap that separates the Colombian countryside from major urban centers. Thanks to Crezcamos, thousands of rural families today access financial services in places where banking was previously unthinkable. “When we open an office in a town where there has never been a bank, people feel that something is changing,” says Osorio. “They say: ‘The bank has finally arrived.’” We are in places like Río Viejo, Santa Rosa, Barranco de Loba, Astrea or Chivolo, municipalities where no one imagined a financial entity. This proximity empowers people and helps bridge gaps.
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