I had the opportunity to join Camilo Arango, Head of Expansion at Minka, and Gustavo Carriazo, Head of Business Development LatAm at Mo, for a discussion on one of the most consequential questions in regional finance: can open finance actually deliver on its promise of financial inclusion in Latin America?
The Case for Open Finance
My core argument: open finance — the structured sharing of financial data across institutions — is not just a regulatory requirement to comply with. It is infrastructure. When done right, it allows new entrants to build on the financial history that customers have already created with incumbents, making it possible to extend credit, payments, and investment products to people who were previously invisible to formal finance.
The model that works is one that is inclusive of traditional actors. Banks and cooperatives hold the deepest financial histories of most LATAM consumers. An open finance regime that only works for fintechs and ignores the incumbents misses the majority of the data — and the majority of the population.
The Real Obstacles
The honest accounting includes real challenges: limited technological infrastructure in many sub-regions, geographic dispersion that makes even digital distribution costly, and the recurring pattern of governments resisting change because the status quo is comfortable for entrenched players.
What breaks that inertia is a combination of regulatory clarity, international cooperation — particularly the role of multilateral organizations in funding infrastructure and de-risking first movers — and a genuine culture of data sharing that the industry itself has to model.
The full press coverage of our conversation was published by Más Finanzas, one of Peru's leading fintech publications.