MejorCDT

Private

Colombia's leading CDT marketplace, allowing retail investors to compare and invest in fixed-term deposits from multiple regulated financial institutions through a single digital platform.

Bogotá, Colombia | Investment Platform | Est. 2016 | Website

At a Glance

Strength

The CDT is one of the most popular savings products in Colombia — tens of billions of pesos are invested in them annually — and MejorCDT created the first transparent, comparable marketplace for a product that banks previously priced in opacity.

Challenge

The platform's attractiveness is highly correlated with interest rate levels — in a low-rate environment, CDTs lose appeal relative to equities or digital bank savings accounts, directly reducing platform activity.

Opportunity

Expanding the marketplace to include investment funds, government bonds, and ETF access would serve the same financially engaged retail audience with products offering higher potential returns and a broader range of risk profiles.

The CDT Market

The certificado de depósito a término — CDT — is Colombia's most widely held formal savings instrument. Millions of Colombians invest in CDTs as a safe, regulated alternative to savings accounts, attracted by higher yields and the security of FOGAFIN insurance coverage up to COP 50 million. Historically, accessing the best CDT rates required either an existing relationship with a bank or the knowledge and time to call multiple institutions and compare their current offers. MejorCDT was built to eliminate that friction entirely.

The Marketplace Model

MejorCDT aggregates CDT offers from dozens of regulated Colombian banks, cooperatives, and financial institutions into a single comparison interface. A retail investor can see current rates, terms, minimum investment amounts, and institutional ratings side by side, invest digitally in minutes, and hold CDTs from multiple institutions within a single account view. The business model is classic marketplace: MejorCDT earns a distribution fee from the issuing institution for each CDT placed, while the depositor's money and insurance coverage remain entirely with the regulated institution.

Rate Discovery and Market Impact

Before MejorCDT, the CDT market operated with significant information asymmetry — banks knew the competitive rate environment better than depositors, and the friction of comparison gave institutions pricing power they would not have had in a transparent market. MejorCDT's platform changed this. Institutions that list on the platform must compete on rate and terms, and rates visible to depositors have consistently been higher than what those same institutions offer at their branch windows. The platform has arguably done more to improve CDT yields for Colombian retail savers than any regulatory intervention.

Regulatory Framework

MejorCDT's regulatory positioning is elegant: it operates as a technology intermediary, not as a financial institution. The CDTs it distributes are issued by and held at regulated entities. FOGAFIN coverage applies to the issuer, not to MejorCDT itself. This structure allows the platform to operate with a relatively light regulatory footprint while handling significant investment volumes. It also means that the platform's risks are concentrated in operational and reputational categories rather than credit or balance sheet exposure.

Path to a Broader Platform

MejorCDT's ambition extends beyond the CDT category. The platform has expanded into related fixed-income products and is well-positioned to become a broader digital wealth management platform for Colombian retail investors. However, this expansion requires building trust across more product categories, investing in advisory and education capabilities, and navigating a more complex regulatory landscape. The CDT business is an excellent foundation — a large, engaged customer base with demonstrated willingness to invest digitally — but the journey from CDT marketplace to full-service digital wealth platform is longer than the first phase of growth.

Editorial Assessment

The Good, The Bad & Opportunities

The Good

The CDT is one of the most popular savings products in Colombia — tens of billions of pesos are invested in them annually — and MejorCDT created the first transparent, comparable marketplace for a product that banks previously priced in opacity.
The marketplace model is capital-light and scalable: MejorCDT earns a referral fee without taking balance sheet risk, while depositors retain FOGAFIN insurance coverage since the CDT is issued by the regulated bank, not MejorCDT.
Rate comparison pressure benefits depositors systemically — MejorCDT's existence forces banks and cooperatives to compete on yield, raising returns for Colombian retail savers across the board.

The Challenge

The platform's attractiveness is highly correlated with interest rate levels — in a low-rate environment, CDTs lose appeal relative to equities or digital bank savings accounts, directly reducing platform activity.
MejorCDT is essentially a comparison and distribution layer; it does not own the customer relationship post-investment, and a bank that acquires a CDT customer through the platform can try to retain them directly at renewal.
The product scope is narrow — CDTs are a single asset class — and building a broader wealth platform requires significantly more regulatory licensing, technology investment, and user trust than the current model demands.
Colombia's cooperatives and smaller financial institutions, which offer the highest CDT rates on MejorCDT, also carry higher institutional risk — a default by a mid-sized cooperative would damage the platform's reputation even if FOGAFIN coverage limits the financial loss.
Larger banks have the ability to build their own comparison-adjacent tools or simply improve their own digital onboarding enough to make MejorCDT's convenience advantage disappear for the most attractive customer segments.

Opportunities

Expanding the marketplace to include investment funds, government bonds, and ETF access would serve the same financially engaged retail audience with products offering higher potential returns and a broader range of risk profiles.
A white-label CDT marketplace product licensed to smaller banks and cooperatives that lack digital distribution capabilities would expand reach without competing with those institutions — converting potential competitors into paying distribution partners.
Pension savings and complementary retirement products represent the natural next step for a platform already trusted by Colombians for conservative, regulated savings — the trust transfer to retirement products is lower-friction than almost any other category expansion.
A financial advisory layer — automated or human-hybrid — built on top of the comparison interface would move MejorCDT from transactional to relational, increasing lifetime value and creating a managed-portfolio revenue stream from users currently captured only at the point of investment.

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