Minka

Private

Colombian real-time payment infrastructure provider whose shared ledger technology powers Transfiya, ACH Colombia's instant transfer network used by every major Colombian bank.

Bogotá, Colombia | Payment Infrastructure | Est. 2018 | Website

At a Glance

Strength

Powering Transfiya — the instant payment rails used by every major Colombian bank — means Minka is embedded in the country's financial infrastructure at a level that makes displacement extremely costly and disruptive.

Challenge

Infrastructure contracts with public-sector adjacent entities (ACH Colombia, central banks) involve long sales cycles, complex procurement processes, and revenue recognition timelines that make the business difficult to scale quickly.

Opportunity

LATAM central bank contracts represent the most significant growth opportunity: every country in the region is at some stage of developing real-time payment infrastructure, and Colombia's Transfiya deployment is the reference case that opens every door.

Building the Rails

Minka was founded in 2018 on a thesis that may be the most ambitious available in fintech: that the shared ledger infrastructure underlying real-time payments between financial institutions was ready to be rebuilt from first principles. The founders observed that existing interbank settlement systems — designed in the 1990s and early 2000s — were batch-based, slow, and architecturally incapable of supporting the instant payment experiences that consumers increasingly expected. Rather than build a consumer product on top of inadequate infrastructure, Minka chose to build the infrastructure itself.

Transfiya and ACH Colombia

Minka's defining achievement is providing the technology platform that powers Transfiya — ACH Colombia's instant payment service. Transfiya enables real-time, 24/7 transfers between any account at any participating Colombian bank, processed in seconds rather than hours. Every major Colombian financial institution is connected to Transfiya, which means Minka's ledger technology processes a significant and growing share of Colombia's interbank payment volume. For a company founded in 2018, the scale and centrality of this deployment is remarkable — and it was achieved not by competing in consumer markets, but by solving the infrastructure problem that consumer-facing fintech companies cannot solve for themselves.

The Shared Ledger Model

Minka's technical architecture is built around a shared, programmable ledger that financial institutions use as common infrastructure for settling transactions between themselves. The key design principles are real-time finality (transactions settle immediately, not at end of day), programmability (the ledger can be configured for different payment types and rules), and interoperability (any participant on the ledger can transact with any other participant regardless of their underlying technology stack). This architecture is more flexible and capable than the legacy ACH batch systems it replaces, and it provides a foundation for payment innovations — QR codes, request-to-pay, conditional payments — that batch systems cannot support.

Regional Expansion

Colombia's Transfiya deployment is Minka's proof of concept for a larger ambition: providing similar infrastructure to central banks and national payment system operators across Latin America. The region has multiple countries at various stages of developing real-time payment capabilities, and Minka's Colombia reference case gives it credibility in conversations with regulators and payment system operators that a startup without deployed infrastructure could not command. The expansion strategy is inherently slow — sovereign and quasi-sovereign contracts take years to negotiate and implement — but the potential deal sizes and contract durations justify the patience.

Strategic Value

Minka occupies a position in Colombia's payment ecosystem that combines extraordinary strategic value with relative obscurity to the general public. The company is invisible to the 17 million Nequi users who send instant transfers every day — they interact with Nequi, not with the rails underneath. But without Minka's infrastructure, those instant transfers would not exist in their current form. This invisibility is both a feature (it prevents competitive conflict with customers) and a risk (it makes the company's value hard to communicate to anyone outside the financial infrastructure community). For acquirers — whether strategic partners or financial investors — Minka represents one of the most interesting infrastructure assets in Colombian fintech.

Editorial Assessment

The Good, The Bad & Opportunities

The Good

Powering Transfiya — the instant payment rails used by every major Colombian bank — means Minka is embedded in the country's financial infrastructure at a level that makes displacement extremely costly and disruptive.
The B2B infrastructure model is strategically elegant: Minka does not compete with banks or fintechs for end consumers, making it a genuinely neutral provider that every market participant has an incentive to support.
LATAM central banks and payment system operators are actively looking for modern, real-time payment infrastructure — Minka's Colombia success is a credible reference case for similar deployments across the region.

The Challenge

Infrastructure contracts with public-sector adjacent entities (ACH Colombia, central banks) involve long sales cycles, complex procurement processes, and revenue recognition timelines that make the business difficult to scale quickly.
Minka's invisibility to end consumers — a feature of its infrastructure positioning — means it has no direct relationship with the users whose payment experiences it enables, limiting its ability to influence product direction.
The technology stack for real-time payment infrastructure is complex and requires significant ongoing investment in security, reliability, and scalability — a cost base that must be sustained regardless of revenue growth.
A single critical failure or security incident in Transfiya would have systemic consequences for Colombian banking — the reputational and contractual liability exposure for Minka would be disproportionate to its size as a company.
Central bank and national payment system contracts can be re-tendered; Minka's position is secure today but subject to the political and commercial dynamics of public procurement — a risk dimension that private B2B SaaS companies rarely face.

Opportunities

LATAM central bank contracts represent the most significant growth opportunity: every country in the region is at some stage of developing real-time payment infrastructure, and Colombia's Transfiya deployment is the reference case that opens every door.
Programmable money applications — conditional disbursements, government transfers with embedded spending restrictions, tokenized financial instruments — represent a frontier product category where Minka's shared ledger architecture is better suited than traditional core banking infrastructure.
Central Bank Digital Currency infrastructure is actively being explored by Banco de la Republica and peers across LATAM; Minka's experience building shared financial ledgers positions it as the most credible technical partner for pilot programs.
Cross-border instant payment corridors within LATAM — enabling real-time transfers between Colombian, Peruvian, and Mexican accounts at interbank rates — represent a product that only an infrastructure provider with multi-country banking relationships could build.

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