Most small businesses don’t fail because the founders are lazy or the ideas are bad. They fail because money moves at the wrong speed. Imagine running a perfectly healthy business, customers want what you sell, employees show up every day, orders keep coming in. Then a large client tells you, “We’ll pay you in 60 or 90 days.” Your employees, your rent, and your suppliers, they still want to get paid this month. That timing mismatch is where growth quietly dies. This is the world Nicolás Villa knows well. Before becoming CEO of Platam, he lived it as a founder. His first company waited years for something as basic as a corporate credit card. Banks looked at his personal credit and shrugged at the company’s, even though the business itself was healthier on paper. That contradiction became the seed of Platam. The credit paradox no one talks about Zoom out and you see a strange picture across Latin America. On one side, institutional capital is piling up, funds actively looking for places to deploy money. On the other, small and mid-sized businesses are starved of working capital. Not because they’re reckless, but because the system was never built for them. Traditional banks aren’t evil here, they’re just structurally broken for this problem. The cost of underwriting, servicing, and recovering small loans often exceeds the value of the loan itself. So banks do the rational thing, they move upmarket and leave everyone else behind. The result is a massive financing gap and millions of companies stuck in survival mode, not because demand is missing, but because cash flow is. Why embedded finance changes the game Platam’s insight is simple and quietly radical. Don’t sell credit to small businesses. Embed it directly into the places where they already work. Instead of asking an MSME to apply for a loan, Platam integrates financing into supply chains and buyer networks. When a business uploads an invoice or places an order with a supplier, the option to access working capital is already there. No new dashboard. No cold outreach. No pretending financial statements tell the whole story. Credit stops being a product and starts becoming infrastructure. This shift does two powerful things at once. It lowers customer acquisition costs to near zero, and it replaces unreliable self-reported data with real transactional behavior. Who you buy from, who buys from you, how often, and at what scale, tells a far more honest story than a spreadsheet designed to minimize taxes. The hardest decision isn’t yes or no One of the most counterintuitive lessons Nicolás shares is that lending decisions aren’t binary. The real risk isn’t deciding whether to lend, it’s deciding how much. Give too little, and the credit gets misused or doesn’t move the needle. Give too much, and you amplify risk faster than the business can absorb it. SMEs aren’t static entities, they fluctuate with seasons, contracts, and demand spikes. A great December can be followed by a brutal January. Platam’s systems are built to move with that reality, constantly adjusting credit lines as businesses change, not freezing them in time like traditional lenders do. Growth can lie to you There’s a moment in nearly every startup’s life when growth feels like validation. Platam hit that moment too, and paid for it later. Pushing volume without respecting credit discipline led to pain downstream. Defaults don’t show up immediately, they arrive months later, quietly undoing today’s good news. The lesson was clear, revenue without risk control is just deferred regret. That scar now shapes how the company scales, with partnerships, data, and patience doing more work than brute-force expansion. Building bridges, not chasing hype What Platam is really building isn’t just a lending business. It’s a bridge between idle capital and real economic activity. One side speaks the language of institutional investors. The other speaks in invoices, inventory, and payroll. The magic happens in the middle. And once you build a bridge, something interesting happens. You realize you can sell pieces of it. Credit scoring systems, onboarding flows, compliance tools, all of it becomes reusable infrastructure for markets that look very different on the surface but share the same underlying problem. Latin America is just the starting point. The quiet revolution Fintech headlines love consumer apps and flashy interfaces. Platam is doing something less visible and far more important. It’s changing how money moves for businesses that never get podcasts, press releases, or venture hype. Nicolás started as a founder waiting to get paid. Now he’s making sure others don’t have to. Sometimes the biggest innovations don’t create new behavior. They remove the friction that never should’ve been there in the first place. 👂🎧 Watch, listen, and follow on your favorite platform: https://tr.ee/S2ayrbx_fL 🙏 Join the conversation on your favorite social network: https://linktr.ee/theignitepodcast Chapters: 00:01 – Why Small Businesses Fail 02:10 – Founder Origin Story 04:30 – Experiencing the SME Credit Gap 07:00 – The Idea Behind Platam 09:20 – What Platam Does 12:00 – Supply Chain Finance Explained 15:10 – The Latin America Credit Paradox 18:30 – Why Banks Can’t Serve SMEs 21:40 – Embedded Finance and Risk 25:10 – Credit Size vs Credit Approval 28:20 – Lessons from Chasing Growth 31:30 – Partnerships as Distribution 34:20 – The Future of Platam 37:30 – Closing Reflections Transcript Brian Bell (00:01:02): Hey, everyone, welcome back to the Ignite podcast. Today, we’re thrilled to have Nicholas Villa on the mic. He’s the CEO of Platam, a Colombian fintech rethinking how SMEs access credit and a serial entrepreneur who spent years building innovation infrastructure across Latin America. Nicolás Villa (00:01:17): Thanks for coming on, Nicholas. Thanks for having me here. It’s my first podcast in English, so yeah, it’s going to be hard. You need to give me some time to lose my tongue, but I’m happy to be here and it’s going to be a great time. Great to catch up. Brian Bell (00:01:30): So I’d love to start with your origin story. What’s your background? Nicolás Villa (00:01:33): So my background, been into entrepreneurship for about six to seven years. I started my first company when I was 27. I actually started it as a consulting company in innovation and transformation for big organizations. That was really good venture. It wasn’t a big company, but we had an acqui-hire because we built a company, we built a platform for open innovation around Latin America. And I got to work as a consultant in Open Innovation for the biggest companies in Latin America, like Huawei, Kizer, Inditex. So that was a great experience. After the act we hired, I lived in Mexico for a while. Coming back to Colombia, my co-founder had been, I think, like proving the concept of Platam for about one year and a half, getting money and getting the money back. That was something very important for him, obviously, as a financial expert. He said, okay, we need someone to go to the company. Let’s bring Nicolas. We’ll meet each other by chance. That was how I got into the company. When I started the company, he didn’t have sales team. There were like three people organically selling. They were actually growing. That was a surprise. The first time I saw it, it was something very surprising against Constance. Because you actually push consultancy services on the company, right? Like you really need to sell those. And something like a credit is the other way around. The company is selling themselves for you to give them credit. So that was one of the biggest prizes when I arrived to the company and happy problems that I had is like, there is a lot of demand for this product. Something that I didn’t have in my previous companies. Brian Bell (00:03:18): Yeah, what was the aha moment for you when you realized that SMEs, small to medium enterprises in Latin America, were massively underserved by traditional finance? Nicolás Villa (00:03:27): Well, I have lived this as an SMC. This wasn’t my first company. I also found a company in Mexico. And obviously, the first thing that a young entrepreneur says when they are looking to get some funds is, okay, I’m going to venture capital. And then you say, okay, am I building a venture-backed company or not? If you’re building a venture scalable business. Is it scalable for venture capital or not? If it is not, then your doors are closed, mostly closed to raise capital as debt or credit or even investment. So I leave that. For example, I always say my first company, I had my first credit card for the company like three years after it started. And it was a loan application for a credit card. And they gave me like $2,000 credit line. And my personal credit, like my personal credit, like it was like 10 times that. And I was like, it’s impossible. Like if you look at my numbers as Nicholas Villa and the numbers of the company, the numbers of the company are much better and it wasn’t attractive for tax. So I lived that. I lived how companies were going to pay me, like big companies were going to pay me 60 days, 90 days after. And I needed to pay my employees at the end of the month. So when I arrived and I met Rodrigo building this, I was like, this is genius. I wish I knew a solution like this one before because that was a real pain. I couldn’t grow. And of course, when I started thinking about being the CEO of this company, I started my research and I knew building companies, of course, was difficult. And I knew from before data that was pretty impressive and it’s like only 30% of companies in Colombia survive after five years. And that was sad, of course, but then I knew investigating about this huge problem is like 92% of companies don’t grow. So if you are building an e
