This entrepreneur is transforming his professional capital into a springboard to financial inclusion

Most entrepreneurs dream of tapping into the kind of capital, industry connections and sophisticated software that Martin Naor has at his fingertips.

The Uruguayan entrepreneur has certainly benefitted from a full career that took him from managing products and businesses for Microsoft to sitting on company boards, investing in startups and running the Montevideo-based tech firm Infocorp.

Yet launching a new business is always a twisty road, and Naor had his share of unforeseen curves when he started his fintech Bankingly a decade ago.

Bankingly was born from a flash insight. Naor noticed that while major banks were proactively building tech solutions to drive their digital transformation, smaller institutions were struggling to migrate online.

He also understood how transformative digital banking could be for people living Latin America, where one in five adults are still unbanked and many of those who are still spend hours travelling to their bank branch.

So he created a venture to provide smaller banks and credit unions from Argentina to Mexico — and more recently, Kenya and Nigeria — with the software they need to offer digital banking services.

“Everybody wants to sell to the big boys,” says Naor, 53. “We decided the big blue ocean of opportunity was on small and medium-sized financial institutions in emerging markets.”

Rather than start from scratch, he launched Bankingly as a Infocorp spin-off so he could piggyback off the company’s products and experiences and reach the market quickly with a segment-friendly offering of low start-up costs and per-usage charges. 

What he did not foresee was the hesitancy. Back in 2015, many of the smaller banks Naor approached saw little reason to start offering online banking to their customers. They preferred relying solely on tried-and-tested traditional branch banking.

“They were less anxious to digitalize than we expected. My naïve starting point was that if I put an affordable, scalable solution in front of them, they’ll jump at it,” he admits.

He quickly realized he needed to tweak Bankingly’s business model and spend its capital wisely so he could take the time to show banks and credit unions the benefits of digitalization, plus convince regulators its cloud-based systems were secure.

Despite the slow start, financial institutions who started using Bankingly’s apps and platforms soon saw their customers were more likely to deposit their salaries, build up savings and increase their card transactions.

Ten years down the road, Bankingly has 120 clients in 20 countries who use its cloud-based solutions to provide some 4 million customers with digital services from onboarding to payment transactions and loan applications.

More importantly, by giving millions of people across Latin America and in Africa access to accounts from their smartphones, Bankingly is playing a role in significantly helping boost financial inclusion in the region. A 2023 Mastercard survey on financial inclusion in Latin America showed that 79% of adults had a bank account in 2023, as opposed to 52% in a report from 2014.

But just 40% of people outside of major cities and 59% of people from low-income households held bank accounts, according to the same study, so more still needs to be done to broaden access to those who have traditionally been excluded.

For Bankingly, joining Mastercard Start Path, the company’s award-winning startup engagement program, in October will help speed up emerging market digitalization and offers a chance to potentially acquire new clients who can reach those unbanked people, including the ability to offer credit cards to their customers for the first time.

Motivated by the opportunity to open up financial services for more underserved communities and small businesses, Naor hopes Bankingly’s growth will mean more than 5 million people are using its software within two years.

As he firmly believes, “Digital financial services can really change lives.”