TOWERTECH AMERICAS

When people ask me, what do we do of how we label ourselves, I would first say that in TowerTech Americas –before anything else- we are technology enablers and disruptors. TowerTech is a fintech that develops solutions for the integration and interconnectivity of payments in different segments (financial entities, transactional service networks, neobanks, retailers, couriers, deliveries, service stations, transport and fintech, among others), that simplify the way how these companies, users and payment methods or disruptive players in this industry relate and work with each other.

The best way to innovate or improve products and services is to involve clients themselves in the construction of these elements: this is why our corporate strategy is aligned with generating digital transformation co-creating with our clients, seeking to articulate solutions from the implementation of transactional ecosystems through payment technology. Thus, we have found the way of generating giant leaps in the performance and capabilities of companies, allowing the business to think and do things it could not do before and accomplishing results in a more economic and intelligent manner.

Nowadays, it is clear that we are a fintech. It sounds odd to say that it is clear to us now, but this term was coined in Latin America and especially in Colombia, many years after than in Europe -where the movement was a trend long before in this part of the world-. While this was happening, many times we saw a door closed in front of us: it was not that easy for people to

Ximena Gonzalez - Lukkap Colombia, Juan Esteban Saldarriaga Ex President of the Directors Board Colombia FinTech, Mónica Ramírez Cofounder of TowerTech Americas.

believe in a different way of making things. They did not considered adequate for us to participate in certain businesses and we had to deal with the discomfort that our presence sometimes generated in traditional entities.

We are no longer the odd one out, even though sometimes we as Fintechs have to deal with market actors that are jealous. Even though our company is little over 15 years old, we truly have considered ourselves as FinTech some 7 years ago. The road to get to where we are now has not been easy nor quick. It is filled with stories and wonderful people that have crossed our path and also with very difficult times we have faced with extraordinary resilience. This allows me to state that certain entrepreneurs are like seeds: when someone try to bury us, we blossom and grow.

After working with many multinational companies that lead the field of electronic payments; going from those that were in charge of producing smart cards to those that created POS or point of sale terminals or as they are known in Colombia, datafonos; I was sure that there was something to be done to change things in the segment of present sale payments and that also allowed financial entities, transactional service networks, retailers, couriers and service stations among

Mónica Ramírez in the Silicon Valley Immersion Program organized by SV Links. Participants from Argentina, Colombia, Mexico and Peru.

others, to have solutions fit for addressing their needs that even in a single segment or category could be very different, due to the operations done in each area. The market was treating them all as equals, and the chances to differentiate between each other was slim. This had to change, and new technologies has to be applied to the financial activity.

I studied in the University of los Andes, but contrary to what a lot of people think I didn’t have the support of my family because since I was 22, I was the breadwinner of all my family. I started just with an idea but with an important technical background, a large number of contacts and an enormous capacity of service and dedication to my clients. I remember that I didn’t have enough bus fare money and sometimes I was booked to meet a client; with whom today we have great business relations and many new projects in development; on Calle 72 and Carrera 7. My house at the time was located beyond Avenida 19 and Calle 134: for those of you that aren’t familiar with distances in Bogotá, that’s over 80 blocks in between.

I would ask for the appointment to be at 9 a.m. (never before because I wouldn’t make it on time), get dressed and wear tennis shoes to get to my appointment on foot: my heels were

inside my bag. Sometimes I had to take POS samples, which added considerable weight to my journey. I think my clients will laugh when reading this, as they probably never knew how much it cost us to work with them. This will even be a surprise for some present and former collaborators of ours. When I made it to the corner, after three hours of walking, I took off my tennis shoes and put on my heels, longing for the cappuccino they always gave me because I hadn’t eaten anything all morning. And when the meeting ended, I had to walk three hours to go back home where I worked in the all-too presently popular home office. If anyone wonders about a meeting being cancelled without letting me know before, only when I had made all that journey, the answer is yes.

My sister Carolina sold her old Renault 21 and bought 20% of the company. She was my first

Mónica Ramírez, Santiago de Chile

investor and truth be told, she has been an unmatched companion of work and dedication, my best friend and my right hand. Our first client was an international one: Solidario Bank in Ecuador. We developed the project known as “La Chauchera”, an electronic wallet based on smart cards and POS. I was able to travel to Ecuador to develop the sales procedures and take the engineers that made all the development and

implementation process thanks to all the miles I had accumulated in the previous job I had working for a multinational company. I didn’t spend them, because it was my way of having a backup plan (even in kind) to begin with, because I didn’t have money to pay salaries and flights at the same time. I also needed laptops for the engineers during the trip, so I lent mine to one of them and another one was lent to me by Jorge Atallah, a great friend from university times.

I remember one December where we had a small budget for Christmas cards and some bottles of wine for our customers, but not enough for the shipping costs. My sister and I went out every Sunday from 6 a.m. around Bogotá on our bikes to deliver the cards and the gifts ourselves – never on a weekday, because my clients could notice. A lot of friends helped me to deliver these bottles in other cities (which were fewer) and delivering these presents themselves. Caro and I had great legs that time: I laugh thinking that we surely had an enviable physical state, but this was never comparable to our desire of making our dreams come true.

Once, when we went to Miami for a training session with one of my engineers (nowadays my dear friend, Ricardo Morales, now living in Holland), we had a very limited budget: we went around many hotels negotiating the rate trying to find a decent place that was adjusted to our needs and meagre capital. It was so low we contemplated sleeping in the car. We finally got the hotel.

When I look back and see that these are just some stories I lived through, and they really are a lot, I realized that these types of situations are very typical in ventures which is also paradoxical, because those who see it from the outside never imagine these things really happening.

I could tell even more anecdotes about what we as entrepreneurs face when we truly believe in the possibility of creating a country with our endeavors and of building a better world for our employees, clients and users. Being an entrepreneur is not for everyone. There are a lot of family sacrifices to be made: funnily enough, the biggest lesson I have is that the most important company is and always will be your family, and around it we must live and develop our ventures, and not the other way around. Sometimes, you will have collaborators that will not work with real commitment or that will criticize you and turn their backs on you, trying to make profits wrongly thinking that entrepreneurs always make lots of money and that they generate wealth at the expense of their work and sacrifice. There are others who truly value your efforts and some that even realize that fair and honest entrepreneurs like us will share benefits but not risks with our collaborators, and those people truly are ready to work hard. Sometimes, health will also remind us when all the burdens we bear don’t give us space to treat the body with the consideration it deserves, feeding it as it should be fed or giving it the hours of rest, it needs.

Starting a venture is not a fashion. Being an entrepreneur requires you to have a special talent to withstand a great deal of uncertainty and stress. We all know what happens when we truly make it -the so-called friends, success and happy faces all around-, but when we don’t, we will be labelled as losers. Some will think we deserve to lose, and others, like in soccer matches, will dare to comment how we should have played in order to win: they will know how, even if they’ve never even tried to play. At times like those, the network you have built for your moral support will be crucial. Then you will understand that being an entrepreneur is a path of personal growth. At first, you might think that success will come with money or recognition, but time teaches you -especially in difficult moments- to find a better version of yourself. And those people that ask you if you need help, or a loan or a helping hand to start all over will be your drive to get up and start all over. My drive has been some of my closest friends, the most loyal of my collaborators or even some of the largest and best-known companies in the country, who have decided to trust human talent and lent us a hand. I think we have responded in kind, a fair trade: to give everything back and respond to that trust given to us. My drive and my boost, Álvaro Motta and Alejandra, my daughter.

My recommendation for those who want to become entrepreneurs because they can’t stand the pressure of their jobs and think that

Edwin Zacipa, Ex - Executive Director of Colombia FinTech, presentation of the 8 most outstanding women in the FinTech industry in Colombia year 2.019

with their own business they will have less pressure, or because they believe that being an employee “robs” them of their time to do other stuff, because they imagine that having their own company averts the risk of being fired (I can give you a hint: that’s Disney, compared to the risks all entrepreneurs and company owners face every day), because they dream of becoming millionaires after a few years or because they want to ride the trendy wave that implies making a venture is a fashion, then better not to do it at all. There will be more pressure, less time, more risks, more responsibilities and more commitments; sometimes not even enough for your own salary and it definitely isn’t a trend or a fad.

A study made by Confecamaras shows that around 70% of all new ventures fails before the first five years. In spite of this; and that things today are not easier; there are at least more tools for whom are in this field for years, for those who are just starting and for those ready to dive in. From incubators and accelerators (public, private or corporate), equity or debt funds at all stages, innovation and entrepreneur centers in universities, government support and promotion organisms, networks of angels investors, corporate innovation centers; consulting brands specialized in innovation, entrepreneurship and intrapreneuship; specialized media/blogs/ podcasts, active communities and meetups, crowdfunding and marketplace platforms – all tools to facilitate the road and give a hand to any company today. To companies and entrepreneurs I recommend knowing how does the ecosystem work, at least in its most basic form, because then they are able to understand the essence of how businesses can be created without using money from the pocket of the entrepreneur, find courses for the development of required human talent and to generate the necessary synergies and networking to build, develop and monetize any initiative that has real value. It is important to receive support in order to make an idea something tangible.

To date, we have not looked for help from any of the previously mentioned entities, but without a doubt, accessing several of them in this escalation

Mónica Ramírez Cofounder and Chief Entrepreneur by TowerTech America

phase we are in now will save us a great deal of friction in a large part of the path we are crossing. The changes we have gone through the last few years have been great and the acceleration we have experienced because of this is even larger still: from radical changes in personnel structure and organizational culture to making important investments in order to change business processes, reconstruct the architecture of the payment platform we had already developed in a monolithic form and move everything to the cloud building a new platform based on loosely coupled pipelines.

One must remember that for some companies to move everything to the cloud means just to move all the infrastructure and not worry about hardware maintenance. What this really means is that they truly haven’t changed anything than just working in the cloud and therefore, this way of doing things is far from a true cloud native perspective we have started to adopt.

In order to become cloud natives, we work on being fault tolerant, to be able to extend the platform horizontally and write all the code so that it can profit from what the cloud provider offers, including test automation and an architecture based on serverless, Kubernetes, containers, functions and microservices, that allows us to be very agile in order to give our customers solutions tailored to their needs with high security standards. And I don’t mean just a security certification which we already have, such as PCI DSS but also security itself as a policy that is before anything. Today, we have the adequate tools to make constant developments and product updates, which today is known as continuous integration/continuous delivery.

We understood that, if necessary, we have to give a 180 degree turn to the company and to the resources it works with to become a company which is quick enough to learn and change constantly. Thus, we cannot imagine our operations now without the DevOps, the agile philosophy and an API-based interaction. Of course, we have to still use old protocols used by traditional actors in the industry, but this is

LatinPyme Magazine Cover, Issue No.176, March 2.020

precisely one of our strengths. We connect that world where there are services that do not respond to events nor activated with a “clicker” -how I call it- but rather must be executed permanently, where transactions are synchronic and not asynchronic, with the way of operating in the cloud destined to obtain agility, resilience and flexibility.

The difference and value of companies today lies in the speed of customer service, service integration, the interaction with all the digital ecosystem and in giving products and services that satisfy customers, detecting and understanding their demands. In order to know if our product truly satisfies their needs, we must collect data about them and truly understand how they use them. The methodology that is used nowadays for software products consists in implementing a minimum viable product (MVP) and update it based on a measurement of real performance.

Instead of allowing a design reaching the final level of production, DevOps creates the MVP as fast as possible so it can be quickly tested and redesigned. An MVP that cannot catch feedback completely loses its purpose. Gathering and interpreting data helps to improve the process, which is the main objective of the DevOps. Recognizing the importance of learning from the client of how does the product work, as well as the process, and how we can improve: this is the core element of our company.

Our main challenge is to become absolute allies to co-create digital transformation, related with payment methods and transactional needs that impact our clients, both in the physical sales point as well as the in the virtual one and/or their issued payment products. We work for this with our solutions, among which we have the transactional switch and our backend, which is able to integrate itself with most clients or third party services in order to implement a custommade platform, as well as our payment points mPOS with integrated dongles for card reading (with chip or contactless) and input of PIN, SPoC (Software PIN on COTS), CPoc (Contactless Payments on COTS), QR Code, OTP, token use, Blockchain and Biometrics, in different as a service modalities. We are thankful of having the opportunity to work during these years in Colombia with wonderful clients such as Exxon Mobil, ACH, Bancolombia, Citi Bank, Grupo Exito, Banco de Bogotá, Puntos Colombia, Davivienda, Metro of Medellín, Credibanco, GANA, Redeban Multicolor, Banco Caja Social, Coordinadora Mercantil and Puntored. Internationally, we have worked with companies such as Verifone (United States), Stratus (Banesco, Panama), Xazar (Mexico) and Banco Solidario (Ecuador), among many others. Thanks to them, and to the need of changing over time to become a better company in order to quickly respond to the current requirements of such a demanding market, is why we are the company we are today.

“This is for the fools”. That’s how Steve Jobs started an ad (created by the TWBA/Chiat/Day agency) for Apple in 1997 after he came back to the company, he had himself created and from which he was fired. The slogan “Think Different” was a stepping stone for a whole generation of people attracted by what was different, by the irrational, by a phrase that called to have a different mindset. This is why I want to close with Jobs’ words, that fit so well in the fintech world:

This is for the fools, for the misfits, the rebels, the instigators, those who don’t fit, those who see things differently, for those who don’t like rules and don’t respect the status quo.

You can quote them, you can agree with them, you can glorify or insult them, but the only sure thing you can’t do is ignore them.

Because they are the ones who change things, who move the human race forward.

While some see them as crazy people, we see their genius.

Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are those who actually do it.

monica.ramirez@towertechamericas.co

I want to thank everyone who has made this publication possible, starting with my wife, my daughter and my father who have been behind tirelessly supporting this initiative. To the entire design team at the head of Beatriz Osuna for her great work and dedication. To all Promograf’s human team under the leadership of Germán Izquierdo for their great collaboration and professionalism.

I thank the Bogotá Chamber of Commerce for their valuable support, to Portafolio, to the Colombia Fintech Association who did not take more than 10 seconds to endorse and put on the shirt in this project, to Erick Rincón, the members of the board and all its members, who took time to listen to me, teach me many things, share their experiences, their knowledge, their adventures, their dreams. To all the people who are part of these companies for their tireless work developing this ecosystem, which makes today Colombia a world reference, being in the first global positions and be a role model.

I thank with all my heart, the time, dedication and their valuable contributions: Andrés Albán, Ignacio Gaitán, Felipe Lega, Carolina Vélez, Pablo Gracia, Kenneth Mendiwelson and Laura Tovar, who contributed some wonderful and very illustrative articles, which enrich this work. To all the companies that shared their history, work, effort, tenacity, energy, sagacity, so that we can learn and know more of this wonderful ecosystem that is Fintech: Finsocial, Resuelve tu Deuda, Bankamoda, Rapicredit, Daviplata, Credíssimo, Transunión, Beriblock, Excelcredit, Olimpia IT, Omnilatam, Addi, ADL, Siigo, Towertech Americas, Referencia and Puntored, you are making a country and have made this book possible.

I thank you all for the infinite patience you have had with me. Thank you very much.