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We're incredibly excited to announce that we have invested in the $14m Series Seed financing round in Oyster. The company is building a neobank that has developed its own core banking technology platform to solve key financial pain points for sole proprietors and SMBs in Latin America. The new funding will be used to accelerate Oyster’s growth in Mexico.
Oyster is co-founded and led by CEO Vilash Poovala, who co-founded Clip (formerly PayClip), a late-stage B2B electronic payments startup that’s on a fast track to become Mexico’s first unicorn. Despite Mexico being the world’s 11th largest economy and its 15th largest exporter, a vast majority of Mexican sole proprietors and small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are still unbanked or underbanked. Recently, new laws have been introduced to address the widespread lack of financial inclusion in Mexico, including Mexico’s landmark FinTech Law enacted in March 2018 that paved the way for open banking in Latin America this year and helped spur a surge in fintech startups after it passed. “We can open business banking accounts for all corporation types and do that for customers in 24-72 hours instead of waiting the typical 4-6 months, or even longer, to do so. And, with the current pandemic, who wants to spend hours in line at a physical bank instead of signing up with us online so quickly", says Poovala. In addition to fast access to setting up business accounts within three days, Oyster Financial provides debit cards for its customers, which can take more than a year or more to attain as a small business in Mexico. Its own high-quality customer support is available 24/7 and it does not charge customers a fee for bank transfers that typically cost 3-4 pesos each. “Latin America represents a huge growth opportunity for fintech entrepreneurs to introduce new technologies that traditional financial institutions in Mexico and beyond have not been able to keep pace with despite increasing demands for innovation,” said Marcelo Lima, partner at Monashees. “The Oyster team has a strong vision, deep tech expertise and quite a head start, as the only neobank for SMBs with its own robust BaaS platform, to deliver an outstanding experience for their customers within Mexico.”
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