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Credit decisioning: how AI is changing financial services in Colombia
uFlow · May 11, 2022 · 2 min read
See how AI is transforming credit decisioning in Colombia, and how uFlow works with the fintech Juancho Te Presta.
In step with digital transformation, financial institutions are adopting some form of AI technology for credit decisioning, improving business performance and achieving cost efficiency through automation.
In Colombia, more than 32.7 million adults hold at least one savings or credit product: 89 out of every 100 Colombians were part of the financial system, according to Banca de las Oportunidades. Fintechs put technology to work transforming traditional financial products and services, reaching segments that had been historically underserved.
Smarter decisioning with the uFlow Decision Engine
uFlow arrived in late 2020: a company that built a 100% cloud credit decision engine, letting risk and credit teams improve their operations without depending on IT to change rules or models.
It was founded more than four years ago by two Argentine entrepreneurs, Mariano Sokal and Santiago Etchegoyen, who saw an opportunity in decisioning processes that ran manually or on rules built by IT and took months to update.
uFlow implemented AI and AWS Lambda (becoming an Amazon cloud success story) so teams can adapt their models on their own, through an intuitive graphical editor.
"uFlow was created so that risk and credit teams can self-manage their lending policies and improve their operations without depending on IT" — Mariano Sokal, Founder and Managing Director.
The company expanded into Colombia, Argentina, Peru, Chile and Panama. By the close of 2021 it had grown transaction volume by 149% (from 2.4 million to more than 6 million), with 12 million projected for 2022. Its engine takes only 0.1 seconds to analyze each user's data and resolve each transaction.
Success story: uFlow and Juancho Te Presta
One of the first clients in the country is the Colombian fintech Juancho Te Presta, which grants loans of up to five million pesos over terms from 12 to 24 months in just 10 minutes. In 2021 it disbursed more than COP 20 billion across some 7,155 loans (217% growth versus 2020) and cut response waiting time by more than 80%.
"With uFlow we integrate more easily with different systems for decisioning, we optimized the parameters across every risk origination policy, we made changes in real time and we were able to deploy machine learning models" — Sergio Arboleda, head of risk and analytics at Juancho Te Presta.