rogereur

6 ms·

1.
by rogereur 4y ago
"Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect."
2.
by rogereur 4y ago
You don't seem to understand fusion
3.
by rogereur 5y ago
Could this work as an alternative to Mighty?
4.
by rogereur 5y ago
I think wars in the future will be about who's better at computer science. It will be programmers vs programmers, and computer literacy will become the new military service and a national security interest
5.
by rogereur 5y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LWNY70Oj4A Recently heard this podcast with Lex Fridman and Carl Hart (author of Drug Use for Grown-Ups) and talk about this
6.
by rogereur 6y ago
Yes, exactly. It’s just like that but think as if SEARS had built the bank itself. It’s crazy but here literally two of the largest banks were created this way
7.
by rogereur 6y ago
Did you have any personal experience on this? We get this a lot, specially from investors, but so far have very manageable levels of loan losses with $1.5m already lent. We haven’t seen that even during COVID-19
8.
by rogereur 6y ago
In Mexico and other countries in LATAM, there are huge department stores that have built their own banks to give their customers credit to purchase on the store. Combined, these stores have ~20 million customers and are some of the largest
9.
by rogereur 6y ago
It is! And also the name comes from the Atrato river
10.
by rogereur 6y ago
We hope it will. At least we will try :) There are some specific things about Brazil that are materially different to our experience but will be exploring other countries
11.
by rogereur 6y ago
Yeah. Something we've discovered is that merchant fraud is more common with smaller businesses, so that's a challenge. There's also a natural concentration of merchants. Like Affirm drives 30% of their revenue just from Pelot
12.
by rogereur 6y ago
We do want to build for small businesses and merchants. We do actually have many of them, work with a lot of local bike dealers, auto shops, small electronics stores and they are happy they can offer financing to their customers. If they do
13.
by rogereur 6y ago
Theres a company called Heru. They do all kinds of services for gig workers. It is definitely an interesting data-set to underwrite, you can connect to the apps APIs and pull a lot of data of these people and potentially create better finan
14.
by rogereur 6y ago
Thanks! It is a historical regional problem and we've seen that installments in the region are pretty popular. The name comesfrom the Atrato River, which is a river that connects central america with south america and provides a safe w
15.
by rogereur 6y ago
Thanks! The name is two-sided, means "doing on a deal" on literal spanish and also comes from the Atrato River, which is a river that connects central america with south america and provides a safe way for travelers while passing
16.
by rogereur 6y ago
They are different but they do have their similarities, specially financial services and solutions and alternatives that people use to pay for large purchases.
17.
by rogereur 6y ago
Will be in many LATAM countries soon. Starting with Mexico now.
18.
by rogereur 6y ago
Thanks for the info. Those two options, at least in Mexico (second largest country in latam) don't exist. I presume that on those countries where they do exist aren't as popular as traditional payment methods. What countries do yo
19.
by rogereur 6y ago
Yeah. Atrasar is a bad word. It's like saying "be late". Our name comes from the Atrato River, which is a river that connects central america with south america and provides a safe way for travelers while passing through the
20.
by rogereur 6y ago
Yeah, the problem of credit cards it's all the confusing terms around payment dates, revolving balance, minimum payments. While this might sound trivial in countries with higher financial literacy. So with credit cards it is easy to ju
21.
by rogereur 6y ago
Banks are tremendously inefficient and have to support huge fixed costs for branches. Credit cards also offer a 1 month grace period without interest, so the effective yield they get is lower, thus they have to charge higher. The cost struc
22.
by rogereur 6y ago
Mexico right now. After we get product market fit here, we will go for other countries
23.
by rogereur 6y ago
Even if you are careful, I would argue that the cost with late fees (everyone forgets their payment at least by one day) + other fees will make it more expensive in the long run. Then try to cancel it and it will take you several calls and
24.
by rogereur 6y ago
There are some. Nubank just got here. Most of neobanks are doing debit or prepaid cards at this points. Rappi also just launched their credit card
25.
by rogereur 6y ago
There's a problem of access to credit, but also distrust for financial institutions. When we talk to users many don't even know that neobanks exist yet. A lot of users also don't like or don't understand credit cards be
26.
by rogereur 6y ago
Yes. It's an installment program.
27.
by rogereur 6y ago
We fund ourselves with credit lines from financial institutions and debt funds. They basically lend us money to lend it again. This is really hard since there's chicken and egg problem, you have to demonstrate you know what you do befo
28.
by rogereur 6y ago
www.atratopago.com :)
29.
by rogereur 6y ago
We're currently in Mexico! And yeah, here you can do that as well. The problem is that not a lot of people have a credit card (90.5% to be exact) and even if they have, they have enough credit limit and deal with the opacity, late fees
30.
Launch HN: Atrato (YC W21) – Credit Card Alternative for Latin America
52 points by rogereur 6y ago|64 comments

More ›