Nico Yepes - Co-Founder and COO, Moffin
Podcast Notes, Episode 7 - The Muffin That Powers Fintech: Nico Yepes on Building LatAm’s Data Rails from the Ground Up
La Frontera 🌵 Podcast, Episode 7 - The Muffin That Powers Fintech: Nico Yepes on Building LatAm’s Data Rails from the Ground Up
Nico Yepes
We met Nico Yepes during CDMX Tech Week serendipitously and re-connected via an intro from Accion Venture Lab. Sharp, knowledgeable, and fresh out of business school (but already sounding like he’s been running infra companies for a decade), Nico brings a rare mix of analytical depth and easy humor.
In this episode of La Frontera 🌵, he shares how he went from Wall Street and private equity to co-founding Moffin, a fintech infra startup based in Guadalajara that’s quietly powering the next generation of credit products in Mexico. His co-founders are engineers; Nico brings the investor lens, and together, they’ve built a platform that turns messy, fragmented data into real-time underwriting pipelines.
From startup branding with a muffin logo 🧁 to the realities of working with Mexican data providers, this one’s packed with insight, stories, and laughs.
Don’t miss it.
Episode 7 Summary
💳 From Wall Street to Guadalajara: How Nico Yepes transitioned from investment banking and private equity to co-founding Moffin, a startup making LatAm’s fragmented financial data usable for credit underwriting.
🧠 Building a Startup That Solves a Real Pain: Why most lenders in Mexico struggle to access reliable data, and how Moffin’s unified infrastructure solves the hidden engineering and compliance nightmare behind every credit product.
🔧 Engineering Credit Decisions in Hours, Not Months: How Moffin helps companies go from form to credit approval in seconds, including a car leasing client that replaced days of back-and-forth with instant decisions.
🌎 Infrastructure for LatAm’s Data-Driven Future: How Moffin fits into the broader story of LatAm’s improving data ecosystem, where APIs are finally becoming usable, but trust, coverage, and automation are still rare.
In Today's Newsletter
Moffin: Modern Credit Infrastructure for Latin America
Moffin is a data infrastructure platform helping fintechs, lenders, and retailers in Latin America access, unify, and use diverse data sources to make better credit decisions. In a region where data is often fragmented, undocumented, or expensive to integrate, Moffin offers an end-to-end solution that simplifies underwriting — from pulling credit reports and invoices to automating decision rules — so companies can launch credit products in days, not months.
Founded: 2022
Stage: Seed
Total Funding Raised: ~$2.2 million
Investors: Accion Venture Lab, Semillero VC, Rally Cap, and various angel investors.
Mission: To enable inclusive, data-powered financial services across LatAm by building the infrastructure layer that makes trust, credit, and automation accessible to everyone.
🧠 From Investment Banking to Impact Infrastructure
“I knew I wanted to do something entrepreneurial,” Nico told us. "But first, I needed to get hard skills."
Nico Yepes
Nico grew up in New Jersey and studied economics. He started on a traditional career path in finance — investment banking at Morgan Stanley, then growth equity at Creation Investments, where he focused on financial services in emerging markets. His interest in LatAm comes from his Colombian heritage along with various stints working and studying in the region.
It was at Creation that he started flying to Mexico City and São Paulo nearly every other week. And that’s where he noticed something interesting:
At Morgan Stanley, Nico worked with pristine public company data. But in LatAm growth equity, he was piecing together Excel models from family-owned lenders with no digital systems. That friction — messy data, legacy systems, and a total lack of scalable infrastructure — planted a seed.
🌱 Enter: Moffin.
🧑💻 The Founding Story (or: How a PE Guy Joined Two Engineers in a Guadalajara Café)
Nico didn’t actually start Moffin. Santiago Aceves and Víctor Díaz did — both software engineers based in Guadalajara. Santiago had led product at startups like SkydropX and Digitt, while Víctor was a self-taught engineer who started coding video games as a teenager.
They had worked together at a microlending startup where, like many before them, they burned half their seed round building core banking infrastructure from scratch.
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"It turns out, building a lending platform is extremely hard," Nico said. "They were spending months — and tens of thousands of dollars — just to get access to the credit bureau."
Nico Yepes
Nico met them during due diligence for an SME lender in Guadalajara. The firm didn’t acquire the company, but the connection stuck. When Santiago and Víctor lost their jobs after the deal fell through, they kept building. With early support from Jüsto founder Sergio Almaguer, they launched Moffin.
Still, it took a year and a half before Nico joined as co-founder; he brought the finance and business acumen to the table.
"I realized what they were doing was exactly what we needed across our portfolio. I saw it from the investor lens. They saw it from the fintech operator lens. And together, we could solve the problem from both sides."
Nico Yepes
⚙️ What Moffin Actually Does
Imagine you're launching a fintech in Mexico. You want to offer credit. That means you need:
Data from multiple sources (credit bureaus, tax authorities, judicial databases)
Legal agreements and API keys for each one
Engineers to integrate and normalize the data
A decision engine to approve or deny loans
Now imagine you’re a non-technical founder, or a midsize business without a dev team. You're stuck.
That’s where Moffin comes in. ⚡
Moffin offers an all-in-one data infrastructure layer. With Moffin, companies can:
✅ Access 10+ data sources via a single API or no-code forms ✅ Automate credit decisioning using customized rules ✅ Store and organize customer data in one place ✅ Add biometric verification, fraud detection, and even invoice-based cash flow scoring
One customer — a car leasing company in Guadalajara — used to take days to process a credit application. Now it takes seconds.
"Their agents submit a form, Moffin pulls the credit data instantly, and we notify them right away if a client is approved. It saves hours per loan."
Nico Yepes
🧬 The Infra That Powers It
Moffin integrates with both major Mexican credit bureaus, SAT (Mexico’s IRS equivalent), judicial records, blacklists, biometric databases, and more.
They even have an AI tool that checks for identity fraud by comparing a selfie's predicted age to the birthdate on an ID. 📸
For SME lending, they go deeper — pulling electronic invoicing data to assess seasonality, growth, and even sales concentration by product type.
All of this is piped through Moffin’s backend, then surfaced in simple dashboards or decisioning scripts.
Oh, and don’t worry if you don’t have engineers — Moffin’s team will write your rules for you. 🧑💼
"We want to make it easier to launch a fintech in LatAm. You shouldn’t need to raise a $10M Series A just to run credit checks."
Nico Yepes
📍 Why Guadalajara (and Why You Shouldn’t Move There 😉)
Nico now lives in the same apartment building as his co-founders in Guadalajara. Moffin doesn’t have an office — their HQ is a café circuit with strong Wi-Fi and good tacos.
Guadalajara earned its "Agave Valley" nickname in the pre-AMLO days, when the state poured money into tech subsidies. Startups like Kueski and Wizeline came out of that wave.
"The tech talent here is amazing, and the quality of life is unbeatable"
Nico Yepes
The city is also a university hub, producing thousands of engineers each year from places like Universidad de Guadalajara and ITESO. Oracle, HP, and other tech giants have dev centers there — but more and more talent is choosing startups.
Nico adds, “You can have face time with your co-founders, meet clients in person, and go hiking in the same afternoon. It’s the best kept secret in Mexico — and we’d like to keep it that way.”
We joked with Nico that he better be careful pitching Guadalajara, if the secret gets out, the demographic breakdown will start to look more like La Condesa (IYKYK).
Guadalajara, Jalisco, MX
🌐 The State of Data Infrastructure in Latin America
Latin America’s fintech ecosystem has made significant strides in recent years, yet the region still grapples with fragmented and outdated data systems. Many financial institutions rely on manual processes, disparate data sources, and legacy technologies, hindering efficient decision-making and scalability.
However, the tide is turning. Countries like Brazil and Mexico are leading the charge with open banking initiatives, fostering greater data interoperability and financial inclusion. Investments in digital infrastructure are also on the rise; for instance, Amazon Web Services announced a $4 billion investment in Chile to bolster cloud infrastructure, marking its third cloud region in Latin America after Brazil and Mexico.
In this evolving landscape, Moffin positions itself as a pivotal player by offering a unified platform that streamlines access to diverse data sources. By simplifying data integration and automating credit decision processes, Moffin empowers financial institutions to make informed decisions swiftly, thereby enhancing financial services across the region.
🚀 What’s Next: Moffin as a Trust Layer
Moffin’s vision isn’t just about credit. It’s about data.
Nico wants Moffin to become Latin America’s platform for organizing, orchestrating, and sharing trustworthy information. He imagines a world where anyone — a fintech, a startup, even a student — can:
Create or gather a valuable dataset
Upload it to Moffin
Allow others (banks, insurers, platforms) to subscribe to or use that data
Think: decentralized trust infrastructure for LatAm. 🔗
“Whether you're trying to offer a loan, rent an apartment, or hire a babysitter — it all starts with knowing who you're dealing with,” Nico says.
Moffin wants to be the layer that makes those interactions possible.
📢 Listen to the full episode here.
Follow Nico, because why wouldn’t you?
And check out Moffin to see if it’s something your team can benefit from.
Moffin: Valida el perfil crediticio de tus clientes en instantes
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