La Frontera 🌵 Podcast, Episode 7 - The Muffin That Powers Fintech: Nico Yepes on Building LatAm’s Data Rails from the Ground Up

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.

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

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.