Plata Card receives license as a bank and goes for savings and investment products

What products will you offer after obtaining a banking license?

Neri Tollardo, founder of Plata Card, said in an interview with Expansion that the company will now seek to strengthen the credit card business and allow it to provide savings and investment options. In this sense, it will launch an account with returns although with different conditions than those offered by Sofipos.

“We want to offer some performance rates, I don’t know if they are going to be promotional ones; There is a possibility of market disruption because banks cannot afford to offer these rates (offered by Sofipos),” he said in his offices located in Polanco.

In recent months, banks such as Ualá, Sofipos such as Nu, Finsus, Klar or Stori, and fintech companies such as Mercado Pago, have fought to attract clients by offering double-digit rates of return close to 15%.

Tollardo knows that although Banxico has reduced the reference rate, clients will look for alternatives to make their money grow. “People will naturally start looking for alternatives and you have to be there for the customer when they start looking for them,” he said.

For Tollardo, the banking licenses that companies are obtaining will benefit users because they will have access to cheaper and more competitive products with those offered by other players such as Sofipos and digital banks.

However, he considers that digital banks, dependent on large corporations, will not be able to compete with banks that are born 100% digital.

In the first stage, Silver’s bet will be focused on the credit card, the product with which it arrived in the country through a Public Investment Promotion Company (SAPI).

“There are many people who do not have bank accounts, who do not have access to formal credit, credit penetration in general is very low,” he said.

Plata is funded mostly by private funds, especially from the United States. “When a Tinkoff team came out it was quite easy to call several investors, remind them of the project and we raised a lot of capital.”

This is how Plata arrived in Mexico

Plata’s story begins in Russia, just before the war between Russia and Ukraine broke out.

“I am Italian, I have lived most of my life outside of Italy and I worked in London at Morgan Stanley for 8 years analyzing emerging markets and financial markets,” says Neri Tollardo. “Then I worked for a bank called Tinkoff, a Russian bank, the first digital bank in the world, a very successful bank that was listed on the London Stock Exchange.”

The founder of Plata assures that it was the Tinkoff model that served as inspiration for Nubank, the bank of Brazilian origin that David Vélez founded with Cristina Junqueira and that is in the process of requesting a banking license in Mexico.

“It’s no secret that David Vélez spent about two or three weeks in Moscow before starting Nubank in Brazil,” he added. “One of my projects at Tinkoff was international expansion, or analyzing international markets, that’s why I opened the world map and went to the Philippines, Indonesia, India, Brazil and at the beginning of 2022 to Mexico.”

On the trip he made for the Russian bank, Mexico looked like one of the countries with the greatest potential, but the outbreak of war between Russia and Ukraine at the end of February caused Tinkoff’s international expansion to stop and Neri Tollardo decided to leave. of the company to start his own business with the help of former collaborators and colleagues.

“I saw this opportunity and decided to return to Mexico in May 2022 with some colleagues who became my co-founders,” he said.