Financial services for merchants on your platform

Anderson Montañez joined R2 the year it was founded and has been building and occasionally breaking its engineering systems ever since. As Distinguished Software Engineer, he led many of the efforts that enabled R2 to process billions of transactions and provide financing to medium and small businesses across five Latin American markets, and lived through the ones that didn’t go as planned. In this piece, he explains why financial systems require a different engineering foundation than most software, what it actually takes to scale across five countries with almost no infrastructure in common, and why an engineer’s responsibility at R2 goes beyond writing code to understanding the problem, deciding what to build, and owning the outcome.

Most people who talk about credit risk in Latin America describe the problem. Roger Teran co-founded R2 to go after it. As co-founder and Chief Data Officer, he spent the last 6 years building the data systems behind one of the region's fastest-growing embedded lending platforms, from manually reviewing 6,000 merchants’ digital activity before a single AI model existed, to processing more than 10 billion transactions per month across five markets today. In this piece, he explains why the data that traditional lenders ignored turned out to be the most predictive signal available, what it actually costs to build a predictive credit model in a segment where no prior data exists, and what he's learned about small businesses in Latin America that you can't find in any financial statement.

Today we're launching R2 in Brazil, Latin America's largest economy. We're doing it with the support of Ant International, a global fintech company with expertise in payments and embedded finance, and we'll announce our first Brazilian partner soon.

We're expanding our partnership with Uber across Latin America. The Uber Earners financing program, which offers pre-approved credit to drivers and couriers directly through the Uber app, is now live in Mexico, Colombia, and Peru, extending embedded, platform-native financing to hundreds of thousands of people who earn through the platform.