Banking as you never imagined

How do you disrupt the banking landscape in Latin America without building yet another digital bank? By throwing out the rulebook entirely and starting from a blank page.

Bancolombia, one of Colombia's leading financial institutions, made an early and courageous bet: that leapfrogging on financial inclusion meant reinventing themselves from the inside out, not iterating on what already existed. And here's where one of the most beautiful projects I've been lucky to be part of just started…

Framing the approach

• Re-learning finance through the eyes of a new generation: Rather than starting with assumptions, we did something counterintuitive: we moved in. For three months, a multidisciplinary team embedded itself at EAFIT — one of Medellín's most vibrant universities — living alongside students, observing their workarounds, their anxieties, and the informal financial hacks they'd invented just to get by. We set up a project room on campus, ran continuous testing cycles, and kept refining until something clicked: a high-potential concept, a credible business case, and a founding team worth betting on.

• Designing and building (not always in that order): We formed squads where designers, developers and product managers shed their job titles and their preconceptions. Together, they asked a harder question than "how do we build this?", they asked "what actually needs to be true to challenge the status quo?" The result was a product that stripped away the fine print, the binding penalties, and the bureaucratic friction that had always made banking feel hostile to first-time users.

• Testing the waters through real life piloting: Once we had a fully functional product, we recreated an entire ecosystem within the university where people could interact using natural and seamless interactions involving real money. It wasn't a pilot in the traditional sense; it was a proving ground where we could surface and resolve operational debt in conditions that closely mirrored the real world, until the product was genuinely ready.