AI is rapidly becoming a core part of how fintech companies build, operate and scale. This is also true for emerging markets. Across VEF’s portfolio in India, Brazil, Mexico and Pakistan, fintech companies are moving beyond experimentation and beginning to deploy AI in ways that are creating measurable impact. Our CIO Alexis Koumoudos shares where the technology could have the biggest impact going forward.
What are the most interesting ways VEF’s portfolio companies are applying AI today?
The strongest companies in our portfolio are not treating AI as a feature. They are rebuilding parts of the business around it. Creditas in Brazil is applying AI across sales, customer service and collections, while Konfío in Mexico is embedding AI throughout its operations, including through Kamila, its customer-facing AI assistant. Juspay in India has gone a step further and has done something only the very best engineering cultures can do, building an internal AI platform for its own organisation, moved most of its work onto it, and has now released it to the world as Xyne, an open-source enterprise AI platform.
Where are you seeing AI create measurable impact rather than just hype across VEF’s markets?
The clearest signal is when companies grow without adding costs at the same pace. Creditas grew lending volumes 29% year-on-year in the first quarter while operating with less than half its historical peak headcount, with productivity per employee and customer acquisition costs at record levels. That combination is only possible because AI and automation are absorbing work that used to require people.
Konfío is using AI to reduce fraud losses while scaling lending volumes, and Juspay processes + 300 million transactions per day, more than a trillion dollars of annualised payment volume, on a remarkably low cost base, growing revenue over 60% while remaining profitable. More broadly, we are seeing AI compress engineering cycles, automate back-office workflows and reduce the cost of serving customers, which is particularly important in emerging markets where financial inclusion has historically been constrained by economics.
Looking ahead, where do you think AI will have the biggest impact on fintech?
Three areas stand out: payments, credit and financial advice. AI-driven commerce will require new payments infrastructure as AI agents increasingly make purchases on behalf of consumers. AI also has the potential to expand access to credit for underserved consumers and small businesses, while making personalised financial advice available to the mass market for the first time. Combined with digital public infrastructure such as India’s UPI and Brazil’s Pix payment networks, these developments could significantly accelerate financial inclusion across emerging markets.
Some investors worry that AI is a threat to fintech rather than a tailwind. How do you see that risk?
We see AI as far more of a tailwind than a threat. Financial services are typically built around strict regulations, mission-critical workflows, proprietary data and trusted customer relationships, which all create structural moats that are hard to replicate. These are areas where incumbents have significant advantages. In our view, the companies best positioned to benefit from AI are often those that already own the customer, the data and the regulatory infrastructure.
And the strongest counter-evidence to the AI-threat narrative is sitting in our own portfolio: these companies are not being disrupted by AI businesses, they are becoming AI businesses, in one case literally shipping an AI platform of their own.