Colektia, a company that uses artificial intelligence focused on debt collection management, has concluded a round of financing combining equity and debt. This operation allowed them to acquire a portfolio with a total balance of USD$72 million, being the first of several that the company plans to acquire in the coming months.
Investment funds from Mexico, Europe, and the United States participated in this financing stage. This achievement will enable Colektia to progress towards its main goal: helping individuals resolve their debts and, simultaneously, collaborating with financial entities to improve efficiency in managing their delinquent portfolios.
Gabriel Monroy, CEO and co-founder of Colektia, highlighted that acquiring portfolios was one of the main projects to accomplish during the year’s first half. The recent purchase marks a significant milestone for the company as it represents a step towards fulfilling its mission of supporting indebted individuals, offering them a new opportunity to reintegrate into the financial system.
“In Latin America, millions of people in debt are listed in credit bureaus and hindered from accessing financing to achieve important goals such as buying a house, a car, or simply applying for a credit card.
“By acquiring these overdue portfolios, our goal is to help these individuals get out of their debt, rebuild their credit history, and in the medium term, enable them to obtain financing again to reach their objectives,” explained the CEO.
Colektia has been developing AI-based technology for the past five years to achieve these goals. This technology design enables Colektia to understand optimal strategies to help individuals regularize their debts through more effective, less invasive, and more human-centric management.
“Colektia demonstrates that it is possible to transform processes that have been a real setback for the sector for years, completely changing the negative image the industry has held for decades,” assures Gabriel Monroy.
Debt collection became an absolute nightmare for users, who were even threatened and intimidated using aggressive methods, some of which were employed by financial institutions to ensure payment.
Colektia was born and entered the market to completely change the idea that collection has to be aggressive because, as Monroy asserts, people who don’t meet their financial commitments do so due to forgetfulness or lack of payment capacity.
For this reason, artificial intelligence plays a fundamental role in the startup, as it can provide a better understanding of each individual and design a personalized strategy to offer payment solutions.
By January 2023, in Mexico, the overdue portfolio for credit cards, personal loans, payroll loans, acquisition of consumer goods, among others, reached MXN 34.065 billion, a 24.8% increase compared to the MXN 27.287 billion registered during the same month of 2022, according to information from Banco de México.
