Driving Financial Inclusion in Latin America: Our Series A in Flink

Consumers are demanding modern products and experiences across the entire spectrum of financial services. How we pay, how we get paid, how we manage our money, how and where we invest are all being reinvented and reimagined. At the core of this radical transformation is a push towards financial inclusivity, democratizing access which had been previously available to those with asymmetric information, prohibitively expensive, or locked behind legacy gatekeepers.

Accel has long believed in the inevitability of this secular shift and has partnered with founders to build this next generation of financial services: Venmo, Public, Braintree, Galileo, GoFundMe, and many more over the past decade. More recently, because of our global perspective and partnership, we have seen some of these same tailwinds begin to emerge outside of the United States.  We’ve committed heavily to this belief and begun investing in entrepreneurs and companies that are best positioned to capture this growing opportunity: Melio in Israel, Monzo in the UK, Lydia in France, Trade Republic in Germany, Xendit in Indonesia, among others.

‍

This is why, when we first met Sergio, Ricardo, and the team at Flink, we knew that they were onto something really special. Since launching their consumer trading platform just a few months ago, Flink has rocketed to the top of the local App Store charts, crossing over 1 million users with nearly half a million active traders — with almost all of that growth driven purely by worth of mouth. Prior to Flink, greater than 90% of the country didn’t have access to a brokerage account, with most legacy Mexican banks catering to a sliver of the population. It speaks to the significance of the Flink team’s vision that the vast majority of Flinkers are first-time participants in the stock market.

Anchoring this remarkable progress is Sergio’s unwavering belief that Mexico’s financial system should work for everyone, not just a select few — a mission that deeply resonates with us. Today, we are excited to announce that Accel is leading a series A investment in Flink, and joining their board of directors, in order to help them build a category defining company. We are once again co-investing alongside our friends at ALLVP, whom we’ve had the pleasure of working with previously on Cornershop. The future is bright for next generation financial services, and we can’t wait to see the journey unfold for Flink and its emerging community of Flinkers.