Using data to build markets with Kueski

What

Kueski is a Mexico-based payments and lending company featuring more than 1 million clients that’s extended over 7 million loans. Founded in 2012, the company started with Kueski Cash, a personal lending product, expanded to Kueski Pay, a BNPL solution, and now offers Kueski Up as its third product, which offers salary advances. The company raised $202M in equity and debt in 2021, with funding from StepStone Group, Victory Park Capital, One Prime Capital, Glisco, and others.

Why

Kueski operates with Mexico’s macroeconomic realities in mind. According to Krishna Venkatraman, Kueski’s Chief Data Officer, approximately 60% of Mexican consumers work in an informal economy without a bank account, and about 80% of them don't have a credit card. On the supply side, 80% of merchants don't have a POS, which means that 90% of retail transactions are happening with cash.

By allowing consumers to pay in cash through partner-store networks, the Kueski Pay BNPL solution lets unbanked and underbanked consumers access e-commerce. Kueski sees BNPL clients move over to Kueski Cash for more general loans, and, in the process, helps these consumers enter the formal banking system and receive credit at affordable rates. 

“Whether they're buying online or whether they're buying in a store, we want [consumers] to have the same ease of experience,” Venkatraman said. “Particularly for the Mexican economy, we want to make sure that we don't lose sight of the fact that in-store commerce is probably the place where most of our customers still spend most of their time, and we have to make sure that we're solving that problem as well.”

How

Kueski identified sites and habits that Mexican consumers were already frequenting and practicing. So, for example, consumers visited Oxxo convenience stores to recharge their phone balances, making the chain an ideal partner site for Kueski Pay. “The biggest challenge our customers have is this barrier between online commerce and the cash-based economy they’re working in,” Venkatraman noted. 

The more customers engage with Kueski’s products, the more data the fintech can collect about the consumer and their lending habits. Over time, this lets Kueski offer credit facilities and other financial products to their consumers on more favorable terms. “With our best customers, we’ve extended the amount they’re able to borrow, the tenure of the loan, as well as the interest,” Venkatraman said. “We are translating all of that knowledge to an exchange to say, ‘Given that we know so much about you and that you’ve been a customer for so long, here are all the benefits as a result.’” 

Kueski also eyes the merchant side of the equation to make for a more robust and inclusive e-commerce landscape in Mexico. It sees its textured user data across lending and BNPL as a way to not only build out its own products, but to help brick-and-mortar retailers determine what products they should sell online as well. “Finding the products consumers want to buy across all these merchants and enabling that type of transaction to happen with far less friction is a big opportunity for us,” Venkatraman said. “We see us building a marketplace that ties merchants and customers together and for their mutual benefit; we're already starting to see that type of dynamic start to take place within our ecosystem.”