We are experiencing an unprecedented moment in the history of our company. Our team’s passion for innovation, commitment to excellence, and tireless dedication have guided us on an extraordinary journey of growth and success. It is with immense pride that we share another significant milestone in our history: Forbes, one of the most prestigious and influential media in the business world, has recognized us as a promising company.
This recognition is not only a testament to our hard work, but also a clear sign of the transformative impact we are having on the sector. The story highlighted by Forbes portrays the journey of our CEO, Julian Colombo, who, after two decades of working in the financial sector, left a traditional market to found N5 and transformed the company into a success story.
We invite you to join us in this celebration by exploring the full article below and discovering the details of our story. This is just the beginning of our journey, and we look forward to continuing to redefine the future of the financial sector together.
After having worked for more than twenty years at Banco Santander, Julián Colombo decided to found N5, a financial institution that allows its clients to achieve four objectives: increase their revenues, extend the duration of their customers, mitigate risks and reduce costs. What the company is all about from one of the most recent Forbes Promises.
04 April 2024 11.44
The idea of creating a platform to transform the operation of the financial industry was germinating in Julián Colombo’s head for decades. Colombo worked for 20 years at Banco Santander, starting in a branch in the City of Buenos Aires and ending up as part of the Commercial Management Committee in Madrid.
“Along the way, I held executive positions in five countries and was responsible for projects in 10 others,” says the founder and current CEO of N5, a systemic platform for banks, insurance companies and fintechs that comes to solve a problem that Colombo dealt with for years: the coordination of systems.
“Although a bank with 300 branches in Poland was very different from a bank with 5,000 branches in Brazil or one without branches in Portugal, they all seemed to suffer from the same problem, something we call technological entropy, which is basically the tendency of systems to become disordered,” says Colombo, who adds that banks can have thousands of active softwares. each with different logics, with different languages and incompatible architectures. “This is why innovating in a traditional bank is equivalent to changing the wings of an airplane in mid-flight,” he exemplifies.
In 2017, Colombio found the solution and decided to leave Santander with the certainty that what he had was an answer to this dilemma. Today, N5 is a financial institution that in 2023 had a turnover of US$ 20 million and closed an investment round with which it attracted partners such as Illuminate Financial, which counts among its LPs firms such as Citibank, JP Morgan or S&P Global, among others, including the family offices of the best entrepreneurs in the region.
N5 enables its clients to achieve four goals: increase their revenue, extend their customers’ lifetime, mitigate risks, and reduce costs. Colombo explains that they achieve these results through five solutions: one for customers, one for employees, one for calling products and services, one for call channels, and one for data.
“The interesting thing about this platform is that it is made to coexist with the legacy systems of banks and insurers, dramatically simplifying their complexity and allowing them to innovate. For example, in five minutes, a bank could publish a different offer for each user in its app, change the incentive system for its salespeople, develop a complaints flow, and connect customer responses to a machine learning engine,” says Colombo.
N5 has more than 60 clients, including banks, insurance companies and fintechs that pay licenses for the use of the platform, in addition to its professional services. Some of the most emblematic are Santander, Mastercard, Zurich, N26, BCP, Credicorp Bank, Sudameris, Atlas and Sura.
They are currently opening new units in Peru, Chile, Colombia and Mexico, in addition to those in Argentina, Brazil, the United States, Paraguay, Panama and Spain. “One of the most significant facts of the last quarter is that waiting lists began to be generated in some geographies. Companies that contact us spontaneously even when we don’t have a presence, which will force us to accelerate expansion plans,” says Colombo, for whom the history of N5, in addition to being a concatenation of results, is a “concatenation of miracles”.
“The first unthinkable situation was to leave a bank to which I had a very strong professional and emotional bond. Neither my family nor my colleagues believed I was going to leave when I announced it,” she says. Secondly, Colombo adds that he resigned in Madrid on a Thursday, founded the company in New York on a Friday and by the following Monday had already won his first client in Panama, with an agreement with Max Harari himself, of Credicorp Bank, his first client: “I assured him that this platform would change the history of the industry, that we would have the most important clients in the world and that they would write for us in Forbes,” he jokes and assures: “Harari shook my hand in agreement. I’ve already been to Panama 19 times in six years and I’m going to be their account executive forever.”
Facts to highlight
- YEAR FOUNDED: 2017
- INITIAL INVESTMENT: US$ 100
- TURNOVER 2023: US$ 20 MILLION
- TURNOVER 2024 (P): US$ 56 MILLION
