8 Countries, 14 Years in Fintech: What I’ve Learned

I grew up in Buenos Aires. I now live in Cork, Ireland. Between those two points, I have built and led teams in Spain, Germany, Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Luxembourg, and Finland. Fourteen years, eight countries, and one thread that runs through all of it: the people who figure out distribution win. The people who build beautiful products and wait for customers to show up, lose.

Buenos Aires to Hamburg: The First Jump

Argentina teaches you resourcefulness. When your currency devalues 40% in a year and the government changes the rules every quarter, you learn to operate in chaos. That training turned out to be the best preparation possible for joining a Peter Thiel-backed fintech in Hamburg that was trying to be in 15 countries simultaneously.

I joined Kreditech at 45 employees. By the time I left four years later, it had 500+. My first role was Managing Director of Spain, where I built a team, launched a market, and negotiated Europe's first PayPal Credit integration. The lesson from Spain was not about PayPal. It was about the compounding value of partnerships versus the linear grind of paid acquisition.

Latin America: Managing Chaos at Scale

From Spain, I was promoted to Regional Manager for Latin America. Five markets. Seventy-five people. A EUR 22M revenue target. I hit 135%.

Running LATAM from within LATAM (I was based between Mexico City and Lima) while reporting to Hamburg taught me the fundamental tension of international organizations: headquarters wants consistency, local markets need autonomy. The GMs who succeeded were the ones I gave real decision-making power to. The ones who failed were the ones I micromanaged because Hamburg was micromanaging me.

Payment infrastructure in LATAM is fragmented in ways that European fintechs rarely anticipate. In Mexico, SPEI works differently than CoDi. In Peru, interbank transfers have different settlement times than in Colombia. In each market, the regulatory conversation -- who can lend, under what license, with what disclosures -- is unique. Trying to run all of this with a centralized product team in Germany created friction that we never fully resolved.

Finland: From CSO to CEO

After Kreditech, I joined Mash Group as Chief Sales Officer. Mash was a Finnish company offering invoice-based payments across the Nordics and expanding into Western Europe. My mandate was to build the outbound sales organization from scratch.

I built a 20-person team and secured partnerships with PayPal, Ingenico, Nets, Shopify, and Verifone across 12 European markets. The partnership revenue hit EUR 8M+. When the company restructured, I was promoted to CEO of Mash Finance PLC, the Nordic subsidiary.

Finland was a cultural education. Finns are direct, egalitarian, and trust-driven. The hierarchical sales culture I had built in LATAM did not translate. In Finland, your CEO title means nothing if your argument is weak. In Argentina, the boss decides. In Finland, the best idea decides. I had to completely rewire my management style.

The company grew from 35 to 150+ employees during my tenure. The Mash chapter confirmed something I had suspected at Kreditech: the partnership model works across industries and geographies. Whether it is PayPal in Spain, Shopify in the Nordics, or Verifone in Germany, the logic is the same: find a platform with distribution, offer them value they cannot build alone, and share the economics.

Luxembourg: The Crypto Chapter

In 2022, I co-founded Sub7 Security in Luxembourg. Blockchain security audits. Smart contract analysis. Governance verification. We closed $1.2M in contracts within 18 months, with clients including Gnosis Chain, Karpatkey Treasury, and Wirex. We built Sechub.work, a marketplace connecting 50+ security auditors with projects needing reviews.

Sub7 was my first time as a co-founder. The difference between running someone else's business and running your own is the difference between skydiving with an instructor and skydiving alone. Every decision -- pricing, hiring, product direction, partnership terms -- is yours. The learning curve is vertical, and the feedback is immediate.

Germany and Ireland: AI and the Present

After Sub7, I built BureauFlow from zero -- an AI phone assistant for German tradespeople. It was my most technically ambitious project: Next.js 15, Vapi voice AI, programmatic SEO across 239+ pages. I learned more about product development in 18 months than in the previous decade.

Now I am in Cork, Ireland, running the Irish market for Closers.app -- AI voice agents for real estate. It combines everything: B2B sales experience, voice AI knowledge, partnership instincts, and a market I actually live in.

The Five Principles

Fourteen years and eight countries distill into five principles I would bet my career on:

1. Distribution beats product.Always. Nubank's success in Brazil is not because their app is better (it is). It is because they cracked distribution through word-of-mouth at a scale no bank could match. Stripe won not because their API was cleanest, but because developers -- the distribution channel -- loved it. Build for distribution first.

2. Hire local leaders and give them real power.The biggest failure mode in international expansion is hiring a "country manager" who has to ask Hamburg for permission on everything. Give them a P&L, a budget, hiring authority, and clear targets. Then get out of their way.

3. Partnerships compound. Every major career win I have had -- PayPal Credit at Kreditech, the Shopify deal at Mash, the Gnosis Chain contract at Sub7 -- came through partnerships. Partnerships are harder than paid acquisition upfront but they scale better, last longer, and create defensibility.

4. Speed of learning beats speed of execution. Moving fast matters, but moving fast in the wrong direction is worse than moving slowly in the right one. The markets where I took time to understand local conditions (Spain, Finland) outperformed the markets where we just tried to move fast (several LATAM markets).

5. Communicate relentlessly. In international organizations, information does not flow naturally. Time zones, languages, and cultural norms create friction. The leader who over-communicates -- who sends the update nobody asked for, who schedules the call that seems unnecessary -- is the one whose teams stay aligned.

What Comes Next

I am 14 years in and more energized than when I started. AI is reshaping every industry I have worked in -- lending, payments, real estate, security. The playbook of the last decade -- build technology, find distribution, scale across borders -- still applies, but the tools are orders of magnitude more powerful.

Cork, Ireland is home now. The Atlantic is outside my window. But the work is global, the network spans eight countries, and the phone still rings. If you are building something in fintech, AI, or international B2B, I am always happy to talk.