London-based Greensill Capital is set to acquire Colombia’s Omni Latam to speed up adoption and growth of fintech innovations in Latin America. Greensill Capital is backed by Softbank. It is a provider of capital finance for businesses and people globally.
Greensill seeks to expand into Latin America, including Brazil and Mexico, media reports said. Omni Latam provides working capital to small and medium enterprises in the country.
Diego Caicedo, CEO at Omni Latam, told the media, “We don’t ask for the company’s financial statements, which will only tell you about the past. We’re seeing the movie in real time here … small companies’ situations change very fast, and in a world [facing] a pandemic crisis like today, it changes even faster.”
Greensill was established in 2011. The company has provided financing worth $143 billion to more than 8 million customers and suppliers across over 175 countries, media reports said. In the first four months of the year, the volume has significantly increased from last year because of the pandemic.
It is reported that Greensill struck a deal with Omni Latam in less than six months from the time of meeting the latter’s founders in New York.
Lex Greensill, founder and CEO at Greensill, told the media, “We realised Latin America requires very special skills, [but] … has a very significant working-capital gap that we estimate to be on the order of $750 billion.”