Financial services and technology keep bumping into each other in ways nobody predicted a decade ago. Santiago Aldana has watched this collision happen up close. The MIT Sloan MBA spent years driving a bank/identity initiative as well as Chief Digital & Technology Officer at Avianca (Latam $5B revenue airline), understanding, building, and scaling digital solutions for greater value generation. His work in digital transformation and creation of new businesses has taught him something most people miss: the technology isn’t the hard part.
Start With The Problem, Not The Technology
Here’s where most companies mess up. They fall in love with a technology, then scramble to find something useful to do with it. Aldana has seen this movie too many times. “One of the biggest mistakes organizations make is leading with technology instead of need”, he explains. The work actually starts somewhere else. You need to understand what’s broken first. Maybe it’s fraud eating into profits, or people getting shut out of credit they deserve, or payment systems that feel like they’re from the 1990s. “Technology should serve a purpose, not just exist as a buzzword, such as AI or stablecoins,” he points out. Every company wants to say they’re using AI. Not many can explain why.
Real innovation shows up in the numbers. When Aldana’s team brought in a new payment solution at Avianca, conversion rates jumped by more than 10 percentage points. Fraud losses dropped while customers had an easier time checking out. “That’s what real innovation looks like—measurable impact aligned with business goals,” he says. Nobody cares about your tech stack if it doesn’t move the business forward.
Build An Ecosystem, Not A Product
The companies winning in fintech aren’t building everything themselves. They’re connecting the dots between banks, fintech players, tech providers, regulators, among others, who all bring something different to the table. Aldana learned this lesson at SoyYo, the digital identity and fraud prevention platform he led. “Most successful digital initiatives came from strategic alliances. “We started with the three biggest banks in Colombia”, he explains, “Those partnerships opened doors that led to work with players such as TransUnion, LexisNexis, Experian, and Mastercard”. Together, they built solutions nobody could have created on their own. This isn’t about being nice or collaborative for its own sake. “In FinTech, that means embracing open banking, embedded finance, and API-driven partnerships that allow you to plug into larger networks and scale faster”, Aldana says. The companies trying to own everything end up owning a lot less than they thought.
Embrace Technology For Continuous Learning And Decision-Making
Something bigger is coming in fintech. We’re moving past AI that just analyzes data and spits out insights. “The next wave of fintech innovation will be driven by technologies such as agentic AI—systems that don’t just process data, but act, learn, and make decisions autonomously”, Aldana explains. Picture yourself requesting a legit agent to develop a complex ecommerce process for you, requiring tasks that include payment systems. You must evolve to real time fraud prevention, agentic ID that can provide trust in the consent process, as well as instant payment solutions that catch fraud before it fully develops. This isn’t very far in the future. The challenge is making it work without things going sideways. Getting AI to act requires zero trust processes. “To leverage this, organizations and people need to be able to discern legit from fraudulent agents, have traceability of consent management and authorization, while ensuring compliance, transparency, and cybersecurity—all built into every layer”, Aldana notes. Seting up the proper guardrails is critical for the development of responsible AI.
Aldana’s approach boils down to three things that matter across different markets and company types. Start with the problem, not with the technology. Build ecosystems, not isolated products. Empower people with technology to drive continuous innovation. Simple to say, harder to execute. These principles hit differently in emerging markets. “Financial services and technology together hold the potential to reshape how the world transacts, saves, and secures value. This includes emerging markets such as Latin America, which can leapfrog traditional systems with new advances in technology”, he says. Countries with less infrastructure can move faster when new technology provides new ways of doing things. The real opportunity sits in a human centric development, where technological capability can generate value faster. “If we focus on human needs, strategic collaboration, and responsible AI, we’re not just innovating finance—we’re redefining trust in the digital age”, Aldana wraps up. When you’re dealing with people’s needs, trust beats speed every time. Technology that solves real problems can build or destroy the trust needed for a human-centered value generation.
Follow Santiago Aldana on LinkedIn for insights on fintech innovation, AI, and digital transformation.
