Puntored is a Colombian Fintech company that helps promote the growth of independent businesses by providing financial services through innovative applications, offering virtual products and transactional services at numerous points of sale. Puntored started its operations in 2004 as a business focused on electronic recharging for cell phones, it became a technology network supported by a robust platform and with the capacity to carry out and offer payment services throughout the country. It was founded by Andrés Albán, current CEO of the company and who in 2012 was distinguished as an Endeavor entrepreneur and in 2014 was the winner of the MIT –Innovators Under 35 years old

Andrés Albán, founder and CEO of Puntored, states “We are a company that makes life easier for millions of people at the base of the pyramid to access financial services, in addition to that, we generate additional income for thousands of shopkeepers throughout of the national territory ”. The success of Puntored lies in its financial inclusion service promoting the digitization of the economy, a task by no means simple, but it is precisely what PuntoRed has achieved in its 14-year history at the national level, extending to Puerto Rico and in the next years they plan to continue their expansion to some Central American countries.

In 2014, the American magazine MIT Technology Review organized in the city of Medellín, Colombia a forum on the most innovative enterprises in Colombia in the area of entrepreneurship and basic complex technologies: nanotechnology, the challenges of medicine and the Internet as a platform for growth of society. On that occasion, Conexred received one of the ten awards for “Innovators under 35 years of age” with the project “Electronic payment and collection network for unbanked and low-income people”. This recognition has been one more motivation that has driven Puntored to seek to expand its presence in the country by developing technological solutions dedicated to the growth and strengthening of financial inclusion, especially for small businesses so that they develop their businesses through technology and technology. access to financial services.

Currently Puntored has about 72,000 points that in 2018 carried out around 300 million transactions and expects to have more than 500,000 businesses connected through its Mi Caja service in the near future.

In 2016 an alliance was born between dotnet and Servinformacion, with the idea of taking the data generated by the consumption of different products offered in neighborhood stores (traditional channel) and converting them into information that allows detailed knowledge of the behavior of sales and that, in turn, the shopkeeper strengthens the loyalty with these new processes and get to know your business in a more comprehensive way. It is for this reason that the Puntored team undertakes a development project based on the Google Cloud Platform infrastructure, which allows the storage of consumption information recorded by shopkeepers and the generation of statistical analysis of sales filtered by the main marketing variables so that Companies can count on a novel way of identifying consumption opportunities to implement their marketing strategies. The challenges involved in this decision is the definition of the processes, including technology, for capturing data from the traditional channel and the way in which these data will be structured to carry out the processing and analysis of information from consistent manner, as well as the way in which the results of the analysis will be visible for its correct interpretation.

The service scheme is supported by an online platform, Servipunto, which allows information to be consulted in an agile way and tailored to needs, making the most of the resources available on Google Cloud Platform. Servinformación participated in the process of defining the infrastructure and technical aspects that support the entire process of information capture, data transformation and analysis, the visualization of results, and the inclusion of best practices on GCP products.

Taking advantage of products such as Google AppEngine, Puntored deployed the backend that allows serving the ingestion of sales information through mobile devices located in traditional channels. Similarly, Cloud Datastore was used to store transactional information according to how the shopkeeper registers it, for EL processes and processing, Cloud Dataflow was used; In the transformation process, Cloud Dataprep and finally Google BigQuery were used to support the analysis process. Tableau is the tool used to visualize the data in a way that is understandable.

“Thanks to the technology available on Google Cloud Platform, Puntored and Servinformación have strengthened their alliance to generate technological projects that link both business core, allowing small businesses to enhance their businesses through technology and access to financial services, while progress is made in transforming Small Data into Big Data. "

Sergio Lopez - Vice President of Operations and Technology