Introduction
Every December I take a moment to pause and look back, and every year I’m amazed by how much can happen in just twelve months (I swear it was March like five minutes ago). 2025 was a year defined by growth, new partnerships, bold projects and a team that keeps raising the bar.
What makes me proudest isn’t just the milestones we reached, but how we reached them: by staying true to our mission of being the tech partner fintech companies rely on. One that understands the industry, anticipates its challenges and helps teams build with clarity, speed and confidence.
As we close out the year, I wanted to reflect on everything we accomplished together. So here’s a look back at our journey in 2025.
1. Clients and projects
This year brought some of our most exciting and diverse work yet. We partnered with companies across payments, fintech, wealth management, lending, remittances, hospitality, e-commerce, and logistics, supporting both new ventures and long-term clients scaling to their next stage.
A highlight for us is seeing how these products evolve. Many platforms we supported years ago are now expanding into new markets, adding new rails, or consolidating infrastructure and we’re proud to be part of that growth.
Our yearly portfolio always reflects our 360º fintech expertise. We approach payments from both sides of the ecosystem: helping fintech and payment platforms build the rails, while also supporting digital commerce and product companies that rely on them.
This dual perspective shaped the range of clients and projects we partnered with this year:
Fintech & Payment Platforms
We supported projects across orchestration, treasury, investment tech, wealth management, and cross-border payments, partnering with teams such as:
Paydock → Payment Orchestration Platform
Bamboo → Cross-Border Payment Solutions
MNI → Market Intelligence Platform
Amber → Wealth Management & Robo-advisor Platform
Koywe → Financial Intelligence Platform
Tigris Consulting → Investment Platform
World Mobile → Blockchain-Powered Mobile Network
Bills Treasury → Bills Management Platform
Baxipay → Remittance Infrastructure
Efecty → Payment & Remittance Network
Edge → Agro-Financial Platform
Digital Commerce Platforms
Guesty → Hospitality Management Platform
Fatsack → Fishing App
Tailored Logistics → Logistics Platform
CSI → Engineering & Architecture Firm
Life Cinemas → Leading Entertainment Chain
Paco's Tours → City Tour Booking Platform
Our partners
A key part of our year was deepening our collaboration with industry leaders and infrastructure partners, including:
Alpaca → API-first brokerage platform
Zion Payments Hub → Fintech & Payments Consulting
Rail → Stablecoin Global Payments
Cobre → PB2B Real-Time Treasury Platform
D28 Finance → Fintech Payments Consulting
Rooftop Tech Hub → Digital Product Studio
Our clients and partners across the globe
2. The team
2025 was one of the biggest years of team growth, and not just in size, but in culture, maturity, and talent density.
Growth & Culture
New team members joined Vangwe across development, HR, marketing, and project management, marking this year as one of our biggest growth years yet with an overall increase of over 58%.
92.3% retention rate, a strong sign of a healthy, engaged culture where people feel challenged, supported, and excited to grow, especially meaningful in an industry as competitive as tech and fintech.
Internal NPS: 95.8% recommending Vangwe as a workplace.
Expanded our presence in the US and Europe with our CGO and COO based in San Francisco and Toronto for the whole year, and myself, working from Europe, allowing us to be physically closer to both markets.
Training & Learning
We continued investing in growth with:
Leadership workshops designed to strengthen both technical leadership and management skills, helping our team grow into more confident, effective leaders.
Our Vangwe Talks, where team members share their insights and knowledge on different topics. This year they varied from technical workshops that sharpen our day-to-day work to broader sessions focused on personal and professional development.
Technical and payments training, keeping the team up to date with industry trends, new payment flows, and hands-on technical practices that help us stay ahead in an ever-evolving fintech landscape.
Vangwe team celebrating together
Team Bonding
From after-hours meetups and team-building workshops to an unforgettable end-of-year party, we created countless opportunities to connect beyond day-to-day work.
We also strengthened our cross-team relationships by visiting our teams in Argentina and welcoming them to Uruguay, reinforcing the sense of unity across our operations.
Benefits
Through our Pase Libre workout benefit, many of us stayed active and energized throughout the year, making wellness part of our routine as a team.
Milestones
This year also marked important milestones that remind us how much we’ve grown:
Vangwe turned 5 years old, a half-decade of building and learning together.
Our office turned 3, continuing to serve as a base for collaboration, focus and connection.
These milestones highlight not only the passage of time, but how much we’ve built—and how far we’re still going.
3. Commitment to the fintech industry
Fintech isn’t just something we do, it’s who we are and what we specialize in. And we take that seriously, which is why this year, we’re especially proud of how intentionally we stayed close to the ecosystem. Contributing to the industry, sharing knowledge, and bringing real value to our clients is core to what we do at Vangwe. And to do that well, we believe in being where things are happening.
That’s why part of our team spent the year on the ground in the US, why we showed up at key industry moments across regions, and why we kept investing time in learning, connecting and building alongside the fintech community.
Events & Conferences
We attended fintech events across the US, Europe, and Latin America, including:
American Banker Payments Forum → San Francisco
Fintech Meetup → Las Vegas
NY Fintech Week → New York
Finovate Spring → San Diego
PayPal Dev Days → San Mateo
Money 20/20 Europe → Amsterdam
Toronto Tech Week → Toronto
Finovate Fall → New York
We continued participating in industry meetups, roundtables, and gatherings hosted by leaders in the fintech ecosystem, from This Week in Fintech to Silicon Valley Bank. And beyond the events themselves, we’re grateful for everything we learned along the way, the people we met, the conversations we had, and the insights we brought back to our clients and projects.
For anyone curious about deeper takeaways, we also published a recap of two of the biggest events we attended this year on our blog.
Vangwe team at fintech conferences
Hosting & Community building
Proud to say that we didn’t just attend events, we helped build them:
Hosted a Fintech Meetup in Uruguay at Cubo Itaú with Akua, bringing together leaders from banks, fintechs, and payment companies. In the sessions, we explored the future of digital wallets in LatAm and what it takes to scale payments infrastructure across the region. We’re proud and grateful to the experts who joined us and helped make the event such a success: Martín Santini (Vangwe), Facundo Sandoval (Itaú), Marcelo Lanfranconi (Cámara Uruguaya de Fintech), Juan José Behrend (Akua), Julieta Decurnex (MORE), Alejandro Chica (Itaú Unibanco / OCA) & Diego Mazzone (Houlak | Binco).
Organized and hosted a Roundtable on the new wave of investments led by fintechs and investment platforms, featuring Tony Lee, (Global Head of Brokerage at Alpaca), Julieta Barros (Co-Founder & Partner at Amber Latam), and Lucía Carbajales (Financial Advisor and MFin Cambridge).
Vangwe hosting fintech events
The team in the spotlight
This year we amplified our voice beyond our own channels, appearing in external media and industry platforms:
I had the chance to join the Nearshore Café Podcast, where we explored how Uruguay’s stability, along with the broader LatAm ecosystem, is helping shape the next wave of fintech and wealthtech innovation.
I was also featured in a Forbes Technology Council article, and contributed another piece of my own, sharing insights on the evolution of fintech, wealthtech, and how to better navigate solution-building in a fast-moving tech landscape.
4. Our brand
It was also a year of strengthening our identity and how we show up to the world.
We launched our new website, a reflection of our maturity, our evolution, and the direction we’re headed as a company.
We introduced new merch, proudly worn by our team and clients across different countries. A small but meaningful symbol of the community we’re building.
Vangwe new website and merch
5. Client visits & On-site connections
Getting closer to our clients is one of the most meaningful parts of our work. This year, we met with clients across the US and Europe, strengthening relationships and collaborating in ways that only happen in person.
Mateo Suburu, our CTO, visited the Paydock team in Porto, Portugal.
Lucía Sánchez León, our CGO, and myself met with NotionV team in New York.
We saw and caught up with Bamboo, Paydock, and Koywe during Money20/20 in Amsterdam.
Lucía and Martín Santini, our COO, had dinner with Bamboo's CEO in San Francisco.
Our team attended Amber's launch in Montevideo.
Stopped by Paco's Tours in San Francisco.
Visited the Life Cinemas team and headquarters in Montevideo.
Each visit helped deepen trust, clarify priorities, and accelerate collaboration, the kind of progress no amount of Zoom calls can fully replace.
Vangwe team with clients and industry friends
Looking ahead
As we wrap up 2025, I feel incredibly proud and deeply grateful. This year we grew, we built, we learned, we traveled, and most importantly, we moved forward together.
To our partners: thank you for your trust and for letting us be part of your journey.
To our team: thank you for your talent, your commitment, and the heart you bring to Vangwe every single day.
If this is what we achieved in just one year, I can’t wait to see what we’ll build next.
Here’s to an even bigger 2026.
