Sempli

Private

Colombian digital lender specializing in fast working capital loans for small and medium-sized enterprises, using alternative data to underwrite businesses excluded from traditional bank credit.

Bogotá, Colombia | SME Lending | Est. 2016 | Website

At a Glance

Strength

Colombia's SME credit gap is both large and well-documented — the majority of formal small businesses have no access to institutional credit despite being viable, tax-paying entities, creating a structurally underserved market with real demand.

Challenge

SME lending at scale requires significant capital — loan books cannot be funded from operating revenue alone, and access to institutional debt facilities at competitive rates requires demonstrated portfolio performance and management credibility that takes years to establish.

Opportunity

Revenue-based financing for digital-native SMEs — repayments tied to monthly revenue rather than fixed schedules — aligns the product with the cash flow reality of e-commerce and SaaS businesses and reduces default risk by design.

The SME Credit Gap

Colombia has approximately 2.5 million formally registered small and medium-sized enterprises, of which a minority have access to institutional bank credit. The rest — the vast majority — finance their operations through a combination of supplier credit, personal savings, and informal borrowing. This is not an accident of market failure or lender incompetence; it reflects the genuine difficulty of underwriting small businesses that lack audited financial statements, formal collateral, or the kind of credit history that conventional bank models require. Traditional lending infrastructure was built for large borrowers, and the transaction cost of underwriting a COP 5 million working capital loan using conventional methods exceeds the revenue the loan would generate.

Sempli was founded in 2016 on the hypothesis that technology could change that calculus. By replacing expensive manual underwriting with automated data processing, and by using alternative data sources — bank transactions, DIAN tax records, invoice flows — that better capture SME financial reality than formal financial statements, the company aimed to make profitable small business lending viable at a scale that justified the investment in building the platform.

Alternative Data Underwriting

The core of Sempli's competitive differentiation is its credit model. Rather than asking SME applicants to submit two years of audited financial statements and offer real property as collateral — the traditional Colombian bank requirement — Sempli's system evaluates creditworthiness through signals that are more current, more granular, and more predictive for the specific dynamics of small business cash flows. Bank account transaction history reveals revenue seasonality, supplier payment patterns, and operating cash flow in ways that annual financial statements obscure. DIAN invoice records provide an independent verification of sales volumes. Payment behavior on previous Sempli loans creates a proprietary internal credit history that compounds in value over time.

The automated evaluation process produces a credit decision in hours rather than weeks, enabling Sempli to serve the acute working capital needs of businesses that need to respond to an order or supply shortage on a short timeline — a use case that bank credit processes are structurally incapable of serving.

Product Design for SME Reality

Sempli's product suite reflects the actual cash flow patterns of Colombian SMEs rather than the standardized loan structures of traditional banking. Revolving credit lines allow businesses to draw and repay as needed, matching the irregular cash flow cycle of a small manufacturer or distributor rather than forcing a fixed repayment schedule that may not align with when the business actually receives payment. Invoice-based lending — advancing cash against verified invoices before they are paid by the customer — addresses the receivables financing gap that is one of the most acute pain points for growing SMEs with strong order books but slow-paying buyers.

Regulatory and Funding Framework

Sempli operates as a Sociedad de Financiamiento Comercial or under equivalent regulatory frameworks that permit commercial lending without a full banking license. This structure allows the company to operate with a lighter regulatory footprint than a bank while maintaining SFC compliance for the lending activities it conducts. The funding side is correspondingly more complex: without deposit-taking authority, Sempli must fund its loan portfolio through equity, debt facilities from development finance institutions, and structured loan sales to institutional investors. Each of these sources carries a cost and a set of covenants that must be managed alongside portfolio performance.

The Path to Scale

Sempli's growth challenge is the combination of portfolio funding and customer acquisition at sufficient scale to achieve the unit economics that justify its operating costs. SME lending is a relationship business — small business owners talk to each other, and positive word-of-mouth from a financed company carries more weight than any marketing campaign. Building that referral network requires a portfolio large enough that a meaningful number of businesses in any given sector or geography have had a positive Sempli experience. The virtuous cycle takes time to establish, but once running, it produces customer acquisition that is both cheaper and more loyal than channel-based marketing. The company's medium-term trajectory depends significantly on how quickly that cycle compounds.

Editorial Assessment

The Good, The Bad & Opportunities

The Good

Colombia's SME credit gap is both large and well-documented — the majority of formal small businesses have no access to institutional credit despite being viable, tax-paying entities, creating a structurally underserved market with real demand.
Alternative data underwriting — using invoice flow, bank account transactions, and tax records rather than collateral and formal financial statements — is genuinely more predictive for SME credit quality than traditional methods, and Sempli has years of proprietary Colombian SME default data to refine its models.
Working capital loans for SMEs are operationally critical purchases: a business that needs to pay a supplier to fulfill an order is highly motivated to repay the loan that made the transaction possible, creating better credit behavior alignment than consumer lending.

The Challenge

SME lending at scale requires significant capital — loan books cannot be funded from operating revenue alone, and access to institutional debt facilities at competitive rates requires demonstrated portfolio performance and management credibility that takes years to establish.
The Colombian SME failure rate is high — approximately 30% of businesses fail in the first year, and a significant portion of the remainder fail within five years — creating structural churn in the customer base that forces continuous new customer acquisition to sustain portfolio size.
Open banking in Colombia is still developing, and many SMEs operate with informal cash flows that are not fully captured in digital transaction data — alternative data underwriting models are better than traditional methods but not yet as accurate as the data richness of more formalized markets would allow.
Colombian banks, though historically reluctant to serve SMEs, are increasingly deploying digital lending products for their existing business customers — a move that captures the most creditworthy SMEs (who already have bank relationships) before Sempli can reach them.
Economic downturns hit SMEs before they hit consumers, and hit informal and semi-formal SMEs hardest — Sempli's portfolio is concentrated in the segment most vulnerable to macro shocks, and a severe contraction would test the loss provisioning and capital adequacy of a lender without a deposit base to buffer against it.

Opportunities

Revenue-based financing for digital-native SMEs — repayments tied to monthly revenue rather than fixed schedules — aligns the product with the cash flow reality of e-commerce and SaaS businesses and reduces default risk by design.
Supply chain financing offered to the customers and suppliers of existing Sempli borrowers would create a network of interconnected credit relationships, increasing stickiness and generating volume from the SME ecosystem rather than just individual participants.
E-commerce platform partnerships (Shopify Colombia, Mercado Shops) for embedded working capital at the point of listing would give Sempli direct access to digital merchants at the moment of maximum credit need.
Bundling accounting and financial management tools with the credit product would create a more defensible SME platform — a company using Sempli for both accounting and credit is significantly less likely to switch either than one using each independently.

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