Culturally informed product development with Nuestro Financial
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What
Nuestro Financial is a Nashville, Tennessee-based fintech providing entry-level banking products and education to Latino communities in the United States. After securing its first round of venture funding in 2022, Nuestro debuted its public operations in March 2023.
Since then, it’s launched its banking service app, lending products, as well as financial literacy solutions. Licensed to lend in Tennessee, Nuestro aims to serve Latino consumers across the Southeastern US.
Why
According to Diego Eguiarte, Founder and CEO of Nuestro Financial, serving Latino communities entails far more than operating bilingual support services. It requires building products in partnership with communities, and hiring people who share those identities to key leadership roles.
“From a long-term asset perspective, if you want your financial institution to be in very good shape for the next 35, 50 years, you need to have a strong Latino-focused strategy that goes way beyond,” Eguiarte said, in reference to the growing share of US citizens and residents who identify as Latino, who are more than 60 million-strong today.
How
Nuestro strives to build smart products for Latino communities, where “smart means culturally aware,” according to Eguiarte. This has involved a more holistic approach to product development, wherein Nuestro builds a product halfway, and then turns community-organization and -member input into specific product features and applications.
This sort of approach has helped Nuestro determine its KYC capacities, for example, using ITIN data to onboard customers, and not just SSNs. Immigration lawyers and legal-aid groups that have been part of Nuestro’s user research efforts were key to that decision.
Ultimately, Nuestro looks to leverage these relationships to help Latino customers move on to more complex financial products with banks and other FIs. Nuestro’s financial literacy curriculum is core to that effort. Unusual for its small size, Nuestro has hired a Director of Financial Literacy, who identifies as Latino and has a graduate degree in curriculum development. “Our product really is to pull relationship building with community members and build a bridge with the financial services institutions,” Eguiarte said.
Nuestro also packages its lending products in response to internal and stakeholder knowledge. It offers relatively small loans (around $5,000) for construction materials, for example, understanding that many Latino consumers prefer to renovate their homes room by room and on their own, rather than having to refinance their home and do a wholesale renovation all at once through a contractor.
“That product is designed for homeowners in the Latino community,” Eguiarte noted.
Nuestro has ambitious targets for the upcoming year, bolstered by the financial performance of consumers who have recently benefited from lower barriers to accessing mainstream financial products. (Sixty percent of ITIN-based mortgage holders, Eguiarte commented, are on average 2.5 payments ahead of schedule.) The fintech hopes to be licensed to lend across the Southeastern US beyond Tennessee, and aims to reach thousands of Latino consumers through its banking solutions, helping magnitudes more, understanding the multigenerational nature of its consumers’ finances.
“A bilingual strategy is not a bicultural strategy, and I think that's the secret sauce,” Eguiarte reiterated. “Hopefully it doesn't have to be a secret and everyone starts using it.”
