“We’re thinking not only to serve the small stores but also their family and their dependents because they are an integral part of that store.” Dan Cohen, CEO and founder of Tienda Pago, shares how Tienda Pago supports microentrepreneurs and family businesses in Mexico and Peru. Tienda Pago, an Accion Venture Lab portfolio company, is a digital supply chain finance solution that helps small mom-and-pop shops finance their inventory so they can stock what they need when they need it and grow their revenue.
Transcript
My name is Dan Cohen, I’m the CEO and founder of Tienda Pago.
Tienda Pago is a company that is based in Mexico and in Peru.
We provide short-term lending to very small convenience shops, bodegas, changarros.
The credit line is used for them to buy inventory from large CPG (consumer packaged goods) brands.
We partner with big brands so [the shops] can sell their products via credits. So their sales increase. We pay directly to the brands, and now the stores can buy that product with one week of credit.
We have over 60,000 small stores that we have signed to the platform. In a typical day, we process over 3,000 loans every single day.
So we’re thinking not only to serve the small stores but also their family and their dependents because they are an integral part of that store.
So creating those kinds of products and those kinds of services together — and with partners — it’s a new, exciting thing.
The more we achieve, the more we understand that this is a team effort or a community effort, and you need several people to achieve those goals.