Building a Global Technology Company from Colombia: Ricardo Villadiego, CEO of Easy Solutions (Part 2)

Sramana: What was the founding concept for Easy Solutions?

Ricardo Villadiego: I created Easy Solutions with my wife and my best friend from my university. When we created the company, our vision was to be the global leader in electronic fraud prevention.

Sramana: Did you do this from Bogota, Columbia?

Ricardo Villadiego: Yes, that is where I founded the company. It was hard putting those words in the vision of the company at the time since it was in Bogota and because there was a lot of bad publicity about the country. The reality was that the country was facing a lot of problems with narcotics traffic and rebels. Some of those problems still remain. When we set the vision of the company, we knew that we would have to work hard to achieve that vision.

A lot of what I had learned through my experience at Unisys and ISS was when the companies had revenue of less than $10 million. The knowledge that I gained at Unisys and ISS gave me the background that I needed to make Easy Solutions a global company.

I began by hiring talented developers in the Bogota area to fulfill that vision. When we decided to be a global leader in electronic fraud prevention, we also decided to tackle the problem in a different way. We wanted to have a fresh approach that was unique to the way the legacy companies tried to address the problem.

Traditionally in fraud, the technology would recognize the fraudulent activity when there was a transaction involved. When we started the company we realized that this was not the beginning of the problem; it was the end of the problem. When a problem is actually occurring, it means that the bad guys were able to complete the entire cycle of fraud. They were able to plan, launch, and convert with a fraudulent transaction.

With the knowledge of how fraud occurs, we built something called the Total Fraud Protection Platform. The platform offers a way to tackle fraud in a holistic manner from beginning to the end. That concept has started to resonate in the market. We started selling in Latin America and then as we got more and more clients in Latin America, some of the industry analysts like Gartner and Forester approached us to understand why some of their biggest clients in South America were switching from their existing fraud prevention solutions to our platforms.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Building a Global Technology Company from Colombia: Ricardo Villadiego, CEO of Easy Solutions
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