Building a Global Technology Company from Colombia: Ricardo Villadiego, CEO of Easy Solutions (Part 6)

Sramana: What did you do after you raised the $11 million round of funding?

Ricardo Villadiego: We literally took the company global. We added a lot of resources in the US to cover it coast to coast. We added sales offices all over the country as well as an innovation center in Atlanta where we added some product managers. Our CTO and VP of Sales also operates out of the Atlanta office. We maintained the corporate headquarters in Miami, which lets me stay close to our research and development center in Bogota while being close to the US operations.

Sramana: How many people do you have in Bogota?

Ricardo Villadiego: We have about 80 people there. Our R&D is still in Bogota. Our product managers are located in Atlanta, and they help us control our messaging. They ensure that our product is received in the manner that the global markets expect it to be received.

Sramana: We are now in the middle of 2014. How many US customers do you have now?

Ricardo Villadiego: We have 40 US customers. We have 320 customers total and we are protecting 50 million end users.

Sramana: How does your customer base break down?

Ricardo Villadiego: We have 40 in the US, some in EMEA, and the rest in Latin America.

Sramana: Does the composition of your US clientele mirror your Latin American clientele, which was primarily comprised of financial services companies?

Ricardo Villadiego: Our US customer base is also comprised of financial institutions. It is a little different than Latin America, because there we had the ability to approach huge banks from the very beginning. In the US, we have to first create confidence. We have started targeting tier 2 banks first. These are banks that have less than $2 billion in assets. We have been very successful in that market and are now attracting attention from the top banks in the US as well.

Sramana: Whom do you compete with in deals?

Ricardo Villadiego: Traditionally, clients have used RSA, IBM, or other big players to prevent fraud. We compete with a lot of companies in different segments. We are a platform company, so we compete against the entire fraud cycle. Other companies focus on the end of the cycle or the authentication component of the fraud cycle. There are also local competitors in various regions. In Latin America, we compete against MonitorPlus at the end of the fraud cycle.

There are a lot of point solutions who we have to compete with. The key is that our approach is a platform approach. Banks like the platform approach because they know that they can see something across all the various fraud stages. Integrating point solutions creates a lot of complexity.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Building a Global Technology Company from Colombia: Ricardo Villadiego, CEO of Easy Solutions
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