Why I'm Joining Oscilar to Bring Agentic Risk Infrastructure to Latin America

I have spent more than thirty years in financial services, most of it in and around Latin America. On the banking side I started in corporate banking, moved into investment banking, and eventually ran technology and operations as chief operating officer at Santander in Brazil and Spain. Front office and back office, not just one slice of the business. On the vendor side I opened Mambu's first office in Brazil and brought a new core banking platform into the region's largest market. For the past year I have been president of ABFintechs, spending my days with over 600 founders building the next generation of financial companies here. I also serve as a senior growth advisor to Deloitte's financial services practice in Brazil.

That vantage point is why I do not take on a role like this lightly. I decided to join Oscilar as General Manager for Latin America after looking hard at three things: the problem, the product, and the people.

Start with the problem, because it is specific to our region

Brazil was an early mover toward real-time payments. In 2002, the country modernized its payments infrastructure with TED, allowing money to move between banks in real time during banking hours. By the time Pix launched in 2020, Brazilians already had nearly two decades of experience with fast, account-to-account transfers.

Pix took that behavior mainstream. Launched by Brazil's central bank, it made instant payments available 24/7, including weekends and holidays, and simple enough for everyday purchases as well as transfers. Within a few years, it became the country's most widely used payment method. Today, money moves between accounts in seconds, around the clock, tens of billions of times a year. Mexico, Peru, and other markets in the region are moving in the same direction.

For consumers and small businesses this has been transformational. For anyone responsible for risk, it has completely changed the dynamics of the job. The old model is gone.

When money settles in seconds, fraud settles in seconds too. A transaction can no longer wait while systems catch up. Most institutions still try to manage this new speed with infrastructure built for the old one: onboarding in one system, fraud in another, credit in a third, compliance in a fourth, each with a partial view of the customer. Criminals do not respect those boundaries. They thrive in the gaps between them eagerly using AI.

That is the problem Oscilar was built to solve, and it is why the product is so compelling to me.

Oscilar brings onboarding, fraud, credit, and AML onto one platform that works from one shared view of the customer. A signal caught when someone opens an account carries straight into a payment decision moments later. A change in credit behavior can move fraud control immediately. The risk teams themselves can build and change policies without waiting in an engineering queue. These are the people who actually understand the local patterns. In a region where every market has its own rules and its own regulators, that independence matters enormously.

Oscilar is also natively agentic, and here, that's not just a buzzword bolted on to decaying technology. Oscilar's agents take on the heavy, repetitive work across the risk lifecycle. They assemble context, draft recommendations, and document the reasoning behind them, while a person confirms and owns every decision that counts. Anyone who has run a risk operation knows how much skilled time is lost to manual review. Handing that work to agents without handing over the judgment is the kind of leverage these teams have needed for years.

I have watched teams across Latin America try to buy their way to this with five vendors and an integration budget. It does not work. I have also watched global platforms arrive and struggle. A system built to serve dozens of countries at once rarely bends to the reality of any single one of them, and this region has no shortage of specifics. The region has not really had what it needs until now: a single platform built for real time and flexible enough to fit the local market.

Then there are the people, and this is what tipped it

Oscilar was founded by people who built real-time infrastructure at a scale almost no one has operated at. They then chose to bring that experience and insight to financial risk.

Neha Narkhede co-created Apache Kafka at LinkedIn, the open-source system that became the standard for how modern companies move data in real time. She then co-founded Confluent, bringing real-time data streaming to enterprises and building it into the real-time data backbone for most of the Fortune 500. She helped lead the company through its IPO, and IBM eventually acquired it for $11 billion earlier this year. Neha is credited in Forbes 250: America’s Greatest Innovators with creating the technology that makes an AI-enabled internet possible. That data infrastructure powers much of our world and digital economy. Companies like Uber, Netflix, BMW, and JPMorgan Chase depend on it. When someone who has built infrastructure of that kind turns their attention to fraud and risk, it is worth paying attention. Real-time decisioning is at its core a real-time data problem. Very few people alive understand that problem as deeply as Neha does.

Sachin Kulkarni is Oscilar's co-founder and CTO. He spent more than a decade as a senior engineering leader at Facebook, building the systems behind Facebook Live, Instagram video, and Messenger, along with the private cloud underneath them. His teams handled tens of billions of events in real time, at a scale where "it usually works" is not an acceptable standard. The video infrastructure his team built won a technical Emmy. That is the discipline of building systems that cannot go down and cannot be slow, because millions of people feel it the instant they do.

That combination is rare, but it is exactly what this problem demands. Handling onboarding, fraud, credit, and AML for a financial institution in real time is hard enough. Doing it at national scale in under a tenth of a second, with a human able to understand and change every decision, is one of the hardest engineering problems in financial services. Bolting AI onto an old system does not get you there. It takes building the foundation correctly from the start, which is what this team has spent their careers learning to do. You can feel it in how the product behaves under load and in how the team thinks about the work. They have the kind of instinct that comes only from having built these systems before, broken them, and rebuilt them.

And they are not building it from a distance. Neha is personally involved in how Oscilar grows in Latin America. When we talked about this role, it was clear she sees the region as a top priority with its own dynamics, not a line item to be managed from headquarters. She was specific about how the go-to-market teams should engage new accounts and where an operator like me can move things. That kind of attention from a founder-CEO is not common, and it told me a great deal about how this company intends to build here.

Finally, the opportunity

Oscilar already has a real business in Latin America. Its customers span Brazil, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay, and include Clara, dLocal, Barte, Conta Azul, and Konfío. There is a team on the ground and a local entity that operates and bills in reais in Brazil. The company has committed to the region and is ready to grow. Over the next year we will triple our footprint here.

My job is to help make that happen: to open doors, work directly with our customers and partners, and help institutions across the region adopt agentic risk infrastructure that matches the speed of their markets. In this part of the world, trust and relationships still decide who gets in the room, and I have spent thirty years building both. I want to help build a business here that lasts because I believe in the power of its technology and people to make our financial institutions stronger and better equipped to protect their customers.

As a native Brazilian, I have watched this industry change for my entire career. It has never moved as fast as it is moving now. Latin America's financial system is modernizing faster than almost anywhere in the world. I joined Oscilar because the risk infrastructure underneath it has to catch up, and I would rather help build that than watch it happen from the outside.

I am looking forward to the opportunity. If you are building in ¡this space anywhere across the region, I would like to hear from you.

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