Trego, a fintech founded in Antioquia in October 2025, operates a digital pawn credit model that charges 24% annual interest to clients who have no formal credit history, targeting the approximately 10 million Colombians whom banks and conventional fintech reject for lacking a sufficient credit score, and projects US$5 million in total credit placements by the end of 2026 with a 20% to 30% monthly growth rate, according to CEO Juan Pablo Triviño.
The model addresses a gap that Colombia’s financial system has documented but not closed: according to ANIF (the Asociación Nacional de Instituciones Financieras), the “gota a gota” (informal loan-sharking scheme that charges interest daily or weekly, often with coercive collection practices) represents 12.1% of household sector debt in the country, with rates reaching 720% annual effective, and 60% of Trego’s current clients arrived having previously used that system precisely because no formal institution would approve them.
A collateral model built for people formal finance ignores
Trego’s operational logic runs on collateral, not credit score: the client leaves a physical asset, such as a laptop, a cell phone, or jewelry, as a guarantee for the loan, receives the funds, and recovers the object upon repayment, a mechanism that eliminates the credit history requirement that excludes the bottom third of Colombia’s economically active population from formal finance while giving Trego a tangible risk buffer that a standard unsecured digital loan does not provide.
The company focuses specifically on users with credit scores below 500 points (the threshold most Colombian banks use as a minimum for consumer credit approval), and the average loan ticket is COP 1.5 million (approximately US$414), a size consistent with urgent household expenses: Triviño confirmed that clients use the funds primarily for rent, utility bills, food, and medical situations, not for productive investment or business capital.
Trego does not compete with microfinance institutions for small entrepreneurs; it sits in the gap between a household financial emergency and the gota a gota lender who would otherwise show up at the door, and that positioning, targeting people who need COP 1.5 million to cover rent or a medical bill this week, explains why the company converted demand into volume faster than its own projections anticipated from the first month of operations.
6 months of growth and a national expansion underway
Trego went from approximately 100 contracts in its first month of operations to between 300 and 600 monthly contracts by March 2026, with 2,000 to 3,000 incoming requests each month indicating a demand pipeline significantly larger than current capacity to serve; monthly disbursements grew from US$138,000 in December 2025 to US$221,000 in February 2026 and US$276,000 in March, a trajectory that Triviño described as the basis for projecting US$2 million in the first semester of 2026 and US$4 million to US$5 million by year-end.
Client retention reinforces the model’s economics: 70% of monthly contracts come from renewals or repurchases, with 200 to 300 new clients joining each month, and the default rate stands at one in 10 clients (10%), a manageable figure for a portfolio built entirely from borrowers that the formal system had already classified as unacceptable risks. Colombia’s recently issued Decreto 368 de 2026, which makes Open Finance (finanzas abiertas, the regulatory framework requiring financial institutions to share client data with authorized third parties) mandatory, creates additional data infrastructure that could help Trego refine its risk models as it grows.
However, the collateral-not-credit-score model depends on physical logistics that constrain geographic expansion: Trego launched in Medellín, expanded to Cartagena on April 4, 2026, and projects Bogotá for year-end, but each new city requires the capacity to collect, appraise, store, and return physical objects at scale, which means the company’s expansion timeline depends as much on warehouse and courier infrastructure as on digital marketing or regulatory approval; reaching the 500,000 people its own projections cite would require either a logistics network far beyond its current size or a shift toward asset categories, like jewelry, that require less storage volume per loan than laptops or phones do.