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It many

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call

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Miami the gateway to Latin America for obvious

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reasons the weather and of course the beach right

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behind me. We caught up with one group. They are a small

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business Lending Group that specifically focus on Latin America

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and we found out how they plant to succeed right

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here in Miami here in South Florida. The growth

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can be seen everywhere from the traffic to the

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buildings to the amount of people calling it home.

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For Jacob short the opportunity to start and grow his small business

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lending company Marco Financial in Miami with

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the ideal situation because of who the company

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works with our current Focus today is solving the mission critical

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problem facing SME exports in Latin America.

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So Marcos solves their biggest problem, which

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is access to Reliable working capital

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given that they typically don't get paid from 30 to 45

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to 60 days in some situations from the buyers

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that buy their goods today and Mark will effectively will

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advance them against that invoice to ensure they've worked

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in Capital new contracts to ramp a production and ultimately

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have liquidity to build and grow their business the unique business

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approach developed when he met his co-founder in New York City the

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business started operations in January of 2021. My

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co-founder Peter spradling is from

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Uruguay born and raised and he's been a Serial entrepreneur and

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cross-border trade for his entire career starting with products

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like Merino wool and then moving into food products. This was

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a problem that he faced.

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And experience this for his entire experience. He was spending about

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50% of his time in church of working capital. We

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really started to look at the broader opportunity across Latin America

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and some key themes that were really drivers of the size of

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the opportunity and there's a few kind of macro components that

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namely the fact that Latin America's increasingly

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becoming some of the largest trading partners of the United States.

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Obviously Mexico being, you know, a huge one Additionally you

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typically a very very wide Commercial Credit spreads in Latin America.

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We knew that that was going to enable us to borrow capital and

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then lend it out and still manage to make a reasonable

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spread developing and working with clients across Latin

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America is no easy task. Jacob says Michael

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Financial has created unique techniques and tools to

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make sure businesses run smoothly for everyone involved.

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So let's talk about the technology you guys you specifically for

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this audience. Let's walk through what exactly you

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guys use and any future products that you guys plan to bring

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on when we started we were really focused on getting

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our hands dirty and and doing

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Everything kind of more traditional way really learning about

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what are the points of friction, you know, what are

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the challenges of scaling a business like this? You know, how do you do it

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in a more technology light Manner and what we learned is really

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a lot of the the areas that we've we've started to invest

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in the fact that you have tons of documentation tons of

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unstructured data you need ways to be able to process that

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without needing a human component to continually scale the business

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and we built the technology called Marcos game which leverages machine

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learning and really enables us to process and extract

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these data out of these unstructured documents at scale and

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really leveraging that component that enables us to capture this

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data in addition, we built technology to tap

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directly into third-party databases and the

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tax databases of Mexico of markets that

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we serve including Mexico and that enables us to actually get

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real time information as far as the payables

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and the receivables of the business and question and then

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we compare that data to other sources and we run our proprietary microscore

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model and that enables us to effective.

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Be quickly provide financing to these customers

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in question that we're serving.

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District Marco being a young company, it has already raised over a hundred

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million dollars in funding and the growth doesn't seem to

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be stopping anytime soon. We were fortunate enough to partner with

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Arcadia funds which is a private credit

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fund and Venture fund. That's both an equity and debt

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partner of ours and we actually just recently closed on

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a new hundred million facility that will be announcing officially

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over the next couple months. We

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were successful given that we were able to look at all of our

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historical data and the fact that we've financed since Inception

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close to 250 million dollars in receivables with

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zero losses and that was I think the driving factor

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between being able for us to graduate from 100 million

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dollar facility to a new hundred million dollar

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facility, but one which has sufficient availability for

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us to scale Jacob says Markle Financial will continue to

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focus on helping Latin American Business to grow with working

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capital, but now it will focus on hoping American

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businesses transact easier with their clients. So let's

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talk about the future. I mean you guys have a bright future

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Of you you guys have only been doing this for two years, but you guys have had

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so much success. What's the future hold for Marco? The

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future is really driving towards I would

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see two main themes that we see as opportunities in

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the market one is really being an operating system

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for businesses. Additionally. We starting to provide a product for

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the US buyers that trade with Latin American

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exporters so that they can ultimately give the benefit to their

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suppliers of getting more favorable terms and accessing working

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capital through Marco. Jacob says Marco

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Financial has a solution to problems in Latin America,

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his advice to entrepreneurs is to never forget how

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they can help. So I'd say really be passionate about the problem. It's

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something that should be persistent in your mind at all

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times. And that is the best advice that I could give for somebody looking

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to to start a business in South Florida Johnny Fernandez

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the bank news