a2censo, the Stock Exchange's collaborative financing platform, will be a leading hub in Latin America, says Andrea Mosquera, its director.

Andrea Mosquera has just completed one month as director of a2censo, the collaborative financing or crowdfunding platform of the Colombian Stock Exchange (BVC), which this year celebrates its sixth anniversary. During this time, she has managed to mobilize nearly 112 billion pesos from some 14,800 investors to support 220 business initiatives in Colombia, through 97,860 transactions.

While the platform continues its consolidation process with the development and offering of new products that allow, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), greater and sustained progress in each of its sectors, the company has set a goal: to become the benchmark for collaborative financing in the region. To this end, its management is working on the creation of a hub that brings together financing lines, such as factoring, financial education modules, and the offering of other products focused on helping to boost entrepreneurship.

Mosquera, an industrial engineer with a master's degree in Innovation for Business Development, told EL TIEMPO that the project is already in its preliminary phase, where they are making progress on the conceptual design . Next year, the entire procedural work will be completed, and the initial testing and implementation phases will be carried out in the three countries (Colombia, Chile, and Peru).

First, I'd like to mention that I've been with a2censo since this platform launched almost six years ago, and I've seen its evolution. One of the challenges, without a doubt, is continuing with the strategy of growth, consolidation, and sustainability. At the beginning of 2025, we conducted a process of resignation and selection with the team to determine what we were aiming for and what we would prioritize to continue this path of growth.

We needed to focus on process optimization and improving the user experience, because when you have a 100 percent virtual platform, online in the cloud, and available 24/7, this is essential. Also, everything related to financial education, which is a huge challenge, needs to continue exploring and exploiting both for companies, which are the issuers on the platform, and for investors, mostly ordinary people. In addition to this, we need to consolidate our debt line, which has provided us with early wins. The big challenge here is how we take care of that portfolio and maintain an acceptable interest rate.

There, we're going to promote and prioritize two new lines of business: equity and convertible notes, which encompass the entire capital component. In this area, in particular, there's a strong appetite from companies to launch convertible equity campaigns. Therefore, we want to strengthen these two lines of business and seek partners in the ecosystem so that the platform becomes a collaborative financing ecosystem that supports companies' entire growth path and generates value for all stakeholders.

It's essential. In our nearly six-year history at a2censo, we've never had a space like this, where we'll be hosting our first online course on basic investment concepts. This is incredibly important when working in a retail market with everyday investors or individuals who don't necessarily have investment experience, providing them with a robust education. We're advancing this idea with the support of EAN University, which has an online platform, EAN X, and the course is free. This is the first step in this major education strategy we have to strengthen this entire value chain.

Significant growth. Let's remember that a2censo is the country's first crowdfunding platform, a segment regulated and supervised by the Financial Superintendency, and it paved the way for others to enter. In this segment—financial crowdfunding—we have a 96 percent share, and this is because there are few players. We have just completed 220 successfully funded campaigns, mobilized nearly 112 billion pesos (about $26 million), and transactions on the platform total 97,860. Our investment community has grown to exceed 14,790 people. In 2019, we started with 300, which demonstrates significant growth.

Among these successful campaigns, we have had participation from 39 microenterprises, 101 small businesses, 39 medium-sized businesses, and 14 large businesses. This product, initially designed to serve MSMEs, has also attracted the interest of large businesses. Among investors, the vast majority—14,633 individuals and 9,191 legal entities—are involved.

Toward a focus on strengthening our regional expansion strategy, now that we are part of nuam, a regional holding company for Colombia, Chile, and Peru, which plays an important role in revenue sources. Thus, a2censo must be the benchmark for collaborative financing in the region, and to that end, we have been working this year on the creation of a regional financing hub whose objective is to be a leading financial ecosystem in Latin America.

The whole issue of financing lines, such as crowdfunding, also a product we have in Chile (ScaleX) aimed at slightly larger companies, factoring, and a very important specific line, a CVC (Corporate Venture Capital), in addition to everything that has to do with financial education and promoting the regional ecosystem to give visibility to all our companies and those success stories in other countries to continue attracting investors from the region. All of this in parallel with continuing to promote new business lines of shares and convertible notes, which are innovative. There is no such product in Colombia or in Latin America, so we must take advantage of it.

We are currently in the preliminary phase, advancing the conceptual design, defining the lines I just mentioned and that will be central to the hub. The plan is to begin working on the procedural aspects and the initial implementation phases next year (2026), conducting the experimental process in the three countries (Colombia, Chile, and Peru).

They're hot off the press; we just need approval from the Superintendency of Finance, which would take between one and three months, so we hope to be up and running with that product this year. In fact, we already have eight companies interested in accessing these convertible notes. We want to begin implementing everything related to artificial intelligence for financial risk analysis so that these processes are extremely effective. In regulatory terms, we are fine-tuning issues so that more players, more companies, and more investors can access collaborative financing. Very importantly, we've been making progress with the Superintendency of Finance and the Financial Regulation Unit (URF) to build this secondary market, and we're already developing a trading platform similar to that market, which we hope to have open next year.