As fintech matures under tighter capital and closer supervision, the companies that endure will be the ones that can translate strategy into a compliant, scalable operating model, an edge shaped by Daniel Villar’s work across the U.S. and Latin America.
For more than a decade, fintech has sold itself as a story of technological disruption. Startups promised to unbundle banks, eliminate friction, and reinvent financial services with code. In the process, billions of dollars flowed into digital wallets, challenger banks, and payments platforms across the world.
Today, that narrative is quietly being rewritten. As capital tightens and regulators assert more control, the industry’s defining challenge is no longer product innovation. It is execution.
“In regulated markets, the limiting factor is almost never technology,” says Daniel Villar, a strategy and operating leader who has worked across banking, payments, and fintech in the United States and Latin America. “It is the ability to turn strategy into a compliant, scalable operating model that actually works in the real world.”
Villar’s career sits squarely in this reality: the place where ambitious ideas meet regulation, risk controls, and operational complexity. As a key leader for the SoftBank-backed unicorn Ualá, Villar spearheaded the complex operational strategy to secure the group’s first regulated financial services license to operate in Colombia.
In a regulatory environment where the rules were being written in real-time, Villar’s ability to align legal constraints with aggressive product roadmaps established a precedent for Ualá’s approach in the region.
“You cannot scale a financial platform the way you scale a consumer app,” Villar says. “The moment you touch deposits, payments, or credit, you are operating inside a system that is designed to move slowly and prioritize stability.”
The effort in Colombia required not just securing authorization, but building an organization from scratch. “Everyone talks about regulatory risk in abstract terms,” he notes. “But when you are trying to launch a real institution, regulation becomes a design problem. It shapes your timelines, your hiring, your product features, and your capital needs.”
That lesson is now being relearned across the industry. As the market shifts from growth-first experimentation to operational durability, Villar observes that transformation work inside banks and fintechs has changed.
“There’s much less patience for strategies that take five years to show results,” he says. “Executives and investors want measurable impact within months.”
Villar, who has led large-scale transformation work for banks and fintechs, including consulting experience at McKinsey & Company, describes a new emphasis on targeted interventions: cost efficiency, vendor consolidation, payments modernization, and data infrastructure that can support compliance at scale.
For example, in one recent modernization effort for a global payments organization, Villar helped design an operating model that delivered more than $40M in annualized savings. This was achieved not through simple cost-cutting, but through a redesign of how the business embedded technology into workflows and payment processes.
“Execution is where value is either created or destroyed,” he says. “You can have the right strategic thesis and still fail if you can’t implement it at scale.”
This trend is being amplified by Artificial Intelligence. While much of the market treats AI as a creative tool for generating content or code, Villar argues its critical role is in “boring” operational rigor: fraud detection, reconciliation, and regulatory reporting.
“AI is no longer optional for execution at scale,” Villar explains. “When you are processing millions of transactions, human teams simply cannot keep up. The winners will be the firms that use AI to monitor controls, surface exceptions, and automate reconciliation and reporting in near real time.”
For Villar, the proper use of AI is the bridge between speed and safety. It allows fintechs to maintain startup velocity while adhering to bank-grade controls, without scaling headcount in parallel with complexity.
Perhaps Villar’s most interesting view is that regulatory engagement is a competitive advantage, not just a constraint. “Regulation is part of the product,” Villar argues. “If you treat it as an afterthought, it will eventually become your biggest bottleneck.”
Rather than positioning themselves against traditional finance, many of the strongest platforms are increasingly trying to become part of the financial system’s core infrastructure. That shift toward governance, controls, and institutional credibility is reshaping what leadership looks like in the sector.
“The next phase of fintech is not about who builds the flashiest app,” Villar says. “It is about who builds institutions that last.”
In an industry that once defined itself by speed and disruption, that may prove to be the most disruptive change of all.
Spencer Hulse is the Editorial Director at Grit Daily. He is responsible for overseeing other editors and writers, day-to-day operations, and covering breaking news.