digital entrepreneur since 1997 ≫ building a fintech in public
Floripa
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six months live. and Dolafy is skyrocketing.
1) over 200 clients live. onboarding 5 new businesses per day (from ~10 daily leads).
we haven't really nailed any distribution channel, and counterintuitively, signups keep happening non-stop
it really feels like a snowball effect. we started onboarding a few friends' businesses, they recommended others, and so on...
onboarding is still the slowest part of the process, but we are fighting really hard to make it as smooth as possible
how? with our AI agents and a whole new level of never-seen-before automation
2) Mark
when a customer onboards Dolafy, we now have 2 fantastic AI agents doing a really cool job for them
first Mark, our compliance agent, he starts screening clients as soon as they submit their docs
Mark reads everything and tries to understand whatever the customer uploaded/typed
(it takes around 15 minutes to check a business, from identifying if it really exists, if numbers make sense, to searching for adverse media related to the business and its owners - it's AMAZING to watch)
if not satisfied, Mark will request more docs/answers right away for the customers
when new docs are uploaded, it goes straight back to Mark, which will analyze them again
(Mark is ready to deal with hundreds of customers at the same time)
this is a really simplified explanation of his job, but there's a really complex compliance setup happening in the background, fully AI-driven and in-house built by myself
if any red flags are found, Mark opens a case for a human to analyze (hello!)
or if all good, with our approval, he sends the case to Helly, our onboard agent, and she'll take it from there
3) Helly
she decides what's the best bank for our client, depending on numerous factors like niche, incorporation country (and state, if in the US), etc
Crossriver Bank? JP Morgan? HSBC? Citi? Erebor? Banking Circle? Helly knows what's best for each client, and will open a virtual bank account there
partner bank asked for more docs? no problem, Helly will contact the customer right away and ask
after approved, she'll inform the client so they can finally start moving money crossborder
but the automation doesn't stop there. client needs to send/receive money from a different country?
they just click one button at our dashboard and Helly will get them a virtual account in that specific currency (EUR, AED, GBP, BRL, etc)
4) other robots
- Harmony: managing our marketing, editing landing pages, ads campaigns, email funnels, all through Slack
- Burd: news guy, he keeps us informed about everything that happens to any partners we use (for security, new products, etc)
- Casey: tracks our to-dos, if we miss any important task, she'll follow up with us next morning to make sure we don't miss it
- Dylan: our finance agent, not yet implemented, but he'll be in charge of invoices, expenses, revenue, etc
- Natalie: she's able to read and answer emails, interact on the live chat, and other support stuff
(she's not active yet, as we still like to talk directly to our customers at this stage)
5) ... and 2 humans
myself and my partner are the only not-so-AI managing Dolafy, a bootstrapped neobank
even though we are profitable and could hire someone, there's really no need right now
all tasks are being handled really really well by our team of agents, and whenever we see a task being repeated too often, we just automate it
2 persons will always be there, managing the 7 agents we have in place, and doing whatever tasks are still not replaceable by robots
(after all, fintech is a strictly regulated industry, and we still need to follow a bunch of AML rules)
but in my opinion, this is a huge shift on how businesses can be managed in 2026 - the true potential of AI at work
pretty cool right?
so yeah... stay tuned for more news about the first AI-first fintech ever built on planet earth!
PS: we now have a really cool office in Floripa! let us know if you are around and need an international bank you can trust for your business
5 months building the most popular fintech on X
(at least for a few days)
1) controversy got us views, popularity, and better deals. who would’ve thought…
our recent Cards issue with Rain got a lot of exposure within the whole fintech community
companies shared my screenshot internally on their Slack, and many approached us offering “better” deals
we had probably over 30 calls just because of that tweet, most unrelated to Cards, but still very useful, like other founders (and VC’s) curious to know more about us
i’ve built automated stuff my whole life just so i don’t have to take calls, but now with Dolafy, each meeting can actually bring us cool insights and connections, so i ended up changing my mindset - after decades
talking about meetings, i was really impressed by the hustling spirit from stripe OR privy OR bridge (i don’t even know the difference anymore)
we were contacted by 6 of their employees offering to help us (not cold msgs, but genuine approaches from non-sales people)
if one day we have to hire humans at Dolafy, i will guide them from day 1 to spend at least a few hours a day on X - this is a gold mine for good-quality clients
(i just promoted Dolafy to good client i guess)
anyway, the incident was very helpful for us (and hopefully helped Rain internally as well)
i will call this mess: the mushroom strategy. you shitpost in public and beautiful mushrooms will arise from it
2) we decided to apply for FinCEN’s Money Services Business (MSB) registration
it should help us onboard our clients faster (so we can do our own KYB, which i’m really excited about) and also become a more legit neobank
but the process is boring AF. creating PDFs is already a pain in the ass, now imagine creating long PDFs for the government?
it’s the first time we’ve gotten slow at a process - and it’s partly our own fault coz we decided to do it ourselves instead of hiring a firm
but tbh, i really think it’s important we do it so we can learn how the process works
if you just pay someone, how can you deeply understand how the rules work? and that’s basically what a fintech is: a legal/license game.
3) our own numbers are becoming chaotic
we focus full time on improving our clients’ experience - and it’s clearly working: they are bringing more volume and recommending to other companies
but at the same time, we are losing a little bit of control over our own numbers
this happens because we keep adding new rails all the time (really fast), and sometimes we miss configuring the fees properly
for example: client wants checkout in PIX? we add it. client wants to pay employees in Thailand? we add it. client wants to receive USDT via Tron? we add it. client wants to buy Bitcoin with their balance? we add it.
now good luck reconciling all that while doing customer support, taking calls, reading contracts, and most importantly, making sure our system is super safe
so we just end up prioritizing the client experience instead of our own profitability, which is fine in the beginning IMO. we are still profitable anyway
(actually, i might need to double check on that)
4) it’s time to play a bigger game: investments
most of our clients came from Wise and Payoneer, as they had bad experiences with having their money held hostage for months (which we are fully against)
and Dolafy is working marvelously for international banking and card payments - we are moving millions per month for our clients without issues
and as we are gaining their trust, i think it’s time to offer them something else: a way to invest their Dolafy balance
if we are disrupting broken digital banks, why not also go after legacy brokerage firms?
as a business owner, i know how terrible the onboarding and support experience is at IBKR-style websites, and i think we can do much better than that
so my goal for this month is to make it easy for our clients to grow their money using reliable and modern stablecoin chains
(i probably should start using different words here, but we don’t really have a lawyer to tell us what to do, so i’ll just stick to being myself)
and that's it
now if you excuse me, i need to:
understand why Meta is taking longer than 48hs to settle card payments, figure out how to get FAST Payments in Turkey, implement SWIFT payments to South Korea, fix an error when exporting CSV statements, check the email copy of our KYB-approved flow for US orgs, teach DOLA how to identify bugs from Axiom logs, calculate payout fees for AED banks, ask our partner why GBP accounts are taking so long to open, prepare Redis to process checkout payments in volume, create the invoice billing product, identify the user’s timezone to stop sending emails late at night… and probably 30 more tasks to finish today
anyway, thx for following my journey of building a neobank fintech in public
(fully AI-driven, with 2 humans and no external capital)
cheers
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I worked at Citibank from 2004–2010
been researching the banking system in detail ever since
and yet im still only halfway thru understanding the US Dollar System flow…
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I just reached 1 million lines of code written for Dolafy
my co-founder asked why we spend so little on AI
even though we have 8 AI agents running 24x7 for onboarding, compliance, finance, marketing, etc
(plus all the code I write daily to make Dolafy work)
guess our total AI bill?
US$ 300/mo (Claude and OpenAI)
pretty great ROI eh?
how much do you spend?
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Eduardo Borges retweeted
Getting lunch with more amazing builders from the Silicon Island (Floripa, Brazil)!
@duborges @zanon1guilherme @theZeugh
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you dont have adhd
what you have is shitty sleep and dumb distractions
(aka problems you create for yourself)
do everything you can in order to improve your sleep, that’s your daily most important priority
your productivity and life quality will naturally become much better as consequence from all decisions you had to take in order to sleep better
nothing should ever impact your hardware’s recharging period
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it took me months of research to be confident enough to offer any yield product for our customers
i've been in this industry long enough to know all the risks a wrong protocol carries
happy to finally offer our customers yield on their dolarized balance
just access Dashboard > Earn and deposit your sacred USDC on the vault and start accumulating those billionsssss
Morpho is live at Dolafy.
Your business balance can now earn yield daily, with no lock-up period, at up to 5% APY.
Just go to Dashboard > Earn and deposit USDC into our secure vault to start earning via @Morpho.
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this is a real problem with banking in Europe
you should be able to receive deposits and send payments whenever you want, right?
well, not exactly…
a bank might require an invoice or contract to verify the transaction’s legitimacy anytime they want
and if you dont have a way to prove it (like this donation for GrapheneOS), they will block the payment (and sometimes your whole balance)
imo these rules just make it more painful for legit companies to operate - while real criminals know exactly how to circumvent it
submitting RFI’s (request for information) on 1000 EUR deposits might sound ridiculous, but here we are…
follow the rules or get sued by the EU
We need the person who recently sent a 1000 EUR donation via Wise to contact us via email with their full name so we can get Wise to unfreeze the payment. We regularly run into this issue with Wise but it's usually for small donations such as a 5 EUR one which got returned today.
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stress and chaos was important to get us where we are
but i agree with Elon, it’s time to change that now for a future of abundance
everybody should have a better life if we 100x our technology development
life will have a different meaning once each person is able to do what its personalities needs them to, not what pay the bills
we’ll be able to cure diseases and to end most of the physical and mental violence against our own
(as no more chaos will be needed for progress)
do try your best to stay alive for the next 10 years
i promise you the Simulation will be amazing
stay tuned for more updates
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can someone explain me how Warren Buffet has contributed to this world?
Today, as Warren steps down as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, I am thinking about his lasting impact. Warren believed in Apple before anyone else, and we will never forget it. Thank you Warren and congratulations to Howard, who will be a wonderful chairman.
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Big Beautiful Intelligence
Many people think that the words “Artificial Intelligence” are inaccurate, and very ineloquent, relative to AI, or Artificial Intelligence. A far more elegant and accurate description of this new phenomena would be Superior Intelligence (SI) or, Extreme Intelligence (EI) or, Supreme Intelligence (SI). This is a Poll, and I would appreciate everybody voting! Which is the best name for this ever growing “Revolution?” President DONALD J. TRUMP
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WEEKEND SITUATION: Jev decided that the US should control Greenland in case Russia attacks Switzerland because the EU fined Putin for using a pirated version of Windows that he purchased from a Chinese employee working for Airwallex.
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i've been fighting against this my whole life
companies grow, hire more people, then slowly start inventing work to justify all the people they hired
then those people need something to do, so they create processes, policies, meetings and rules
then more people are hired to manage those rules
and even more to make sure everyone follows them
eventually, the company becomes a giant game of creating rules, managing rules and following rules
...while almost nothing useful is actually being built
(Europe is very good at this game)
if you're wasting your life inside this machine: rebel!
go build something useful for your community or the world - you're better than that
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the worst companies we’ve had calls so far are the ones that don’t know which products to offer us
they join the call and start showing a bunch of random products
i mean, what the hell do you sell exactly? do you even understand what my business is about?
many are demoing this swiss knife company that instead of making them more money, just moves their company further from closing sales
it’s fine to have multiple products, we have that at Dolafy too
but whenever we enter a call with a prospect, we already know which feature they need the most
for example, if we do calls with MoR companies, we show them our API for transfers
if we talk to an import/export biz, we show them the international banks and currencies we offer
if we talk to media buyers, we focus on our credit cards
if we talk to companies selling products to younger generation, we show them our crypto checkout
if we talk to the rich founders trying to keep their money safe from legacy banks, we show our earn/invest products
and so on
it happened SO MANY TIMES that we jumped in a call with another fintech trying to offer us their services
and after 30 mins we left with no clue of what they actually offered us…
please do your homework of what I need before trying to sell me something
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it's pretty great being able to code on codex and asking claude code to review (or vice-versa)
each AI company has their own training methods, so one might find bugs the other didn't
i usually do 2-3 back and forth between models, until the feature is ready to ship, super power
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as we grow, more fraudsters try to onboard Dolafy
so i created a really cool system using AI to detect fake documents
it's really wonderful seeing Helly, our onboard agent, flagging a suspected-fabricated PDF
minor details that humans would sure miss, she's able to detect, and ask the customer for more documents
and most of the time, they'll end up uploading another fake document, making it easier for us to reject the application
fun fact: most of the frauds we get have some sort of connection to Africa... who would have guessed?
PS: dear crooks, please find another place to do banking with, Dolafy's risk appetite is not that high to onboard you, sorry and good luck out there
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almost missed the deadline but here it is: Arc is now live at Dolafy
our clients will soon be able to hold balance not only in USDC but also EURC (under @circle’s new blockchain, @arc)
and their agents will have a safe bank to operate without the headache of legacy digital banks (can I use that term already?)
very glad to be part of the Circle Alliance and deploying our first Arc wallets since day one!
Our goal is to make it simple for our clients (and their agents) to move money anywhere, fast.
That’s why Dolafy is ready for @arc since day one.
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import & export is a really tough industry to offer banking products
since we launched @dolafycom we’ve been trying to enter that niche, but what a nightmare
we have around 10 customers today dealing with food export and related trades, but it’s never an easy process to help them get paid
the unreliability of not knowing if a payment will arrive on the estimate date OR if one of the banks will put an RFI holding the operation for weeks is a bitch
at the same time, food trading is probably one of the most important markets in the world
i hope one day we can proudly say: we make the life of legit import & export companies much easier
banking & infra partners serving that industry: we are all ears
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hold on
so you are telling me all i had to do was incorporating in Cheese land?
good bye mr trump, we are leaving
There is an insane loophole that makes Nu Global possible
Nu Global is not a bank. Not deposit-insured
Swiss law says: if a bank guarantees repayment + interest, the money is not a “deposit.” So a non-bank Swiss company can hold it
The catch: they can only market in Switzerland. You “came to them.” Reverse solicitation
One Swiss book. 35 countries. No local license. You don’t even own the coins. You own a claim on Nu Global AG
That’s how you custody globally without opening a bank everywhere
Genius. Might become the new standard for stablecoin neobanking
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thx for sharing our story, @lightspark
(and for keeping our clients happy)
lightspark.com/customers/dol…
Two bootstrapped founders from Brazil went live on Lightspark in five days.
Six months later @dolafycom has 200+ businesses on the platform, onboards five new businesses a day, and is profitable.
What they run on our open infrastructure:
> USD in from any US bank
> USDC out to the wallet their customer picks
> one API for fiat and stablecoins
@duborges on the five-day build:
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our happiest clients are the ones coming from those digital banks
having your business account balance held hostage can be a really traumatic experience...
come to dolafy, we are on your side
"What are the benefits of using Dolafy instead of payoneer/wise/revolut?"
Glad you asked
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