Navigating Fintech Innovation During the Pandemic

Here’s the thing. Payments only look simple from the outside. In this Tech Talks Daily episode, I sit down with Roberto “Reks” Kafati, CEO and co-founder of DEUNA, to unpack how a scrappy one-click checkout idea grew into an intelligent payments infrastructure that now touches a large slice of Mexico’s online economy. 

Reks explains why Latin America’s high decline rates aren’t just an inconvenience but a growth killer, and how DEUNA’s early focus on orchestration and checkout opened the door to something bigger. When a region routinely sees more than four out of ten online transactions knocked back, the bar for reliability sits in a different place. That practical problem set the stage for what came next.

Athia, Real-Time Decisions, and 638 Signals per Transaction

DEUNA’s pivot point came when merchants asked a fair question. With all this payment data flying through the system, what should we do with it? The answer is Athia, DEUNA’s AI-powered layer that watches every transaction and feeds merchants real-time insight, routing choices, and suggested actions.

It is not another dashboard you promise to check and then ignore by Friday. It is a reasoning engine that sits on top of 638 data points per transaction and turns mess into movement. That is how you recover revenue without punishing good customers with extra friction, how you avoid surprise fees from networks, and how you protect recurring revenue when a processor wobbles. Reks walks us through results that speak plainly.

Ramped merchants saw conversion lift from the original one-click experience. The infrastructure tier recovers meaningful GMV and trims fees. Enterprise clients report double-digit ROI and stick around for the compounding effect.

Building Through Adversity and Betting on the Right Layer

What resonated most was the human story behind the metrics. DEUNA was born in the first months of the pandemic, shaped by the shock that hit real-world businesses when revenue fell off a cliff and marketplaces became a lifeline with strings attached. Reks shares an unvarnished look at a tough 2023, the kind of year founders rarely talk about on record.

Revenues dipped, deals went sideways, life got complicated. The team chose resilience and doubled down on a two-year vision. That bet is paying off. Over the past twenty-four months the company has grown at a pace that would bend a chart, and the focus has shifted from commoditizing orchestration to productizing intelligence. Put simply, earn trust at checkout, then make the data work for the merchant in real time.

Agentic Commerce, US Expansion, and What Comes Next

We also look forward. If chat interfaces begin to mediate more buying decisions, merchants will need infrastructure that can think, not just connect endpoints. That is the territory DEUNA calls intelligent infrastructure, and it is where Athia operates every day. 

The company is now in active conversations with major US retailers, confident after winning head-to-head enterprise evaluations. Reks frames the opportunity without hype. If you can see acceptance trends by processor, by country, by card type, and act in the moment, you keep customers, protect margins, and avoid death by a thousand false declines. If you cannot, competitors will gladly welcome your frustrated shoppers.

If you care about the real mechanics of growth, this conversation is for you. We talk conversion lift, recovered revenue, and the gritty bits of building a payments company that merchants actually rely on. We also talk about the days that test your resolve and the tenth day that reminds you why you started.

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