In 2020, Charlie Correa wanted to do something gloriously uneventful with his money. He wanted to open a CDT, Colombia's fixed-term bank deposit. A saver gives a bank money for a set period; the bank gives the saver a known return. No pitch deck, no token, no drama. Yet Correa's attempt became a three-day tour of the country's financial plumbing.
He compared bank rate tables, only to find that an early number could change before he finished checking the rest. Pandemic movement restrictions added choreography. One day was for requesting a check. Another was for visiting a different bank. A later trip was required to collect the certificate. The investment promised predictability, but buying it felt improvised.
Correa knew this species of inconvenience. He had spent four years at Uber, helping launch UberX in Colombia, the Dominican Republic and Argentina. He then joined DiDi early in its Colombian expansion and ran operations. Mobility had taught him that a familiar service can look permanent right until software makes its awkwardness visible.
“The path has been understanding Colombians' pain points and solving them.”Charlie Correa, translated from Spanish
The promotion that became an exit sign
Correa's leap did not begin with a cinematic resignation. It began with a promotion. At DiDi, he was offered a larger regional role. He was 30, leading a substantial operation and earning more than he expected to earn as a new founder. He had also made himself a private promise: when the corporate ladder offered another inviting rung, he would know it was time to climb off.
He declined and agreed to stay two months while the company found his replacement. The countdown gave him urgency before it gave him an idea. Sixty days became 59, then 58. He wanted to build for Latin America's middle class, but the category was still open. Education, food and finance all looked unsettled in the pandemic. The maddening CDT errand kept returning to mind.
Correa is an industrial engineer with a master's degree in engineering, and his instinct was to count before he proclaimed. He studied what people typed into search engines: queries about Bancolombia CDTs, rates, definitions and which CDT offered a better return. The demand was hiding in plain sight, distributed among customers who could not easily see all their choices at once.
How an errand became a marketplace
First, carry the paperwork
The early version of MejorCDT was less an app than a pair of determined couriers. Correa and co-founder David Susa handled the errands for their first customers themselves. They drove across Bogota, visited homes, found copy machines, waited in branches, made deposits and returned with proof of investment. The founders absorbed the inconvenience before asking software to remove it.
This was field research with parking problems. It revealed which steps genuinely mattered, which existed through habit and which could be joined with a little ingenuity. When a bank lacked electronic signatures, the answer was not to pretend the obstacle had vanished. The team sent the form to the customer's home with the humble equipment the process still required, including an ink pad and a pen.
The lesson is easy to admire and harder to practice: a founder can learn more from being the temporary process than from drawing the permanent one. Manual work makes the exceptions impossible to ignore. It also creates sympathy for the customer, who does not experience “legacy infrastructure.” The customer experiences Tuesday being wasted.
A marketplace with two customers
MejorCDT compares rates from financial institutions and enables users to open a CDT remotely. The money goes to the chosen institution, not to MejorCDT. The saver pays no platform fee; participating banks pay the marketplace for bringing them customers. Correa's consumer promise is legibility. You should know how much you can earn before choosing where to place your savings.
On the other side sit banks that need deposits to fund lending. Large institutions can rely on branches, brand recognition and broad sales organizations. Smaller institutions have fewer ways to reach savers. A digital marketplace gives them distribution without asking them to build another street-corner network. Better visibility can produce more competition for deposits, which is precisely what a rate shopper wants.
The company has also worked on the rigidity implied by “fixed term.” Its CDT Flexible service allows an eligible customer to sell part of a deposit before maturity under specified conditions. There is something nicely mischievous about making a fixed product more flexible, but the serious point is customer trust. People hesitate to lock away money when an emergency might require it.
The marketplace also changes the geography of the transaction. Correa has described customers in Riohacha opening CDTs with institutions in Popayan, and people in Pasto investing with banks in Barranquilla. A branch network once defined the available menu. A digital comparison layer lets the saver begin with rate, term and confidence instead of proximity. For the bank, a customer outside its physical footprint becomes reachable. For the customer, the local branch is no longer the edge of the market. The distance remains on the map, but it disappears from the errand.
The growth arrived in layers. Luable, the company behind MejorCDT, entered Y Combinator's Summer 2021 batch. Correa has said the founders spoke with more than 100 investors while raising their first million dollars. The recurring question was geographic: why begin in Colombia rather than the larger markets of Mexico or Brazil? His answer lived in the initial frustration. Colombia already had the product, the savers and the banks. What it lacked was a clean meeting place.
The operator's version of conviction
Correa talks about persistence without polishing it into a poster. After an investor says no, he says, the practical move is to stand up, call the next one and continue as if nothing happened. He does not claim founders are unaware of their idea's weaknesses. Usually, they know the list more intimately than the critic does. Conviction comes from having inspected the flaws at close range.
His management principles are similarly specific. A financial company cannot lie to customers because it is handling both their money and their confidence. Work should be good enough to make its makers proud. Resourcefulness matters because banks do not modernize on a startup's schedule. These are less like slogans than constraints for operating in a regulated, trust-heavy category.
“A successful company cannot deceive the customer. We are playing with their money and their trust.”Charlie Correa, translated from Spanish
The figures by March 2026 suggest the method traveled. MejorCDT said it had more than 550,000 users, aggregated more than 11 financial institutions and had generated over COP 120 billion in returns for users. The company had also appointed longtime operator Omar Casas as general manager for Colombia, giving Correa's creation another layer of leadership as it considered regional growth.
Ringo Starr meets the regulator
There is one piece of the old system Correa has chosen not to disrupt: his mustache. It appeared gradually, then became a calling card. Colleagues at LATAM Airlines nicknamed him Ringo Starr. Years later, Correa joked that shaving had become professionally inconvenient because people in financial regulation recognized him by it. Brand strategists charge handsomely for less memorable outcomes.
The detail fits a founder who is serious without insisting on solemnity. He plays tennis early, often before messages begin arriving. He visits his grandmother in Armenia and likes to work remotely there when possible. He has said he wants to go to space. The aspiration sounds extravagant beside a company built around fixed-term deposits, which may be exactly why it works. A person can care about the dependable return and still look up.
The bigger return
Correa's ambition for MejorCDT is broader than putting an old certificate inside a new interface. He wants more Latin American middle-class savers to participate, and more banks to compete for their deposits. Access begins with a clear comparison, continues with a process that can be completed from home and survives only if the institution keeps the user's confidence.
His personal measure is different. Correa attended public school after his family experienced a financial reversal. He has said he wants students from public schools, including people without privileged access to education, to believe they can create companies that matter. The biography is not presented as destiny. It is offered as permission.
That may be MejorCDT's telling metaphor. A return looks small when it is hidden in a rate table. Make it visible, give it time and allow ordinary people to choose, and the arithmetic begins to compound. Correa did not invent the CDT. He noticed how much of its value was being lost between the customer and the counter.