The first business Juan Diego Galvez tried to repair did not move money across borders. It sold Doritos. He was 15, working a summer at a hotel his family owned on Panama's Pacific coast, and he was bored by the prescribed tour of operations. Then he noticed the gift shop was losing money. Galvez proposed a deal to his father: let him run it, and if he made it profitable, he would keep 10 percent of the earnings. He watched what the hotel's roughly 400 employees wanted from the shop, stocked the snacks and soft drinks they could not find in the staff kitchen, and turned a dull assignment into a small lesson in incentives.
The episode is almost comically modest beside his present work. As co-founder and CEO of PayCaddy, Galvez deals in card issuing, digital wallets, payment processing, identity checks and the dozens of permissions that stand between a neat product demo and money that actually moves. Yet the teenage shop and the fintech platform share a method: look past the official description of a system, notice where people are stuck, then rebuild the operations around what they need.
PayCaddy calls itself fintech as a service. A bank, lender, retailer, crypto exchange or software company can use its APIs or white-label tools to launch a credit, debit or prepaid card program. PayCaddy supplies parts that are expensive and slow to assemble alone: Mastercard connectivity, BIN sponsorship, processing, wallets, customer onboarding, compliance and monitoring. The visible object may be a piece of plastic. The product is the choreography beneath it.
Raised for banking, restless for technology
Galvez was born and raised in Panama in an entrepreneurial family. His father was a banker, and business arrived early: meetings at 15, practical responsibilities, summers spent learning how work moved through a hotel. He absorbed a stern but durable lesson from watching his father: good periods and bad periods both pass, while discipline is what carries a person between them.
There was an expected route available. Study in the United States, pass through investment banking, return to a family enterprise or a local financial institution. Galvez did study at New York University from 2013 to 2017, earning a degree in innovation, entrepreneurship and technology. But the conventional banking ladder did not appeal to him. He liked the future-facing quality of technology and wanted to build something of his own.
Payments offered the junction. Starting in 2016, he worked on electronic and cross-border payments, with later biographies naming Sia Partners, Ingenico ePayments and Worldpay among the companies he collaborated with. The work made sense to him quickly: settlement, card networks, operating risk, the strange industrial backstage of a transaction. When college friends asked what they should read to understand fintech, Galvez gave them a decidedly unglamorous answer.
“If you want to be good in fintech, learn banking straight up.”Juan Diego Galvez, 2025
It is an operator's answer. Technology can improve a financial process only after someone understands what the process protects, who bears the risk and where the money rests at each moment. A clean interface is not a substitute for that knowledge. It is what good knowledge eventually permits.
02 / The geography of a productPanama as a feature, not a footnote
PayCaddy was founded in 2018. From the beginning, Galvez wanted to build it in Panama, even though Brazil, Mexico and Colombia offered larger markets and more venture attention. His reasoning was structural. Panama uses the US dollar, has a long-established services economy and sits at a commercial crossroads. For a business built around international settlement, dollar-based cards and customers that cross national boundaries, those details can reduce foreign-exchange friction and give the headquarters a regional logic.
The choice also imposed a cost. There was no local playbook for the infrastructure PayCaddy wanted to build. Regulatory pathways were unclear. Connections to global card schemes were not waiting on a shelf. Galvez describes the early years as a period of reading banking law, working with banks and designing the company to be trustworthy before a specific supervisory route was settled.
The quiet middle: a simplified card-program flow
That work became formal in 2023. Panama's Superintendency of Banks registered PayCaddy as an electronic-money issuer and as an issuer of debit, credit and prepaid cards. The regulator specifies that card issuers and processors on its list are supervised for anti-money-laundering, counter-terrorist-financing and related obligations. The precision matters. In financial infrastructure, credibility is built from the exact scope of a permission, not a loose claim that a company is “regulated.”
The company now presents itself as a Mastercard Technology Partner and offers two main doors into its system. Technical teams can build their own customer experience against a REST API, webhooks and a sandbox. Teams without developers can use an existing white-label interface. Both paths lead to the same difficult middle: onboarding a cardholder, checking identity, setting up a wallet, choosing a funding model and issuing a physical or virtual card.
PayCaddy sells weeks at the front end because it spent years absorbing complexity at the back end. Speed is the visible product. Institutional patience is the ingredient.
Eighteen months, then fewer than two
Before Y Combinator, PayCaddy raised money from family offices and early believers. Galvez has said the first round took nearly 18 months. Central America did not offer the density of venture firms or the valuation conventions familiar in the United States. The team had to show substantial traction while explaining both the company and the market around it.
Selection for Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch changed the frame. Investors began to see PayCaddy as a globally legible infrastructure company, not simply a startup from a small country. Its next round came together in under two months. The contrast offers a clean lesson in signaling: validation did not write the code or secure the permissions, but it compressed the time outsiders needed to understand the bet.
The company's ambition remained regional. PayCaddy serves businesses that want to offer dollar-based financial products across Latin America and the Caribbean. Its website lists banks, retailers, marketplaces, wealth managers and crypto businesses among the intended customers. A medium-sized bank that cannot justify building a complete issuing stack can rent the capabilities. A software company can embed a wallet. A cross-border platform can let a user spend from a dollar-backed card.
The product is what disappears
In one example, Galvez explains a remittance by describing the costly choreography behind a simple transfer: cash collected in one place, liquidity maintained in another, teams reconciling positions and managing exchange rates. New rails can reduce time and operating cost, but the usefulness is not in novelty alone. It appears when a friend can receive money faster, when a business can reconcile without an army, or when a transaction across countries feels local.
This helps explain his resistance to building another consumer finance app. The app wins attention; the infrastructure survives attention. PayCaddy's job is to make the hard layers repeatable enough that many companies can create their own experience on top. Its clients keep their brand. PayCaddy occupies the middle, where compliance checks, authorizations, alerts, balances and settlement have to agree.
“We wanted to build the rails upon which others could innovate and scale.”Juan Diego Galvez, 2025
There is also an appealing modesty in a company whose success can look like nothing happening. The card activates. The alert arrives. The purchase clears. The customer does not need to know which API call, license or monitoring rule made it possible. Good infrastructure is thanked mainly when it fails, which gives its builders a peculiar professional ambition: disappear reliably.
05 / The next cyclePlanning in 18-month horizons
Galvez avoids a theatrical five-year prophecy. He has said PayCaddy plans in 18-to-24-month cycles because financial technology changes quickly. In 2025, he described the next set of goals plainly: prepare for a larger institutional financing round, strengthen compliance, refine product design, deepen partnerships and move annual processing volume from hundreds of millions of dollars toward billions.
The customer set is meant to span old finance and new. Banks still need modern card products. Neobanks and blockchain-based platforms need regulated access to familiar payment networks. Companies in the United States or Europe want entry into Latin America; Latin American businesses want dollar-based services that travel outward. PayCaddy's cross-border identity is less a slogan than the consequence of where it was built.
Galvez has also extended his operating experience into Wolf Advisory, where he is listed as a co-founder and partner focused on fintech operations, product development and processing. The work is adjacent to PayCaddy's original problem: financial institutions possess deep systems, dense rules and expensive complexity. Someone has to translate between the architecture and the business decision.
The teenage gift shop returns here as more than a charming preface. Galvez did not escape operations; he found progressively more elaborate versions of them. The snacks became payment instruments. The hotel staff became a regional network of cardholders and institutions. The percentage of earnings became the economics of processing. Every step increased the stakes, but the question stayed intact: what does this system need to do, and why is it not doing it yet?
His answer is neither a shiny card nor a heroic founder pose. It is a layer in the middle, deliberately built in Panama, that lets someone else launch the thing customers see. In a business culture addicted to visibility, Galvez has chosen the backstage. The work is technical, regulated and often slow. If he succeeds, using it will feel quick.