The App That Makes Banks Compete for Your Savings

In Colombia, the fixed-term deposit has a name savers say with a shrug: the CDT. For decades it worked one way. You walked into your bank, took whatever rate the teller offered, locked your money away, and hoped the number kept pace with inflation. Nobody shopped around, because shopping around meant visiting five branches to ask five people the same question. Luable, a Bogota fintech, looked at that friction and built a marketplace on top of it. Its product, MejorCDT, does the walking for you.

The idea is almost boringly simple, which is usually where the good businesses hide. MejorCDT pulls fixed-term deposit rates from many banks in real time, lines them up side by side, and lets you open the best one from your phone - registration, signature, and payment, all digital, all the way to the bank. Comparing is free. Investing is free. Even withdrawing is free. The savers, in other words, never reach for their wallets. Somebody else does.

The ModelWho actually pays

That somebody is the bank. This is the part worth slowing down for, because it explains everything else. A bank needs deposits - retail funding is the raw material it lends against. The old way to get more of it was expensive: open branches, hire salespeople, print brochures, wait. MejorCDT offers a cheaper channel. A bank lists its rate on the platform and gets access to hundreds of thousands of savers without laying a single brick. Luable takes its cut from the institution that budgeted for growth anyway.

It is a two-sided marketplace, and like all good ones it charges the side that can afford it. For an emerging or regional bank the logic is especially sharp. It cannot out-branch a national giant, but on MejorCDT it does not have to. A bank in a smaller city shows up in the same list, on the same screen, competing on the one number savers actually care about: the rate. Distribution, not branch count, decides who wins the deposit.

There is a second, subtler effect. When rates sit side by side, they stop being a secret. A saver who once accepted whatever their primary bank offered can now see, in a single glance, that the institution three rows down is paying meaningfully more for the same locked term. That transparency does quiet work on the whole market. Banks that want the funding have to post a competitive number, because the customer is no longer captive to a branch they happened to live near. In economics the polite word for what MejorCDT removes is information asymmetry. In plain terms, it stops savers from leaving money on the table without knowing it.

The NumbersWhat it adds up to

Since launching in 2021, MejorCDT has processed more than USD $30 million in deposits routed to partner banks. In August 2024 the company reported crossing $1 million in annual recurring revenue, with hundreds of thousands of registered users and tens of billions of Colombian pesos in returns generated for them. For a product most people would call dull, that is a lot of money quietly changing hands.

The growth also says something about who the customers turned out to be. The obvious assumption would be that a rate-comparison app draws only the financially fluent - people who already read the fine print and chase basis points. In practice the audience is wider. A fixed-term deposit is one of the few investments that is genuinely simple to understand: you put money in, you get a known rate, a government fund stands behind it. That simplicity makes it a natural on-ramp for first-time savers, retirees protecting a lump sum, and anyone who wants a return without the volatility of the stock market. MejorCDT did not have to teach people what a CDT was. It just had to make the good one easy to find.

How It WorksFrom question to deposit

The user experience collapses a week of errands into a few taps. You tell the app how much and for how long. It shows you who pays the most today. You pick, you sign, the money goes straight to the bank. No branch, no queue, no salesperson steering you toward the product that pays their commission rather than your interest.

Behind that simplicity sits a real product surface. There is the simulator itself, which is the front door - the only comparison tool in the market, the company says, that consults live bank rates rather than stale published tables. There is the fully digital account-opening flow, which handles registration, signature, and payment straight to the chosen bank without a branch visit. There are the iOS and Android apps that let people manage a portfolio of deposits from a phone. And there is the bank-facing side of the house, the piece savers never see, where financial institutions plug in, post their rates, and receive funding. Two products, really, sharing one marketplace: a consumer app and an infrastructure layer for banks.

One feature deserves a mention because it pushes against the grain of the category. A fixed-term deposit is, by definition, locked - that is the deal you make for a higher rate. MejorCDT's CDT Flexible lets users pull part of their money out before maturity. It is a small rebellion against the fine print, and the kind of feature that only makes sense once you have decided the customer, not the bank, is the one you answer to. It also addresses the quiet reason many people avoid deposits altogether - the fear of needing the cash and finding it fenced off. Give savers a door out and more of them are willing to walk in.

TrustThe regulation as a feature

Moving strangers' savings requires trust, and Luable found a shortcut that was hiding in plain sight. Colombia has a deposit-guarantee fund called Fogafin. The CDTs sold through MejorCDT sit with regulated banks and are backed by it - the same protection a saver would get walking into a branch, minus the branch. The company also belongs to Colombia Fintech, the country's industry association. None of this is flashy. It is the quiet scaffolding that lets someone hand over real money to an app.

The FoundersAn operator's lens

The company's read on friction is not an accident. CEO Charlie Correa spent his early career inside two of the sharpest logistics machines in the region - he helped launch UberX across Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Argentina, then ran operations for DiDi's Colombian expansion. Ride-hailing is, at bottom, a matching problem wrapped in information asymmetry: connect the person who has the thing with the person who wants it, and strip out the middlemen. Deposits turned out to rhyme. His co-founder, CTO David Susa, is a systems engineer with a master's in information security - a useful background for a company whose product is other people's money.

That pairing - an operator who has scaled marketplaces across borders and an engineer who thinks first about how data is protected - shapes the kind of company Luable is. Marketplaces live or die on liquidity, and Correa's Uber and DiDi years were an education in bootstrapping two-sided demand from zero. Susa's security background matters for the boring reason that trust, in this business, is the whole product; a single lapse handling savings would undo years of it. The team, roughly forty strong and based in Bogota, has stayed small relative to the deposit volume it moves, which is what you would expect from a business whose growth comes from software rather than storefronts.

The MarketWhere it fits, and where it's going

MejorCDT's competition is not really another app. It is the branch itself, and the habit of taking the first rate you are offered. That is a large, sleepy target. The bet Luable is now placing is that the fixed-term deposit is the same lonely, un-shopped product everywhere in Latin America. If that holds, the marketplace travels. The company has begun expanding beyond Colombia toward Mexico and the Caribbean, with the same premise it started with: banks need funding, savers want returns, and someone should make the match easy.

Expansion is where the theory meets its test. A rate table is easy to copy; the hard parts are the bank integrations, the regulatory footing, and the trust that took years to earn in Colombia. Each new country means rebuilding those relationships from scratch, one financial institution at a time. But the underlying human behavior - accepting the first rate you are offered because comparing was a chore - is not unique to Bogota. If MejorCDT is right that the un-shopped deposit exists in Mexico City and San Juan too, then it is not entering new markets so much as running the same play on a new field.

Backed by Y Combinator's Summer 2021 batch and a roster of regional investors, Luable has built something that reads less like a moonshot and more like plumbing - the useful, unglamorous kind that, once installed, is hard to imagine living without. It did not try to replace the bank. It just made the banks line up and compete, then handed you the winner.