Innovation Doesn't Start With More Data. Sometimes It Starts With None.

How Wharton alumna Eugenia Carmona is helping redefine digital finance by building technology under constraints.

By: Elisa Cubillán

When people think about financial innovation, they often imagine Silicon Valley, London, or Singapore. They picture artificial intelligence trained on vast datasets, sophisticated credit bureaus, and mature financial systems that have evolved over decades.

Venezuela rarely enters that conversation.

Yet for Wharton alumna Eugenia Carmona (W'20), some of the most interesting technological breakthroughs happen precisely where those assumptions no longer hold.

After beginning her career in J.P. Morgan's Latin America Investment Banking group in New York, Eugenia joined Cashea, Venezuela's leading Buy Now, Pay Later platform.

Many people questioned that decision.

The prevailing narrative at the time was that Venezuela's challenges were simply too great. But Eugenia saw something different.

"I disagreed with that framing," she told me. "I believed there was a version of the country that could be rebuilt, and that the rebuilding would happen through digital technology first, because the traditional financial infrastructure was too damaged to serve as the foundation."

When Cashea approached her, the company was in its beginnings.

"There was no financial model, no reporting infrastructure, no capital markets function. But that was exactly what attracted me. It was an opportunity to build those foundations from scratch, in a place where the work could genuinely change how millions of people access financial services."

Today, less than four years after launching, Cashea serves half of the adult population of Venezuela, and has become one of Latin America's fastest-growing fintech companies.

But what drew my attention wasn't the company's growth. It was the type of technology its team has been forced to build.

"The first question people usually ask us is which credit bureau we use," Eugenia told me.

"The answer surprises them. We don't."

That single sentence captures the challenge behind building digital financial infrastructure in an environment where many of the systems fintech companies elsewhere take for granted simply don't exist.

Rather than relying on decades of financial history, Eugenia and her team developed a machine-learning credit-scoring engine built from behavioral signals generated through users' initial payment patterns. Without meaningful bureau data to train the model, they took a different approach: extending very small initial credit lines to a broad group of customers, observing repayment behavior in real time, continuously refining the model based on those outcomes, and progressively expanding credit as confidence grew. What began as an experiment evolved into a scalable underwriting engine capable of identifying creditworthy borrowers using alternative data rather than traditional financial histories.

The results have been striking. Cashea rapidly scaled to serve more than 10 million users while maintaining repayment rates among the strongest in Latin America. In practice, the system performs many of the functions traditionally associated with a credit bureau, despite operating in a market where no meaningful consumer credit infrastructure exists.

It required a different way of thinking about artificial intelligence.

"One of the biggest misconceptions about AI is that better products simply require more data," she explains. "Some of the hardest problems appear when data is incomplete or unavailable. The challenge becomes redefining what information is actually valuable."

That mindset extends beyond lending.

As Cashea's merchant network expanded, Eugenia and her team quietly shifted much of the company's focus toward empowering merchants through technology. Rather than viewing merchants simply as distribution channels, they began building software that helps businesses better understand and manage their operations. It reflects a broader vision of embedding technology directly into merchants' day-to-day workflows, transforming the relationship from one centered on financing to one built around digital infrastructure.

At the same time, Eugenia has led the capital raise that has funded this transformation. While fundraising is often viewed as a financial exercise, she describes it as a product challenge of its own: ensuring the company has the long-term capital required to invest in technology, expand its platform, and build products whose impact compounds over years rather than quarters.

"The most important technology isn't always what customers notice," Eugenia says. "Often it's the software that quietly becomes part of how businesses operate every day."

Listening to Eugenia describe her work, it becomes clear that the conversation is less about buy now, pay later, and more about building digital infrastructure.

Building technology in Venezuela has meant designing systems for an economy characterized by fragmented financial rails, currency volatility, and limited legacy infrastructure. Those constraints have forced engineers and product teams to rethink many of the assumptions underlying digital financial services.

Ironically, those same constraints have become a source of innovation.

"When you can't rely on existing infrastructure," Eugenia says, "you have the opportunity to design from first principles."

That philosophy increasingly resonates beyond Venezuela.

Around the world, hundreds of millions of consumers remain outside traditional financial systems despite widespread smartphone adoption. Solutions developed in emerging markets are beginning to influence conversations about financial inclusion, embedded finance, alternative data, and AI-powered credit far beyond their original contexts.

For Eugenia, London has become more than a base. It has become a laboratory for exchanging ideas between two very different fintech ecosystems.

She regularly participates in industry discussions across the UK, including forums such as Citi's SPRINT Fintech Lending Summit, where conversations around AI, open banking, cash-flow underwriting, and the future of consumer credit are shaping the next generation of financial services. Through those discussions, she has developed relationships with UK fintech companies building credit-scoring models based on customers' real-time cash flows rather than traditional credit histories, finding unexpected parallels with the work her team has undertaken in Venezuela.

"The problems aren't identical," she says, "but the underlying question is remarkably similar: how do we build fairer ways of assessing creditworthiness when traditional signals are incomplete?"

Rather than seeing innovation flowing only from developed markets to emerging ones, Eugenia believes the exchange increasingly runs both ways. The UK brings world-leading expertise in AI, regulation, open banking, and financial infrastructure, while emerging markets have become testing grounds for building resilient digital products under extreme constraints. Her role increasingly sits at the intersection of those two worlds, helping transfer ideas, technology, talent, and capital between them.

Those ideas are attracting attention beyond the fintech industry. Cashea's work is currently the subject of a randomized controlled trial led by researchers from Harvard and Kellogg exploring the long-term impact of digital credit on financial inclusion. At the same time, the company's experience building financial infrastructure in Venezuela is being developed into a Harvard Business School case study, offering future students an opportunity to examine how technology can emerge from environments where conventional assumptions no longer apply.

For Wharton alumni, Eugenia's story offers an interesting reminder that innovation rarely follows a predictable geography.

Sometimes, the most meaningful advances in technology are not born where infrastructure is strongest, but where entrepreneurs are forced to build it themselves.

As artificial intelligence and digital finance continue to reshape the global economy, the next generation of ideas may well come from places that have spent years learning how to innovate without the foundations everyone else assumed would always be there.