You are Sebastián Restrepo-Mejía, 36, Head of Open Innovation at Banco Andino — a mid-sized Colombian bank with €7.8B in assets serving mid-market and SME customers across Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. The board approved a fintech accelerator nine weeks ago. Applications open in November.
The situation
The board's interest is clear and contradictory. The strategy team (Camila Botero) wants partnerships — fintech-as-supplier feeding into the bank's product roadmap. The CFO (Hernán Pinilla) wants something measurable on the P&L within 24 months. The CTO (Ignacio Toro) wants engineering talent — the program as a hiring funnel. The CEO (María Lucía Arenas) is hosting a regional banking conference in 18 months and wants something to point to on stage.
Your budget is COP 8B (~USD 2M) for Cohort 0. The five other Colombian-bank accelerators that launched in the last six years have a recognizable pattern: brilliant demo days, polite media coverage, and almost no signed POCs twelve months out. The cemetery has names: Bancolombia's NXTP partnership (folded after one cohort), Davivienda's Pulso lab (now an internal-only innovation team), BBVA Colombia's Open Innovation Challenge (now a one-off contest). You have a Notion document open with each of their post-mortems.