All on the Line · Payments and Settlement
Split anything, across any card, seamlessly. Why Mexico still has no elegant way to share a payment at the moment of purchase.
We live in a time where nearly everything is shared, homes, cars, subscriptions, groceries, even office desks. Most people can’t afford big purchases or recurring costs alone, so we split them. We share bills with our partners, utilities with roommates, investments with friends, expenses with business partners. It’s not a trend, it’s how people live.
Today, we’re expected to share nearly every cost, and yet there’s still no elegant way to actually share a payment at the moment of purchase. You either pay and hope to get reimbursed, or you chase people down, or you keep a mental list (or spreadsheet at best). And most of the time, it leads to stress, tension, and sometimes even broken relationships.
It’s 2025, and we still share expenses like it’s 1995, with awkward reminders, mental math, and unspoken tension. That’s why we built Compago, to make shared payments seamless, real-time, and dignified. For couples, for families, for roommates, for friends, for small businesses, for everyone.
In Mexico alone, over 60 million people live with a partner, family member, or roommate, and together they share more than $18 billion in annual expenses. And yet, nearly all of this is still managed manually and in cash.
Globally, platforms like Splitwise have shown just how massive this behavioral shift is. In the U.S., Americans share over $4 trillion a year in expenses, and studies show more than 50% of couples argue about money, while 75% of friendships can break over disputes as small as $500.
We live in the sharing economy, Uber, Airbnb, WeWork, Mercado Libre, Amazon Mechanical Turk, yet we still lack the financial rails to split the bill cleanly, directly, and instantly. That’s where Compago comes in.
Compago lets people split payments automatically, at the moment of purchase, using their own cards. No IOUs, no delays, no mental accounting.
Here’s how it works. Users form groups and select their splitting rules: percentages, caps, timing, limits. Users select expenses and the group they want to share it with. The group confirms, or auto-confirms if it’s a pre-set rule. Compago splits the charge and processes everyone’s portion in real time. Everyone pays directly, with their own card. Done.
Whether it’s dinner with friends, rent with roommates, or a joint business expense, Compago handles the complexity, so people don’t have to. It’s easy for users. But behind that simplicity, we’ve built something powerful.
Compago wasn’t built as a prototype. It was architected from the ground up as a modular, scalable, and resilient platform that can serve millions, while remaining seamless for each individual user.
It is distributed and highly available: Compago runs on a cloud-native, distributed infrastructure, eliminating single points of failure, so whether it’s one user or one million users sharing expenses, the platform remains fast, secure, and available. It processes events in real time: we use Kafka (Confluent Cloud) for real-time, asynchronous event streaming, which means every action, from initiating a split to confirming a charge, is processed the moment it happens, with traceability and fault tolerance built in. It supports custom logic per group: our system supports fully configurable group rules, percentages, hard caps, participant limits, timing, auto-approval, and more, because no two groups are the same and we designed the backend to reflect that. And it settles securely and smartly: each transaction goes through Compago’s orchestration layer, where it’s validated, split, and securely routed, with PostgreSQL for transactional consistency, Redis for ultra-fast access to ephemeral data, AWS Lambda for scalable microservice execution, NestJS for clean, maintainable API logic, and S3 and API Gateway for content and secure integration.
Everything is API-driven, so banks and fintechs can integrate once and enable shared payments natively across every channel.
Compago doesn’t grow through advertising. It grows because it solves a problem that brings others in naturally. One user creates a group and shares an expense. The other person joins, and now they’re a user too. That person creates their own group and shares another expense. Each shared expense becomes an invitation to new users. More users, more groups, more transactions, more users.
That’s how Splitwise scaled. But Compago goes further, with full transaction processing and card-based settlement. The utility doesn’t end when the bill is split, it begins. And like Splitwise, once groups and social behaviors are locked into one ecosystem, switching becomes painful. That’s why network effects are moats.
In Mexico, many still rely on cash not because they reject technology, but because they don’t trust what happens when they go digital. They fear CoDi or DiMo means the IRS is watching. They think banks will charge them unfair fees. They worry that fintechs are temporary or unreliable.
That’s why Compago is different. We didn’t build Compago to push people into the system, we built it to pull the system toward how people already live. You don’t have to change your life to use Compago, you just have to share an expense, the way you already do, and suddenly, you’re in.
This is how trust starts, not with control, but with collaboration. Not with marketing, but with usefulness. If banks and fintechs want to win the trust of millions, they have to offer something that feels relevant, respectful, and empowering. Compago delivers that.
Compago is more than a product, it’s infrastructure. A plug-and-play layer that turns existing cards and apps into collaborative tools for daily life.
For banks and fintechs, it brings higher credit line and card utilization, lower CAC through organic invites, higher retention through emotional utility, a stronger Net Promoter Score, and the kind of usage that actually drives profit growth. But beyond numbers, it helps banks and fintechs become more trusted, more useful, more embedded in people’s lives.
We’re also advancing national objectives: reducing cash dependence, encouraging digital adoption in underserved segments, and enabling new forms of financial collaboration for households and small ventures. Compago is how digital finance becomes human, relevant, and shared.
We’ve spent the past two years doing the hard part: building the foundation. A real platform, with real architecture, and a clear vision.
The necessity is no longer a question. We’ve sat down with nearly every major bank and fintech in Mexico, and the consensus is the same: there’s no elegant solution for shared expenses today, and there should be one.
Some may see Compago as a standalone product, others will see it as infrastructure. But either way, it opens the door to something much bigger, a national layer for seamless shared payments. Think of what CoDi, DiMo, or Zelle did for real-time transfers. Compago can do the same for collaborative payments. And that layer is still up for grabs.
Whether Compago becomes the standard through one bank, a coalition, or as an independent utility, that’s still to be seen. But what we know for certain is this: the first institutions to embrace this shift won’t just benefit from it, they’ll define it.
The opportunity is real, the product is built, and the market is ready. Now, the next move belongs to those who see what’s coming.
— Carlos E. Mora
I wake up, I build, I repeat. No guarantees.
I work like it’s all on the line, because it is.
Family is the only true legacy.
Your name is your currency, and it must be earned daily.
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