Tensec Blueprints: Meet the Fintech CEO Driving a New Era of Fast, Efficient Cross-Border Payments

Costanoa’s BuilderOps Blueprints are designed to help early-stage start-ups build successful foundations. Through this series, Costanoa’s BuilderOps team interviews founders and start-up leaders, showcasing their superpowers and learnings on all things company building. Costanoa is an early-stage VC firm backing company builders across data, dev, and fintech. 

For our latest BuilderOps Blueprint, we met with Helcio Nobre, CEO and Co-Founder of Tensec, a fintech innovator transforming cross-border financial services for global trading companies and their clients. Helcio co-founded Tensec after relevant senior leadership roles at Rapyd, Visa, Facebook/Meta, and Paypal. Tensec recently emerged from stealth with a $12M seed round we were proud to lead. 

Let’s kick this off with the fundamentals: what’s the problem Tensec is trying to solve?

From the outset, I knew there was a clear opportunity to disrupt the current paradigm for B2B cross-border financial services . This is a space where people are still using the SWIFT system to move funds across borders, which has literally been around since fax machines were considered advanced technology.

When businesses want to transact overseas, it’s an incredibly cumbersome, highly manual process, with banks operating as the expensive middleman. Tensec makes  it possible to send or receive money in just days versus weeks. Companies won’t have to rely on literally making phone calls to the bank’s trading desk to agree on the exchange rate. Instead, our AI-powered software does it all – securely, swiftly and compliantly.

What a challenge! How does Tensec step in and reimagine this stale paradigm?

It’s not just that our software will deliver a level of speed and efficiency that’s never existed before. Tensec focuses where global fx banks do not serve: SMBs. We’re also offering our clients something even more compelling: a revenue growth proposition.

Our clients – distribution partners who serve importer and exporter customers with logistics, customs support, etc. – can now offer new, reliable, technology-powered revenue services to these SMB customers. In essence, they’re expanding their services to include what banks currently provide to enterprises, only better. Now these distribution partners can reap the benefits of the margin banks used to capture, and pass that value to their clients as well.

You raised a $12M seed round earlier this year. In your view, what are investors looking for in this market?

I think it’s about instilling confidence in the market size and appetite, the experience and judgment of the founding team, and the ability to execute on cost-effective customer acquisition. 

In our case, we were able to do that on all fronts. We’re pursuing a gigantic, $200T industry that truly hasn’t been disrupted for decades and relies on human-led, paper-based processes.

The founding team also obviously gets close scrutiny, especially when it comes to highly regulated industries that have regulation complexity, compliance requirements, and the risks inherent with moving money. Our founding team has ‘been there, done that’ in this field – in both early stage and large, well-known companies. We’ve learned some hard lessons along the way that we can apply to Tensec.

Because we’ve learned those lessons, we were able to give investors greater confidence around the customers we’re pursuing. Partnering with  aggregators and distributors, helping them grow, aligns with our belief that all players in the cross-border ecosystem have the opportunity to grow by adding financial services in their product portfolio.

Take it a step further. What would you recommend for founders raising right now?

Do your homework. Take a good amount of time to validate your assumptions with potential clients and investors.  Some investors might have really great general knowledge but lack the specificity to understand the validity of your value prop. Concentrate on building strong relationships with multiple individual investors who know your sector very well. 

Doing that means going deeper than just looking at the fund as a whole. Start researching early, well before you want to raise. Make sure the investors are truly interested in the sector, with strong points of view on it.  Are they writing about it on LinkedIn? Being quoted in news outlets on related subjects? Going deep on themes you think about on their VC’s blog? Those are good signals.

How do you approach integrating your values into Tensec’s culture?

The founders – not just the CEO – provide the company’s DNA. That really starts with the three of us, investing a good amount of time to make sure we share the same mindset around the values, mission, culture and people dynamics. That’s how we’re building a business we truly love – and that others will too.

I think it’s about consistently holding and actively living to those values, especially when it’s hard. We encourage our team to celebrate when we’re clearly aligning to them – and call it out when we’re not. It’s also about not being shy to cut people who don’t embody our values and doing everything we can to retain those who do. 

How do you think about leading your team?

I really like that phrase that’s about having “strong convictions, loosely held.” I want to show up with conviction and a strong point of view, but I also don’t want to be so stuck in one position that I can’t be convinced otherwise. It’s important to lead your team – and it’s important to listen to them.

One last question: how do you balance work and family?

It’s challenging.  At every step, you learn more and get better. You learn how to be more efficient and disciplined – and what you need to prioritize. My experiences as an entrepreneur (Dabee Technology), CPO at early stage fintechs (Rapyd, Bond) and leadership roles in strong companies (Visa, Facebook/Meta and Paypal) has taught me what to do to make companies grow faster in a sustainable way. I think I’m better at eliminating filler and delegating the things that others could do just as well or better. Founders need to stay focused on the core because that’s what helps you better balance out the demands of work and family.

As to whether I’m successful, well, you’ll have to ask my wife! 🙂