🏗️ Why We Didn't Write for Two Weeks

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🥽 Zero Dark Frontera

We know we disappeared for two weeks, and I know I broke my 54-week consecutive writing streak here at Frontera. But it had to be done.

We locked in and built the newest iteration of Bando, an onchain treasury management platform for SMEs in emerging markets.

At Bando we built  a corporate cash management solution that gives businesses direct access to tokenized Mexican government bonds (CETES). We let Mexican companies (more countries coming soon) put their idle capital to work in secure, government-backed instruments with real-time transparency and seamless settlement, 3 things that are currently impossible in the current Mexican financial system.

In 3 weeks (because we did write the first), we designed and developed the full platform, secured our first transacting client, signed LOIs with a Series B stablecoin startup and Mexico’s largest cash payments operator, and have a full pipeline of companies lined up right behind them.

We just came back from the locked in factory and everyone knew our name.

So today's essay is the story of why we built this, how it works, and what it felt like to ship a real product in three weeks.

🇲🇽 Wait…but…

Why a Treasury Platform?

The forces that led us to this idea were a fortunate series of events. 

We, and you along with us, have spent the past year studying how money moves across Latin America here at Frontera.

The last few months, however, we dove deeper into CETES because the numbers kept screaming at us. The first part, was done in public, and we wrote two articles about it:

1. A Global Bond Fable: The Tortoise (MX CETES) and the Hare (T-bills)

2. Why the Market Slept on CETES for a Decade

They essentially talk about how CETES grew 2.52x, outperforming T-bills that delivered a 1.67x increase and the 1.38x gain of the USD over 15 years (first article), and why the market slept on the trade for over a decade (second article). 

Both are interesting thought pieces that I definitely think you should check out, but they circle around the idea of friction, which has kept global capital out and local capital idle.

Why Mexico?

The second part was done privately, as part of our product and GTM research:

• We found out that Mexico’s corporate sector holds $195B USD in bank deposits, representing 46.7% of the entire banking system.

• Total CETES outstanding reached $125B. Banxico (Mexican central bank) does not publish the standalone corporate CETES category we wanted to see, so our closest proxy to see the amount of CETES businesses hold is the “other residents” category at 31.5% of the total.

• After subtracting non-corporate components, estimated business holdings are $15-25B.

• These two numbers together represent the total addressable float Bando can target in Mexico as a beachhead market, which is $210-220B.

This meant we now had friction on our sights as the solution to a dire problem.

Why Now?

Four more things are happening everywhere all at once:

1. In October 2025, the U.S. government sanctioned three key financial institutions serving our segment: CiBanco, Intercam, and Vector. Overnight $250B in yearly FX volumes was displaced and 20,000 B2B clients were left without a home. Traditional banks absorbed some of them but charged abusive fees since they can’t serve them profitably. And we saw the gap.

2. Tokenized assets hit product-market fit. This one kind of speaks for itself, basically tokenized RWAs are production-grade ready today. Etherfuse has changed the way people can access global assets and there is no going back.

3. Crypto infrastructure (programmatic MPC wallets, sub-cent transaction fees, and stablecoin rails) matured to the point we can build financial products that feel like magic to outsiders.

4. Current AI models can let a 3-person team ship an MVP that does not look like an MVP in a regulated industry in 3 weeks. More on this below.

🧙 The Fellowship of the Ring

If you want to see the final product you'll have to read a bit more. First let me tell you how we built it.

You see, as an ultra-lean three person team, there's a limit to how much we can stretch and how much area we can cover. So we did what we had to do.

Before this three week sprint I worked on product, now, I'm an engineer. An agentic engineer to be exact.

As I said above, AI is too overpowered. Claude Code can oneshot things we couldn't even begin to imagine a year ago.

With that said, I dove into the trenches (as a disclaimer I do want to say I took my fair share of CS classes in college, so I did know what I was doing even while going in blind).

Before Feb 24 I had just 2 Github contributions, when I joined Github, and when an invite from an organization. Three weeks later I now have 200+, leading to the birth of our product. See it for yourself here.

Still, I absolutely don't take full credit, not even a third. Of course the whole thing only works because of Guayabas, our CTO, who apart from tackling the hard stuff makes sure our AI-augmented engineering is scalable, safe, and modular. 

Ab says he's like Gandalf, making sure the hobbits (me) do not f*ck up the mission (codebase).

With his 13+ years of experience and today’s building tools we're shipping at least 10x faster than last year. And we're just warming up.

🧯 Solving the Friction Problem

Alright, so here it is. This is our newest product, Bando Treasury.

We have abstracted all crypto complexity, and focused on solving the friction problem.

Today, a Mexican CFO who wants to deploy idle cash into CETES has to open a brokerage account (2-4 weeks of legal paperwork), call a trading desk by phone during market hours, wire funds once greenlit, wait for settlement, and repeat that call every time they want to move money.

Per entity. With separate logins, tokens, and authorization chains for each brokerage relationship (sometimes needing 6+). And forget about doing it on the weekends. This is how pain looks like:

The only digital alternative, CETESDirecto caps at $500K and has no corporate features as it was built for individuals.

With Bando that changes today. Companies can easily swap MXN for tokenized CETES with instant liquidity and competitive yield, execute FX at transparent rates on the $935B US-Mexico trade corridor (coming soon), and manage reconciliation from one dashboard instead of 6 bank portals and a spreadsheet. 

🤔 What now?

We built this for the 27,000 Mexican companies generating $5–15M in revenue that are completely ignored by the country's financial services. Too complex for retail tools, too small for enterprise treasury desks. 

These businesses juggle multiple banking relationships with horrific fees just to cover basics, because nothing serves them end-to-end. But Bando does. 

This is just the beginning of our journey to help them. They are responsible for 60% of Mexico's GDP and deserve better products. Next up are FX, cross-border payments, and lending…

We’re back, baby.

Bando Treasury is now live. If you're operating a Mexican company earning zero on your idle cash, have a complicated banking relationship, or know someone who might be interested, talk to us here.