Zendly: The AI platform revolutionizing financial onboarding on WhatsApp

In Latin America’s rapidly expanding fintech ecosystem, one challenge continues to undermine growth: customer onboarding. Zendly, a conversational AI platform led by Colombian entrepreneur David Salinas, is reshaping how financial institutions verify and activate users by moving the entire process into the chat channels where customers already operate.

The Broken Onboarding Funnel in Financial Services

While banks and fintechs invest heavily in digital transformation, the entry point to their products, customer onboarding, remains a critical weakness. Studies suggest that nearly eight out of ten prospects abandon the onboarding flow due to long forms, excessive KYC requirements or technical failures.

Traditional processes often force users through multi-step experiences: lengthy forms, document uploads, identity checks, proof of address, eligibility questions, consent screens and external links that bounce them between apps. These layers of friction are especially costly in markets like Mexico, home to thousands of fintech platforms competing for user attention.

The result is a familiar pain point for acquisition teams: high abandonment rates and millions of accounts or credits that never move past the initial intent.

A Conversational Approach to Verification and Activation

Instead of trying to streamline outdated web flows, Salinas proposes shifting the onboarding process to the only place where users consistently respond: conversation.

With more than eight years of experience designing AI-powered conversational flows for Walmart, Cencosud and Rappi across five countries, Salinas has translated those learnings into Zendly, an AI agent platform that completes onboarding directly within WhatsApp or iMessage, without breaking the conversational thread.

“The onboarding must happen where the user already is. If you force them out of the chat, you lose the moment of intention,” explains Salinas.

Zendly’s AI agents guide users step by step: capturing ID documents, matching selfies with government IDs, checking internal and external databases, collecting consent, updating personal data and writing everything back into enterprise systems. The flow remains fully auditable, yet entirely conversational.

Why WhatsApp Is the Natural Onboarding Channel in Mexico

In Mexico, where WhatsApp dominates daily communication and users are already accustomed to making purchases or managing services through chat, conversational onboarding emerges as the next intuitive shift.

Instead of losing leads to broken mobile forms or users who never return to a link, companies can verify, activate and assist them in the same channel where questions and interactions are already happening.

Organizations such as Ontop in the U.S. and Littio in Latin America are adopting these flows to recover leads, reduce validation times and simplify activation.

A Value Proposition Built for Conversion and Compliance

The core of Salinas’s vision is simple: activate and verify users in the channel where their digital life happens, while maintaining compliance and clear audit trails.

“The conversation is the new interface for financial services,” he says. “If you turn chat into an auditable flow, with identification, validations and consent, you not only accelerate sales but also reduce operational risk and return time to the user.”

Scaling Conversational Onboarding Across the Region

Zendly’s next phase focuses on expanding in Mexico and Colombia, accelerating integrations and enabling use cases like:

• opening accounts for e-commerce users
• originating loans for financial institutions
• conducting periodic data updates
• enabling compliant cross-sell campaigns

All of this happens inside the same chat thread where the relationship began. With a three-to-five-year roadmap aimed at building a global standard for conversational onboarding, Zendly seeks to position Latin America as a pioneer, where traditional forms no longer push customers away and every verification step occurs seamlessly within the conversation.