Thirty-one-year-old Angela Cristina Aroca and her two brothers took over their family’s restaurant two years ago after their mother passed away. The business was successful before, but its growth now carries a deeper meaning. “I feel incredibly proud of my mother,” says Angela. “She left behind this beautiful legacy: Children who are driven and forward-looking. Children who have been working to make her dream a reality.”

Running the restaurant has been a challenge, but a labor of love. In addition to the narrow margins and high standards of food service, Angela’s business is in Ipiales, a rural town in Colombia’s highlands near the border with Ecuador. For rural businesses like hers, the distance to a brick-and-mortar bank branch can delay important transactions and occupy time better spent on key business processes. Small and rural enterprises also struggle to access credit because they often lack collateral or credit history. Growth is slower and less certain under these conditions. Digital financial services from microfinance institutions can provide small, rural, and woman-owned businesses with financial products that help them grow, along with digital tools to manage their finances better.

For Angela, digital tools have saved her time and energy managing the business’s finances so she can focus on serving customers. Angela uses Mi Contactar App, a platform that allows users to view their accounts, apply for loans, make and receive payments, and study educational modules on financial management. “[The app] has certainly made a lot of things much easier since you can make payments right through the platform. It’s a much faster method. You no longer have to physically go to a bank branch. You practically don’t do anything else except through the app.”

Mi Contactar App is a product of Accion’s partner Banco Contactar, a microfinance bank that serves rural communities in Colombia. Accion Digital Transformation invested in Banco Contactar, aiming to support the bank in leveraging digital technologies to better serve underserved rural customers across the country. More than 70 percent of the bank’s customers live in rural areas, and women’s empowerment is core to their strategy. Although women are more likely to be excluded from the formal financial sector, women make up 50 percent of Banco Contactar’s customers and 54 percent of its employees. Mi Contactar App also offers modules on women’s empowerment to support users.

The results highlight clients’ growing interest in digitalization and their increasing adoption of digital channels. Today, one in three Banco Contactar clients uses the Mi Contactar App, with 61,626 registered users, and growing. Through the platform, clients have completed 221,084 transfers using Bre-B, Colombia’s instant payment system, totaling more than COP 113.7 billion (over USD 28 million). In addition, almost 6,697 individuals have participated in financial education courses.

These figures demonstrate that populations traditionally excluded from the financial system are not only gaining access to financial services, but also actively integrating digital solutions into their daily lives. This progress is particularly significant for an institution whose client base is predominantly composed of entrepreneurs, small-scale producers, and families living in rural areas.

Thirteen years ago, Angela and her family took out their first small business loan from Banco Contactar. With the loan, they bought cuy (guinea pigs) to raise. Angela and her mother were building a restaurant, and cuy would be their signature dish. Prepared with a unique seasoning mix and served with love, their take on the traditional Andean meal proved immediately popular and they named their restaurant Asadero Delicuy after the dish.

With her first loan in repayment, Angela could apply for a second to buy the restaurant that she and her mother would continue to build. As the business succeeded, she hired four employees. A third loan allowed them to remodel the business. A car loan, a home loan, and a loan to renovate her home followed. Now she can imagine a future where her mother’s dream lives on in other towns. Angela believes there are more opportunities to come.

“Our project involves expanding to more places — places where people can discover our signature dish, and where customers can leave feeling truly satisfied,” she says. “When we serve this dish, we aren’t just selling a meal; we are selling a tradition. Something offered with deep affection to every single customer. And it represents that beautiful legacy that was passed down to me, a legacy that shouldn’t remain confined to just one location, but should instead spread to many more places.”