The person setting the price stood in the line first.
Isaias Hernandez was born in the United States, first generation. He grew up in Washington state working in the fields. Before Pesito was a company, it was something he learned as a kid at his grandmother's fruit stand and in the line at the remittance counter.
A dollar was never a number on a screen.
Cherries, peaches, cucumbers, squash blossoms. Folding tables and plastic crates by the side of the road. His grandmother sold fruit to help support the family, and he helped her.
When money is earned like that, you learn to count it. A dollar was the week's groceries. It was medicine, rent, a birthday cake. That is what the person who later prices a remittance knows about numbers.
What it looked like from the customer side.
His grandfather worked the fields. Every so often the two of them stood in line at the Western Union counter to send money to family in Mexico. Isaias watched the slip: a fee on one side and an exchange rate on the other, and between the two, a piece of his grandfather's week that stayed at the counter.
Nobody explained to his grandfather that the exchange rate was a fee too. That is the charge you cannot see. Isaias grew up, learned to build software, and ended up working on payment infrastructure. The question stayed with him: why does sending your own money to your own family cost so much?
Pesito is his answer. The planned fee is 1% of what you send and never more than $1 USD sending from the United States, or $15 MXN from Mexico. There is no markup in the exchange rate. You see the fee and the rate before you confirm. The person setting that price knows exactly what it costs a family, so it is not a growth offer to be clawed back once nobody can leave.
A cheap transfer is the front door. Inside is an honest wallet.
The cheap transfer is the front door. Inside, we are building a wallet that charges what it says it charges, across the Americas. We can price the transfer near cost because the settlement rail is ours and because the money is made elsewhere, and we say where. The full explanation is in How we make money.
The same goes for language. Many of the people who work the fields speak Mixteco, Zapoteco, Mam or K'iche' before Spanish, and every financial product they touch is written in a language they were expected to learn. This site is already in Nahuatl, with more languages on the roadmap. Serving you in your own language is the same argument as not hiding a spread in the rate.
We have not launched.
We would rather tell you straight: Pesito is pre-launch and transfers are not available yet. Aztlan Software, Inc. is pursuing its own money transmitter license; Idaho is the first state. What you can do today is join the waitlist and watch us build it, step by step, on the public roadmap.
This is not just a fintech company. It is our way of making sure more families get to keep more of what they worked so hard to earn.
Isaias Hernandez, founder and CEO