➤ The coronavirus pandemic has led to a 300% increase in the payment of bills and services via Ualá, and a 40% growth in the money invested in the mutual fund available on the financial services app.

➤ Ualá claims to have the highest number of contactless credit cards in circulation in Argentina, and has issued 2 million prepaid MasterCard-branded cards.

Since its launch in 2017, Ualá has emerged to be a leading player in Argentina's startup fintech universe with its financial services app and prepaid debit cards. The company has a stated focus on greater financial inclusion, including young people. Roughly 7% of its issued cards have gone to minors aged between 13 and 17, subject to parental consent. The company is hoping to turn a profit on its financial app by 2022.

In late 2019, the startup raised $150 million in a series C financing round led by China's Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Japan's SoftBank Group Corp.

In an interview with S&P Market Intelligence, Pierpaolo Barbieri, Ualá's founder and CEO, said the company is now "fully funded" to cover growth for the next two years. That growth, he confirmed, includes new business units and a significant staff build up. The move comes as the company expects greater demand as the cornonavirus pandemic has forced Argentina into lockdown.

Below is a transcript of that conversation, edited for length and clarity.

What percentage of your clients had no prior access to financial services?

It's impossible to know the specific number, but according to our estimates, more than 70% of Ualá users had never had a card that they used to pay for things. Those people could have been either completely unbanked or just underbanked.

How do you choose partnerships and features to incorporate onto Ualá?

We don't think about making a vertical product, in which we do everything ourselves, because as a technological company, we don't believe we will be better at making each product than the rest of the players in the system. What we do believe is that we have the best marketplace for financial services. Our idea is a card and an app, where you find all financial services. That's why we have a partnership with Western Union to pay for services, with Grupo SBS to enable investment in a mutual fund, with several banks, with Banco Industrial SA for CVUs [virtual account keys]. That's Ualá's value, partnering up with different players to offer more and more products and services within the platform.

What new partnerships or features will you incorporate in the short-term? You mentioned near field communication (NFC) cellphone payments on Twitter.

I can't talk about what hasn't been launched ... What I said is that we have the most massively distributed contactless card in Argentina. We issue every card with contactless [technology] and a chip, whereas banks generally reserve these for their premium clients. That means NFC payments directly through these contactless cards, which are safer and easier to use in times of a pandemic. We are seeing a lot of traction for products due to this context. For example, 300% growth in the payment of bills and services, and a 40% increase in the money invested in the mutual fund in the last month and a half, with more than 400,000 users who are currently investing or have invested through Ualá ... this year, we will not only be launching new features within the app, but also new business units.

When do you expect your next funding round will be? And how are you using the $150 million you raised at the end of 2019?

We don't have plans to seek additional funding this year or next. We are fully funded, and we are using these funds to grow our business units and to increase our personnel numbers. We started the year with 180 people and we are now more than 300 ... I think we will be doubling in size by the end of 2020, also in response to the demand we are seeing. It took two years to reach the one-million mark, and only nine months to get the second million. That acceleration has to be met with growth in the size of our team, in order to meet demand and to incorporate the features users want.

Any plans to expand to other countries?

For now our plan is to focus on Argentina. We have 2 million people, but 40 million left to go. We want to keep growing here ... not only having teams in Buenos Aires City, but also in the Buenos Aires province ...[and] in different cities across the country.

The government backtracked on a decision to allow wages to be paid into virtual wallets, and more recently on the ability of emergency subsidies to be deposited into them. Is collaboration possible in the near future?

We have frequent dialogue with the government, and we respect the central bank's regulations that help to clarify fintechs' position within Argentine regulation. That's why we supported the creation of a Payment Services Providers registry, which serves to calm fears within the sector. .. There is a regulation, which is different to banks', because they lend people's deposits, and we don't. We are more than available to collaborate as the regulator may see fit.

Are digital financial services and inclusion here to stay after lockdown, or will people go back to the way they used to do things?

I believe there is no turning back from financial inclusion. The more we can achieve an open, interoperable and competitive system, the more products users will have access to and the more formal the economy will become. I believe people want to use cashless [payments]. Cash is expensive, dirty and unsafe. We want to change that. The future is very bright for financial inclusion and the banking of the country.