How R2 cut collections costs by 70% and scaled across 5 countries with AI agents

Scaling a collections operation usually means one of two things: hiring more people or turning to traditional agencies with limited reach. For R2, one of Latin America's leading fintechs, neither was a viable option. With a portfolio growing rapidly across several markets in the region, R2 needed to expand without inflating its team or losing the agility that defines them. This is exactly where AI agents found their ideal setting.

A perfect use case for AI agents.

About R2

Founded in 2020 by Roger Larach and Roger Terán, R2 operates in Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Peru, and Brazil, enabling platforms such as payment processors, POS systems, e-commerce solutions, and marketplaces to offer financing to micro, small, and medium-sized businesses across Latin America. Through its APIs, R2 provides an end-to-end lending experience to technology platforms, allowing them to offer capital to their users without taking on any risk.

Rather than relying on traditional credit history, R2's revenue-based financing model underwrites with machine learning and AI on transactional data, extending credit to merchants and independent workers that banks typically leave out. A good example is its digital mobility partners, where R2 lends to drivers and automatically collects payments from their trip earnings. In a region where most SMB credit demand goes unmet and the financing gap exceeds one trillion dollars, this is a problem of continental scale.

That same magnitude is what made collections so difficult, and the reason AI agents were such a natural fit. R2's reach is broad:

• 100,000+ SMBs and independent workers served through partners across industries including Digital Mobility, in Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Peru, and Brazil.
• Partnerships with leading payment processors, POS systems, e-commerce solutions, mobility apps, delivery services, and marketplaces.
• In October 2025, Ant International (the global arm of Ant Group, co-founded by Jack Ma) made a strategic investment in R2, adding world-class risk and AI capabilities.

The challenge: scaling the operation without becoming a call center

Before Altur, R2's collections operation ran on a combination of external agencies and limited in-house efforts. Internally, they used email, SMS, and some WhatsApp interactions, but without the capacity to cover 100% of the base. That forced them to constantly prioritize which customers to contact and to leave part of the portfolio out.

The real bottleneck was scalability. Account volume grew month over month, but a model built on people and agencies could not scale at the same pace. R2 needed an automated solution to sustain growth without turning collections into a heavy, costly operation.

Why they chose Altur

After evaluating different providers, the factors that made the decision to try Altur easy (in their own words) were:

• Natural, high-quality interactions. Calls with genuinely human-sounding AI voice and automatic, granular scoring on every call. The agents negotiate, offer alternatives, and close agreements the way the best human operator would, on every call.
• Omnichannel. The agent can move the conversation to WhatsApp without losing the context of the call, keeping the interaction personalized across thousands of simultaneous conversations.
• Speed. In the words of Angel Coronado, Director of Collections at R2:

"We started seeing results from the first month of implementation. From that point on, the improvement in operational efficiency and in the performance of our key metrics was clear."

Unlimited calling capacity

The single biggest factor behind the success of R2's collections operation with Altur is, without a doubt, unlimited contact capacity. With Altur's AI agents, contact capacity is no longer tied to the size of the team. Altur can sustain thousands of calls in parallel, so there is no longer any need to prioritize the base for lack of staff: R2 can cover 100% of the portfolio consistently, at the right time and through the right channel.

The combination of capacity and precision on every contact results in an extremely efficient operation. Scalability and savings are built on top of it.

Rapid expansion across five countries in Latin America

Today R2 runs its collections with Altur in five countries in Latin America, and continues to expand. What made this possible was entering new markets without scaling the team at the same pace.

Each country gets a localized experience: local phone numbers and agents with a local accent, which significantly improves contact effectiveness. Instead of copying and pasting the same operation into every market, each customer hears something that feels local.

A 70% reduction in operating costs

The numbers speak for themselves:

• 70% reduction in operating cost compared to the previous model of people and external agencies.
• Across 8 different products, Altur's AI agents matched the results of the human operation and even outperformed it by up to 15%.
• A significantly higher ROI than external agencies.

The most important improvement for their operation, according to R2 itself, was being able to scale efficiently across multiple countries without needing to grow the team.

Would they recommend it?

We asked Angel whether he would recommend Altur to other financial institutions. The answer was a direct yes.

If your collections are limited by the size of your team or the agencies you use, or if you want to expand into new markets without increasing costs, let's talk. At Altur, we help fintechs and banks collect more effectively, in more countries, and at a fraction of the cost.