How Grupo LATAM Airlines, Sika and Correos Express Transformed Their Credit Risk Management

How do thousands of companies sell on credit without letting risk spiral out of control?

That was the central question behind the webinar that brought together three internationally recognized companies: Grupo LATAM Airlines, Sika and Correos Express. Their heads of credit risk and collections shared firsthand how they moved from manual, fragmented processes to proactive, automated and consistent credit risk management using Yndika, the Order to Cash platform from Atlax 360.

Below is a summary of the most valuable insights from the session. If you’d prefer to watch the full recording, it’s available here: Watch the webinar on YouTube.

Participants:

• César Delgado, Credit Risk Manager at Grupo LATAM Airlines.
• José Arévalo, Credit and Collections Chief at Sika.
• Hugo Bordon, Financial Management at Correos Express.
• Rafael Neira, Projects Director at Atlax 360 (moderator).

Three distinct sectors — aviation, construction, and parcel delivery — sharing a single challenge: turning credit into a growth lever without losing control of risk.

Grupo LATAM Airlines: From the Snapshot Approach to Credit Risk Monitoring.

César Delgado oversees credit risk across the entire Grupo LATAM Airlines, spanning multiple geographies and business segments. His core challenge is that data quality and depth vary significantly by country, yet the group operates under a single credit policy.

Key takeaways:

• Credit approval is a snapshot; risk is a motion picture. The decision to extend credit is made based on information available at a specific point in time — financial statements at a given closing date, bureau data — but the real risk begins after that. This is why the area where Yndika has delivered the most value to the group is credit risk monitoring: daily alerts identify which customers show signs of future deterioration, enabling the team to anticipate and act before problems materialize.
• From casting a wide net to having a radar. Previously, portfolio reassessment meant reviewing a sample of customers without any specific focus. Today, Yndika’s calibrated alerts act as a radar that pinpoints exactly where to look. Calibration was a collaborative effort with the Atlax 360 team, fine-tuning which signals deliver genuine value — for example, a shift in payment behavior that would be impossible to detect by manually reviewing every account every day.
• Consistency across 7 platforms. The group manages all its markets through seven Yndika instances (Colombia, Brazil, Chile, Peru, and the rest of the world), with a consolidated platform that displays portfolio composition by risk level across all geographies. A shared risk language that has also improved dialogue with the commercial team.

The outcome: analysts spend less time consolidating data and more time analyzing, engaging with the commercial team, and talking directly with customers. Risk management shifted from reactive to proactive.

Important note: as César emphasized, Yndika enhances — not replaces — the internal rating model and the analyst’s judgment, by providing a standardized, daily-updated input.

Sika: Doing More with Less in One of the Most Volatile Sectors

José Arévalo manages credit and collections at Sika, with approximately 3,000 credit customers in the construction sector — one of the most volatile in existence. Every order generates its own invoice, which multiplies the operational burden on the team.

Key takeaways:

• Dynamic data, every single day. A customer can be in good standing today and show a deteriorating signal tomorrow. Yndika’s daily refresh of risk indicators across the entire portfolio allows analysts to prioritize intelligently — focusing on customers that genuinely need attention, not just the most familiar or convenient ones.
• Automating the repetitive. Account statements, payment reminders, and follow-up emails were tasks that generated no value but imposed an enormous operational burden. Today they run automatically. The team’s own quantified impact: a workload reduction equivalent to half a full-time position, capacity that has been redirected to higher-value activities such as analysis and calls to maintain customer relationships.
• Results in 4–5 months. According to José, between the support from the Atlax 360 team and the automation of routine tasks, Sika began seeing clear results from the platform within four to five months: more customer contact and a collections team focused on what truly adds value.

And customers responded positively. Approximately 85% of customers reacted very well to the new automated communications, perceiving them as a sign of efficiency and professionalism in collections management.

Correos Express: Collecting on 20,000 Invoices a Month Without an Army of Managers

Hugo Bordon manages the finance function at Correos Express, and the numbers tell the story: approximately 20,000 invoices issued per month and between 16,000 and 17,000 active billing customers, served by a team of just 16 account managers. Each manager handles between 2,000 and 3,000 customers.

Key takeaways:

• From financial reports to end-to-end automation. Correos Express has been working with Yndika for over ten years. Initially the platform was used primarily for financial reporting and new customer evaluation. The real step change came with the integration of collections management: today, if at the start of the month there are 1,000 or 2,000 outstanding invoices, Yndika automatically sends communications to customers — from pre-due reminders through to tracked escalation claims — acting, in Hugo’s words, “like a police officer watching over every single invoice.”
• Coordinated communication with the commercial team. Every time a customer is chased for payment, their account manager receives the information in parallel. This cultural shift aligned finance and sales around a clear message: collecting effectively also protects the commercial relationship.
• Initial resistance gave way to adoption. As with many transformations, part of the team initially feared that automation would replace jobs. Experience proved otherwise: the platform reaches where a person simply cannot, and today the account managers’ own feedback is that Yndika is there to improve collections efficiency — not to replace them.
• Beyond major accounts. Without Yndika, collection pressure was manually prioritized toward the highest invoice values. Since adopting the platform’s flexible configuration, collections reach the entire portfolio — particularly the thousands of smaller customers — without expanding the team.

What All Three Companies Have in Common

1. Credit as a sales lever: they use information to extend more credit with risk under control.
2. Scaling without increasing costs: growing in customers, business lines, or countries without a parallel increase in the risk team.
3. Measurable results within months: clear improvements visible within four to five months, accelerating after ERP integration.

The Next Step: Artificial Intelligence Agents

During the session, Atlax 360 previewed the next evolution of Yndika: AI agents capable of executing planned collections tasks — including customer calls with configurable accent, tone, and firmness level based on debt aging. Artificial intelligence is already embedded in the platform for calculating risk indicators and credit limits, adapting the model to the data available in each country to maintain the same predictive power even where public information is scarce.

Frequently Asked Questions About Credit Risk Transformation