For Mercado Libre, what started as a conversation with IT leaders quickly turned into a shared vision: designing and implementing a solution that could transform the way financial operations are managed at scale.
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According to Quartr, a leader in public market research, Mercado Libre is more than Latin America’s largest company by market cap—it’s also the digital backbone of Latin America. The logistics of Amazon, the marketplace of Alibaba, and the fintech capabilities of Block are all rolled into one company in a region experiencing rapid structural growth.
“At Mercado Libre, innovation is part of our DNA. For over 25 years, we’ve been shaping the future of commerce and financial services in Latin America, empowering millions of people and businesses to buy, sell, and thrive,” said Hernán López, Senior manager, Mercado Libre. He was speaking at the recent SAP and SAP Fioneer Forum for Financial Services event presented by TAC Insights in Munich.
His presentation featured the company’s transformative project to bring AI to the heart of its financial operations. “Our story of progress isn’t just about scale—it’s about constantly evolving to meet the needs of a fast-changing digital economy,” he explained.
From Boston to Buenos Aires
The seeds of this project were planted last year in Boston, during an event where experts from Mercado Libre connected with technology leaders to discuss the potential of AI-driven financial agents. What started as a conversation quickly turned into a shared vision: designing and implementing a solution that could transform the way financial operations are managed at scale.
Over the past year, dedicated teams from Mercado Libre and its partners worked side by side to bring this vision to life. Countless workshops, user interviews, and co-creation sessions took place, always guided by one principle: put the end user at the center of innovation.
The goal of the project was to tackle complexity and fragmentation. López listed some of the daily challenges faced by finance teams:
- Disconnected systems – Data was scattered across BigQuery, Microsoft Excel, and other tools with no single source of truth.
- Manual processes – Tasks such as filtering reports or preparing audit cases could take up to 40 minutes each, multiplied by thousands of cases.
- Slow turnaround – New reports or configurations often required weeks to implement.
- Limited flexibility – Even small changes to models required starting from scratch.
- Time-consuming data prep – Teams spent more time cleaning and downloading data than actually analyzing it.
For financial analysts and managers, this meant wasted time, duplication of effort, and missed opportunities for deeper insights.
A new financial assistant
“Together, we imagined a different future, one where financial reporting and analysis could be handled through natural language, powered by AI,” said López.
He went on to describe the AI agent developed by the team. It can consolidate data into a single, user-friendly system. It automates repetitive tasks such as trial balance reporting, subledger analysis, and reconciliations. It provides real-time insights for faster decision-making.
Most importantly, it allows analysts and managers to simply “ask” questions and receive structured, visualized results in seconds. During live demonstrations, López showed how powerful this could be.
A user could type: “Create the trial balance for Q2 2024 for company MCM.” Within seconds, the AI agent would generate a clean, structured report, with the ability to drill down, filter results, or even generate charts, all without manual intervention or technical barriers.
In another example, a controller could request: “Analyze transaction 12345 on January 1, 2024.” The agent would instantly display detailed entries, accounting impact, and even custom attributes relevant to Mercado Libre’s financial processes. What used to take hours of work was now achieved in moments.
The guiding principles
Throughout the project, the team followed five key principles to ensure adoption and success: synchronous reporting, self-service, consistency, simplicity and scalability. These principles kept the team focused on creating not just a “smart” solution, but one that is also practical, accessible, and valuable in everyday work.
“These principles kept us focused on our goals to deliver real-time data for making real-time decisions, empower end users from start to finish, and consolidate data across multiple databases,” said López. “The simple user-friendly design makes us fast and agile and enables us to build for high volume and future growth.”
The road ahead
The journey doesn’t stop here. Mercado Libre is in the process of launching AI-driven business and financial insights. Later this year, it’s expanding with error analysis, smart recommendations, data validation, and improved data quality. The introduction of anomaly detection to monitor critical accounts and ensure robust financial control will follow next year.
“This road map reflects not only our ambition but also the speed at which we are moving,” said López. “Working hand in hand with our partners such as SAP Fioneer, we are accelerating innovation to deliver meaningful results for our teams, our users, and the broader ecosystem.”
The goal at Mercado Libre is to make financial analysis simple, fast, and accessible—turning complexity into clarity with the help of AI. For the team, this project is more than just a technological milestone. It’s proof that when passionate teams come together, guided by a user-first approach, the results can be transformative.
“We believe the best is yet to come,” López concluded. “This is only the beginning of how AI will reshape the future of financial operations in Latin America and beyond.”
