The Ecosystem: A Decisive Step Towards Sustainability
Ecuador takes a decisive step towards financial sustainability. The
Superintendencia de Economía Popular y Solidaria (SEPS), with funding from
Banco de Desarrollo de América Latina y el Caribe (CAF), commissioned
Urbadigital to design and develop a comprehensive technological platform for the collection, analysis, and visualization of data on Green Finance in the country’s cooperative sector. The result is a robust, scalable, and interoperable digital system that modernizes how the State supervises compliance with the SARAS Standard and makes visible the sustainable financial products of 395 active entities of the Popular and Solidarity Financial System (SFPS), which manage a total portfolio exceeding USD 19,637 million.
The Challenge: Technological Gaps in Green Supervision
Despite regulatory advances led by
SEPS—particularly the SARAS Control Standard for the Administration of Environmental and Social Risk—the sector faced critical gaps that limited its real supervision capacity. Without specific tools to monitor green financial products, with limitations in evaluating the real impact of reported sustainable initiatives, and difficulty in detecting practices not aligned with international criteria, the State lacked the necessary data to make evidence-based decisions.
The automation of reporting was an urgent need. The diagnosis carried out by Urbadigital confirmed this reality: although documentary compliance with the SARAS Standard reached 100% in audited entities, the real operational traceability presented significant gaps. Out of 169 surveyed cooperatives, barely 20% had operational green financial products.
Key Metrics
395 active entities of the Popular and Solidarity Financial System (SFPS) managed.
USD $19,637M+ total portfolio under digital supervision.
100% document compliance with the SARAS Standard in audited entities.
42 QA test cases executed to ensure system robustness.
Our Methodology: Digital Transformation Serving Sustainability
Urbadigital designed and implemented an end-to-end digital transformation solution, structured into four integrated products:
1. Technical Diagnosis and Gap Analysis:
An exhaustive report that analyzed the SFPS ecosystem, evaluated compliance with the SARAS Standard against international standards (IFC, ISO 14001, ISO 45001, Equator Principles), and identified information gaps regarding Green Finance. In-depth interviews were conducted with four representative cooperatives in the sector.
2. Data Collection Architecture:
Structure C08 was designed, a scheme of 15 standardized fields for reporting green financial products, fully adaptable to SEPS systems. The technical component included XSD manuals, DERS specifications, and security validations under OWASP standards, guaranteeing data integrity and reliability from its source.
3. ETL Methodology and Data Quality Assurance:
Based on a microservices architecture, Urbadigital implemented ETL pipelines with Spring Batch and asynchronous processing via RabbitMQ, integrated with an IBM Netezza Data Warehouse and analytical cubes in Microsoft Analysis Services. The result: clean, traceable data ready for strategic data analytics.
4. DATASEPS Application — Green Finance and SARAS Modules:
The project’s core product: a web platform developed in React + Spring Boot, interoperable with the SEPS technological environment, integrating interactive maps by canton and province, geographical and segmented filters, and public and private reports with embedded Power BI. The user experience was designed under person-centered UI/UX criteria. 42 QA test cases were executed, and 5 training sessions were designed for internal and external users.
The Impact: Data That Decides
The platform implemented by Urbadigital generates institutional value in three strategic dimensions:
· Supervision with Real Traceability:
SEPS has a specific tool to monitor the operational compliance of the SARAS Standard with standardized KPIs. The DATASEPS portal integrates Green Finance data analytics with dynamic territorial visualization.
· Transparency and Accountability:
The solution enables differentiated access—public and private—to information on sustainable financial products, strengthening accountability to citizens, investors, and international organizations.
· Alignment with the Global Agenda:
The project directly contributes to SDGs 8, 10, 12, 13, and 15, and positions Ecuador to attract international climate financing under IFC standards and the Equator Principles.
