How a farmer turned fintech CEO is building the infrastructure to make agricultural loan underwriting faster and smarter.
Victoria Tostado has stood on both sides of the agricultural lending gap. She has been the farmer filling out forms a lender couldn't quite translate into a decision, and the consultant sitting across the table from bankers who had the capital but not the confidence to deploy it. That firsthand view of both sides of the equation is what led her to found Agxes, a platform that brings satellite imagery, weather data, AI analysis and market intelligence into the underwriting process so community banks can serve more farmers, faster and at lower cost. We sat down with Tostado to talk about her path from running a greenhouse and lime orchard in Mexico to building financial infrastructure for agriculture, and why she believes closing this gap matters far beyond the balance sheet.
How did you get started with farming?
I was born on the southeast coast of Mexico, in the state of Veracruz, in the city of Coatzacoalcos. It's a city that has depended on the oil and gas industry since the 1980s, but we also have huge potential for agriculture and export markets since we have a long coastline on the Gulf of Mexico. Mexico is a major producer of citrus, and one of the main exporters of avocados and tomatoes. It's a region well positioned to build that economy, and we had the land just sitting there, so it was a matter of asking what it was good for.
In 2018 I founded an agricultural production company. We have a greenhouse that produces tomatoes for the export market, and an orchard of limes also for export. I faced firsthand the problem of accessing credit. I worked with different lenders, spent hours trying to explain and translate our productivity into financial insights, and after days of back and forth we basically ended up doing the forms and the files for them, because they still weren't grasping our business in detail. Every crop is different, every season is different. You need a certain expertise to underwrite it well.
And then you started working with banks too?
Yes. Working as an independent consultant for a development bank, I had the opportunity to work with farmers across different regions producing different crops, and I saw the same issue from the other direction. For farmers, the number one challenge was accessing good financial services. For the bank, the challenge was understanding the potential success of deploying the money. They had the capital. The money wasn't lacking. The question was how to understand each region and each crop well enough to actually deploy that capital with confidence.
So you were looking at two sides of the same equation.
Exactly. What was missing was an infrastructure of information that could let that dynamic flow better. When there's trust, every business and every industry works better. What we were missing was a layer of trust and intelligence that could connect the two sides. That's how I came up with the idea for Agxes.
What can community banks do through Agxes that they couldn't do before?
Agricultural lending has the highest operational costs of any lending category. Why? Because it can take 90 days or more to underwrite a loan, and it's limited by human capacity and human expertise. Banks tend to focus on just one crop or a few crops to manage risk, but that concentration actually makes the portfolio less healthy than it should be. There are also a lot of compliance bottlenecks, and one loan can cost on average $4,000 just to process. Multiply that across the thousands of loans in a community bank's portfolio and it's easy to see why agricultural lending is the most expensive to originate.
That's the problem we're solving. According to the US government, 70% of US farmers are underserved or not served at all, not because they're bad farmers or bad businesses, but because it isn't cost effective to analyze them at $4,000 a loan. A lot of loans under $300,000 simply don't get served. That's the opportunity for community banks: tap into a new segment and expand their business while doing it more profitably, saving up to 95% of processing time and reducing operational cost by at least 50%.
How does the platform actually work?
We emulate the onboarding and underwriting process banks already run, and we expedite it with AI, while bringing in alternative information to complement what they're doing today. That includes satellite imagery for anti-fraud, third-party validation, weather patterns, and market price forecasting using machine learning. In the end, we take scattered, technical data and turn it into ready-to-use financial insights.
Banks often send people out to visit farms in person. Does this replace that?
Not replace, complement. Today, most banks send people to the land in trucks to walk it and see things for themselves, which is great, but very costly. Now you can combine sending someone out occasionally with a weekly view of how the land is performing from satellite imagery, for cents on the dollar. You get more information more often while reducing the cost of in-person visits.
How do you build trust with lenders and with farmers at the same time?
We work on behalf of the lender, so we meet all the regulatory and security requirements they need. We're a white-label solution. A bank's farmer customer enters their information in the bank's own platform, and on the back end, that information runs through the Agxes platform for analysis.
We're not asking farmers to change how they operate or to go digital on day one. They can still deliver information on paper at the branch, and it gets scanned and uploaded into our platform. If they're already digital, they can send photos from their phones. We're making it as flexible and low-friction as possible for both producers and lenders, and we integrate with the servicing platforms and CRMs banks already use, since underwriting is usually still done manually today.
How does the Farmer's Wallet play into that trust?
We pair our analytics solution with a farmer's wallet, an expense management card that's controlled. Once a bank decides to deploy the loan, the money on the card can only be used for the purpose it was approved for, say fertilizer. That creates transparency around how the money is used and controls what can't be diverted. Farmers benefit too. They can issue digital wallets/cards to their own teams with the same kind of control. And we can match behavior to outcomes: they buy the fertilizer today, and in a month the satellite imagery shows the land greener. That closes the loop between the analytics and the deployment of capital.
Some bankers might hear "faster" and assume "riskier." What do you say to that?
Speed is part of our value proposition, but it's not the only one. We bring domain expertise using technology to make things more intelligent, for example understanding whether a farmer is selling a crop above or below standard market price, and why: is there leverage, is there scarcity. We take deep domain expertise in an industry with an enormous number of variables, region, crop, quality, water availability, commercial terms, and put it at the fingertips of the banker. Those variables are exactly what limits community banks from growing this business with confidence today. Now they have a source of intelligence that can guide them toward new income they were previously constrained from reaching.
Why does supporting farmers matter to you personally?
All of us eat. The quality of our food matters for health, and that makes the food value chain a matter of national security for every country. If you want to move from traditional agriculture to sustainable agriculture, water use matters too. Roughly 70% of the world's available water is used in agriculture, largely because most producers don't have access to irrigation systems. Irrigation costs money, and it can't be paid back in the short term. It requires a medium-term financial product. If we want to advance this industry at all, we need the right financial services behind it. That's why focusing on financial services for agriculture is so crucial.
Acceleron is a modern correspondent banking platform that empowers community banks and credit unions to automate international wire transfers, capture non-interest income, and compete more effectively with big banks. With a foreign exchange (FX) marketplace and currency conversion engine, Acceleron’s API-first infrastructure helps institutions turn cross-border payment flows into efficient, revenue-generating opportunities. Serving over 200 financial institutions and facilitating more than $1 billion in international payments annually, our correspondent banking services and international payment automation solutions are pre-integrated seamlessly with Fiserv Payments Exchange, Aptys, and other leading payments platforms.
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Daisy Lin, Head of Marketing, Acceleron: 7/28/26, 8:28 AM
Daisy Lin, Head of Marketing, Acceleron