What is the name of your solution?
Symplifica APP
Provide a one-line summary of your solution.
Symplifica is an enterprise that seeks to streamline the job formalization process for domestic workers in Colombia and Mexico.
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Bogotá, ColombiaWhat type of organization is your solution team?
For-profit, including B-Corp or similar models
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
Before the 2011 Domestic Workers Convention (No. 189), which was adopted in Colombia in 2014 and in Mexico in 2020, domestic workers in both countries were exposed to precarious working conditions. They worked without contracts, received no healthcare, occupational hazard insurance, or pension benefits. They earned less than minimum wage, and often worked more than eight hours per day.
Historically, domestic workers have largely been women who have undertaken care and household tasks in the form of unpaid work. 91% of domestic workers in Latin America and the Caribbean, who tend to be from disadvantaged social groups, are vulnerable to labor exploitation. Frequently, when households choose to redistribute domestic work by employing someone, they do so informally through references from acquaintances, without signing a work contract and without enrolling staff in social security systems. Informality increases domestic workers' vulnerability to job and financial insecurity, which has worsened in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In Colombia and Mexico, employers are required by law to formalize their domestic workers by registering their employment contracts and enrolling them into social security systems, which enables domestic workers to access pensions, health benefits, and other social security programs. However, complex and often lengthy processes and paperwork discourage formalization. Data suggests that in Colombia 80% of domestic workers are informal and in Mexico 96.7% are informal.
What is your solution?
Symplifica created a digital platform with a broad portfolio of services for employers and domestic workers that promotes their formalization. The company currently operates in Colombia and Mexico.
Symplifica assists employers to enroll domestic workers into social security systems, formalize written contracts, and administer monthly payments to pension, health, occupational hazard insurance, and family subsidy systems through the same platform.
The company offers flexible plans to both households and domestic workers depending on the number of working hours. Plans provide the employer: a) assistance with the hiring processes; b) contract templates; c) assisted social security systems registration, which requires separate procedures to enroll in each benefit (pension, health, and other social systems according to national law); d) online payments channel for employers to pay salary, contributions, and benefits that provides transparency and on-time disbursals as well as payment tracking; e) a digital folder for employment relationship documentation; and f) 24/7 customer service. As part of its portfolio, Symplifica also offers basic medical examinations, background checks, COVID-19 tests, uniforms, and legal and psychological counseling for employers and domestic workers.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
Symplifica makes it easier and faster for employers, primarily women, to formalize and enroll domestic workers into national social security systems. Through Symplifica’s services, domestic workers, mainly women, are more likely to access decent and legal employment opportunities and other social benefits, receive fair remuneration, access formal financial services, and gain knowledge about their labor rights.
Since 2016, Symplifica has served:
Over 22,000 employers; 60% of whom are women and 40% men.
Formalize more than 33,000 domestic workers, 95% of whom are women, including nannies, nurses, elderly care workers, drivers, farm stewards, and gardeners. According to Symplifica’s monitoring data:
* 65% of domestic workers claim to have improved their quality of life,
*61% gained knowledge about their labor rights, *48% gained confidence in their abilities, *46% had employment benefits for the first time in their lives, *42% designated an additional beneficiary to access social security benefits.
How are you and your team well-positioned to deliver this solution?
Salua was born on the island of San Andres, being in a remote environment she grew up seeing how the informality of domestic work on the island and at homemade older people have to work for almost all their lives to have an acceptable quality of life, motivated by this when she was studying her master's degree for her thesis she created a project very similar to what Symplifica is today. During this process she has had the opportunity to get closer to the domestic work sector with partnerships like “Woman’s secretary”, “National care system” or “Foundation let's talk about domestic work”. She became an advocate of this topics and at the same she was recognized in the list of the most influential women in Latin America by Bloomberg.
In the recruiting process in Symplifica we look for people who could be engaged with our purpose. Most of our collaborators have a family member that is a domestic worker, which helps us to stay closer to the community and know the pains they suffer.
We care more than just helping to formalize domestic workers, we want to give them a better quality of life and make them feel loved and respected, that's why through the exclusive application for them (Symplifica trabajadores@s) we have an open feedback channel for them to give us ideas on how to improve their specific product. Additionally, we hold celebrations such as Domestic Workers' Day to make them feel part of the community.
Which dimension of the Challenge does your solution most closely address?
Generate new economic opportunities and buffer against economic shocks for workers, including good job creation, workforce development, and inclusive and attainable asset ownership.Which of the UN Sustainable Development Goals does your solution address?
What is your solution’s stage of development?
ScaleWhy are you applying to Solve?
Symplifica require help and a partner to advance their solution. In this case we consider needing some advisers and mentorship in technical and financial topics. We are preparing for a Series A round and it is necessary to improve the pitch for our investors, measuring our impact and adviser in our marketing strategy and how we can expand our customer base. In the tech side at the moment we are facing two important situations, on one hand we do not have enough funding to start implementing new AI based technologies to complement our product, and on the other hand for similar reasons we have put aside our security efforts, at the moment we do not have an internal team or provider that can do audits or ethical hacking to improve our platforms.
In which of the following areas do you most need partners or support?
Who is the Team Lead for your solution?
The person who is responsible for the strategic direction of Symplifica is our CEO-Salua Garcia Fakih. She is part of the cofounder team of Symplifica and has more than 12 years of experience in marketing and sales. She has a MS in innovation and entrepreneurship and a MSC in Marketing.
What makes your solution innovative?
Our platform is an innovative product based on the following:
*Symplifica reduces the complexity of recruitment a domestic worker: Making things simple Symplifica helps small employers to formalize their workers , eliminating time consuming and complex HR process.
* Symplifica improves the quality of life of domestic workers: Through this platform domestic workers could improve their quality of life through financial inclusion , access to health care , education and housing with better prices.
*Through this platform employers could manage payroll and social security payments: Gathering payroll through one platform allows us to obtain unrivaled negotiation power for employees. Besides, employees can have access to the healthcare system as they can enter the social security systems easily.
In addition:
*During 2022 Symplifica launched the new benefits platform "Symplifica trabajador@s" through this platform domestic workers have access to different benefits like education, access to financial services, insurances and other benefits with special prices
Link of this issue on news:
https://www.elespectador.com/impacto-mujer/symplifica-trabajadors-una- herramienta-para-las-trabajadoras-domesticas/
*Symplifica is offering legal accompaniment to all the domestic workers and employers that have questions, or problems to resolve.
*Symplifica was presented and recognized in CNN in spanish in the segment "The Innovator of the Week" by our co- founder - Salua Garcia. Link :
Describe in simple terms how and why you expect your solution to have an impact on the problem.
The solution that Symplifica offers: reduce the complexity of recruitment of domestic workers.
- Improves the quality of life of domestic workers
- Promotes gender equality in the work environment
- Helps guarantee labor rights to domestic workers
What are your impact goals for your solution and how are you measuring your progress towards them?
Our main impact goals are:
Improving quality of life and quality of work in the care sector
Facilitating guarantee of labor rights
Promote gender equity
We measure them with this indicators (updated on march of 2024)
+33.000 domestic workers accessing social rights
+22.000 employers conscientize
+112.000 MM cop of social security payments to improve rights
The following indicators were collected by a third firm in 2022 and help us to keep track of our solution’s progress and impact.
95% are women with an average age of 44 years
64% work full time
59% Have daily household income less than 11.00 USD, which is considered "vulnerable"
56% are single mothers
65% of the domestic workers mentioned that their quality of life improved since they started to use Symplifica
48% of the domestic workers say that confidence in their own abilities improved
61% of the domestic workers report greater awareness of their labor rights thanks to Symplifica
Describe the core technology that powers your solution.
Symplifica's latest version of the web application is constructed using Ruby, with its Rails framework. This at its core makes it a classical Model, View, Controller (MVC) architecture. Our web app is developed based on Engines that allow us to add new features to our host app. Each engine contains its own set of views, components, services, and in general well defined logic. This way of development has allowed us to increase the stability of our platforms by isolating possible errors in each Engine without compromising our main core.
Not native to the Rails framework but a common industry practice is to have a gem or library that allows the track and execution of tasks that need to be queued by priority or triggered under specific conditions or time. Within Symplifica we leverage the power of asynchronous processing for multiple tasks through the use of a gem called "GooJob '' that uses PostgreSQL as the main base for its queues.
The mobile apps of Symplifica are just native iOS and Android wrappers for the web version. There main reasons for which these wrappers present benefits over traditional full blown Swift or Kotlin applications are:
There is just one code base to be maintained (the web app), which ensures consistency among all applications.
Updates, bug fixes, improvements, and in general changes to the production code base are immediately available to all users without having to roll out an update and wait for users to adopt it.
The way the backend is handled is dictated by the rails framework, so there is the standard use of Controller, Models (with the use of active storage), helpers, services, and Object Oriented Programming standard architecture and design patterns that allow reusability, and good coding practices. Some of the back libraries that standout in the backend are: Faraday, Flipper, Redis, Postgres, daemons, hubspot, selenium-webdriver, among others.
Our Cloud is based on three key technologies at the moment, Kubernetes, SpringBoot and Ruby on Rails. The mix of these solutions allows us to deploy the code base to make horizontal scaling (increase the amount of Docker containers) in our growth process both in the local and international market.
Which of the following categories best describes your solution?
A new business model or process that relies on technology to be successful
Please select the technologies currently used in your solution:
If your solution has a website or an app, provide the links here:
https://symplifica.com.co/ , https://www.instagram.com/symplifica?igsh=am9zNG96aDUzZXFv , https://www.facebook.com/share/WLcZhejcx4y6ZeSB/?mibextid=LQQJ4d
How many people work on your solution team?
At the end of March 2024 the team has 72 people all of them are in full-time
How long have you been working on your solution?
Symplifica has been working in this solution since June 2015
Tell us about how you ensure that your team is diverse, minimizes barriers to opportunity for staff, and provides a welcoming and inclusive environment for all team members.
With Value for women we receive gender advisory and prepare a Gender diagnosis, Gender Smart Nexus survey application, participate in Interviews with key informants and collect Internal background data.
Main tasks developed by Symplifica:
1.We defined the action plan and measurement indicators
2.Formalize the commitment by developing a gender strategy
3. Started to prepare internal gender inclusion policies and practices
4.Define actions to improve the work environment and identify opportunities to improve work life balance
Symplifica participate in “AEQUALES RANKING PAR”
The results showed some advances:
We were recognized by:
*Gender strategy
*Formalization of the gender committee
*Application of the climate survey with results disaggregated by gender.
*Implementation and dissemination of policies
Symplifica participate in the gender mainstreaming scaling fund were we obtained a grant of $2,831 Swiss Francs, a partnership between Swiss Development Cooperation, PES Latam, LeFil Consulting and Pro Mujer, for the proposal of two initiatives:
INITIATIVE 1 : Strengthening communication between employers and workers
INITIATIVE 2: More equity in Symplifica's hiring schemes in the area of Technology
What is your business model?
Symplifica is a digital platform with a broad portfolio of services for employers and domestic workers that promotes their formalization.
Symplifica assists employers to enroll domestic workers into social security systems, formalize written contracts, and administer monthly payments to pension, health, occupational hazard insurance, and family subsidy systems through the same platform.
The household pays a monthly subscription depending on the number of working hours of the domestic worker.
Our current prices are:
*Full time: $53,900 cop ( if the domestic worker works more than 5 days per week)
*Plan flexi : $32.700 cop ( If the domestic worker works between 2-5 days per week)
* Single Plan: $28.500 cop for domestic workers that works 1 day per week
Additionally Symplifica offers different products and services for workers and employers like:*Affiliations to social security system and legal advisory
*Symplifica has a web site where employers can buy different products like : uniforms, medical exams, background checks, etc..
*We have a prime plan for VIP customers , the price is $228.200 cop (annual) and with this VIP plan the customers have access to discounts and benefits to hire more than 1 domestic worker.
Do you primarily provide products or services directly to individuals, to other organizations, or to the government?
Individual consumers or stakeholders (B2C)What is your plan for becoming financially sustainable, and what evidence can you provide that this plan has been successful so far?
Our main stakeholders are funds that participate in entrepreneurship and high social impact , this fund are OPEN SOCIETY FOUNDATION (OSF) , ALIVE and LATIND DIGITAL INVESTMENTS
This Funds invest in our company and give some advice and mentoring in various aspects like:
*Strategy
*Product
*Financial advisory
*ESG Advisory
At the end of 2023 with the main participation of these funds we receive more than $3MM usd in resources that we use in the plan to expand the operations of the company and growth.
During March 2024 we applied some initiatives to reach break even. The plan is to continue in the develop of different strategies to growth the customer base, increase revenues, improve the product and explore a new business model focus on SME´s ( Small, and medium companies) were we could help them to formalize their employees, support their payroll process and collaborate in the affiliation processes to social security systems for employees.
Finally we are looking some advisory to start the process of raising capital in a SERIES A ROUND
Solution Team
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DB
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Salua García Fakih Cofounder & Co-CEO, Symplifica
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MT
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Our Organization
Symplifica