Graduate from UTNBA was recognized as social entrepreneur
Her project, Zolvers, offers quality job opportunities and financial benefits such as loans for domestic workers.
Eng. Cecilia Retegui, Information Systems Engineering graduate from UTN Buenos Aires, obtained a recognition as “social entrepreneur” in the first edition of the Emmanuelle Supervielle Award granted by the Marianne Association of Franco-Argentine women in October 2017.
Retegui was awarded for Zolvers, a web site she created to offer services for the home, and which this year added a pension education tool through which users can make pension contributions, generate receipts and calculate monthly and weekly payment amounts.
According to the Marianne Association, the award “is an initiative which is the result of a partnership between France and Argentina and which seeks to promote productive projects led by bold women, female entrepreneurs who contribute to find solutions to social problems with their projects.”
In this sense, the UTNBA graduate stressed that Zolvers seeks to “foster financial inclusion, in addition to offering better job opportunities. That is why we created Zolvers Payments for those who have a domestic worker, regardless of where they hired them. With this service, we create the bank account for the worker, automatize the salary payment, tax payment receipts and pension contributions,” Retegui explained.
With the platform, which started operations at the end of 2013, the graduate wanted to develop a project which might scale to a regional level and which had a social impact: “I had had a software company for 15 years. I quit that company seeking another kind of project and I had been thinking about something that might run at a regional level, which had an impact and which might give solutions to hundreds of people; that was my dream. At that time, I had already had children and I received WhatsApp messages from people seeking trustworthy people to work in their homes. That’s how the idea came up.”
The graduate considered that one of the greatest satisfactions the project gave her was being able to offer better job opportunities: “We are going to add painters, and we have been working with the financial product. Also, we are working on offering domestic workers the possibility of finding a job on Zolvers and, for those who are already working for other clients, the possibility of having access to other services and benefits such as loans. Currently, we provide the full service of tax payer enrollment for clients and of formalization of the labor relationship for free and the idea is to continue working in that line.”
