Colombia has 3,251 entities supervised by the Superintendencia de la Economía Solidaria. Between them they hold 63.1 trillion pesos in assets and have 7,598,771 members, as of December 2025.
A note on scale: Colombian financial reporting uses the long scale, where billón means a million millions. Throughout this article “trillion” means 10¹², which is what a Colombian reader sees as billón.
That second number is what makes the sector different: in a cooperative or an employee fund, the customer and the owner are the same person. Seven and a half million Colombians do not buy services from these entities — they own them. That works out to 8.3 million pesos of assets per head and 4.6 million pesos of loans.
The whole sector is run by just 65,267 employees: one worker for every 116 members.
Four legal forms that do different things
The Superintendency sorts them into four categories, and treating them as one block is the most common mistake in reading this sector.
| Entities | Members | Assets | Loans / assets | ROE | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Savings and credit cooperatives | 178 | 4,061,477 | $24.5 tn | 75.5% | 4.8% |
| Cooperatives with savings activity | 1,621 | 2,062,114 | $21.6 tn | 19.9% | 1.7% |
| Employee funds | 1,346 | 1,259,613 | $16.5 tn | 71.7% | 6.7% |
| Mutual associations | 106 | 215,567 | $0.47 tn | 56.9% | 2.8% |
The column that matters is loans over assets. The 1,621 cooperatives with savings activity hold nearly as many assets as the savings and credit cooperatives, yet only 19.9% of those assets are lent out. They are not financial institutions. They are worker, consumer, health or transport cooperatives that also take savings from their members: Coomeva, Colanta and Coopidrogas all sit in that category. Ranking them by profitability against a savings and credit cooperative compares two different businesses.
Employee funds are the opposite case, and the most profitable in the sector: 71.7% of their assets are loans and they return 6.7% on equity, nearly double the average. It makes sense — a fund lends to salaried workers, collects repayment through payroll deduction, and carries structurally low credit risk.
The ones losing money are the small ones
392 entities closed 2025 at a loss — 12.1% — but between them they hold just 4.7% of the sector’s assets. The problem is not where the money is.
By legal form, mutual associations are the most exposed: one in five closed in the red. Employee funds the least: one in twelve.
Four in ten entities are tiny
| Asset size | Entities | % of sector assets |
|---|---|---|
| under $1,000 M | 1,350 | 0.8% |
| $1,000 M – $10,000 M | 1,290 | 7.4% |
| $10,000 M – $100,000 M | 504 | 24.3% |
| $100,000 M – $1 tn | 99 | 39.2% |
| over $1 tn | 8 | 28.3% |
1,350 entities hold under 1,000 million pesos in assets and, all together, add up to 0.8% of the sector. At the other end, eight entities pass the trillion-peso mark and concentrate 28.3%.
The sector’s median is 194 members. The 90th percentile is 2,816. Only 14 entities have more than 100,000 members.
That size is not a defect, it is the model. An employee fund exists for the workers of one company: if the company has 300 employees, the fund will have 300 members and cannot have more. The figure is useful for sizing the sector, not for judging any single entity.
It does carry one practical consequence: any regulatory burden applied equally to all 3,251 weighs very differently on an entity with 600 million pesos than on one with 6 trillion.
Member savings fund two thirds of liabilities
The sector owes 39.2 trillion pesos against 23.9 trillion in equity: 62.2% leverage. Of those liabilities, 63.4% are deposits from the members themselves.
That is a midpoint between a commercial company (46% leverage, funded by owners and suppliers) and a bank (87%, funded by the public). And it explains why a separate superintendency exists: whoever takes in savings needs prudential supervision, even when they are not a bank.
Three departments, two thirds of the money
Bogotá, Antioquia and Valle del Cauca concentrate 68.3% of the sector’s assets — the same concentration the corporate sector shows.
Santander is the exception worth looking at: fourth by assets with 198 entities, but third by membership with 1,547,083 — more than twice Valle del Cauca, which holds nearly twice the assets. That is many small entities with a lot of people inside them, the exact opposite of Bogotá’s profile.
How it was built
The source is the financial and membership data of entities supervised by the Superintendencia de la Economía Solidaria, cut-off 31 December 2025, in current pesos. Three things worth knowing:
- The source file arrives with broken character encoding: every accented letter comes through as question marks. Names were rebuilt word by word against a hand-reviewed dictionary, and the accents the source never carried were restored on top of that.
- 36 entities report zero members. They are kept in the asset totals and excluded from the median membership calculation.
- The category is assigned by the Superintendency, not by us. “Cooperative with savings activity” does not mean financial cooperative, and that is the single largest source of error in reading this sector.
All information is public and pertains to legal entities. Neither the dashboard nor the attached file includes contact details, legal representatives or information about any natural person.
The contrast with the other two supervisory regimes is laid out in the comparison of the three regulators.
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Attachment
The data behind this analysis, so you can verify it or build on top of it.
- Summary by legal form, size band and department Download