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Visa Inc. said Wednesday it has struck a definitive agreement to acquire Brazilian financial and payments processor Pismo Soluções Tecnologicas Ltda. for $1 billion in cash. The deal strengthens Visa’s presence in fast-growing Latin America and gives it access to technological services that can be taken abroad.
Founded only in 2016, Pismo provides core banking and payment card processing for financial institutions and supports digital wallets and other financial services. In March, Pismo added digital lending to services that run on its application programming interface-based platform. The company is based in Sao Paulo, and, besides Brazil, operates in other parts of Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Europe.
“By acquiring Pismo, Visa will be positioned to provide core banking and issuer processing capabilities across debit, prepaid, credit, and commercial cards for clients via cloud-native APIs,” Visa said in a news release. “Pismo’s platform will also enable Visa to provide support and connectivity for emerging payment rails, like Pix in Brazil, for financial-institution clients.”
Brazil’s central bank, the Banco Central do Brasil, in 2020 created the Pix instant-payments system for account-to-account transfers.
“Through the acquisition of Pismo, Visa can better serve our financial-institution and fintech clients with more differentiated core banking and issuer solutions they can offer their customers,” Jack Forestell, Visa’s chief product and strategy officer, said in the release.
Asked by Digital Transactions News how the deal came together, a Visa spokesperson said the company is not commenting beyond the release. A Pismo spokesperson was not available Thursday morning.
“We aim to enable our clients to launch cutting-edge payments and banking products within a single cloud-native platform—regardless of rails, geography, or currency,” Ricardo Josua, Pismo’s co-founder and chief executive, said in the release. “Visa provides us unrivaled support to expand our footprint globally and help shape a new era for banking and payments.”
Though it’s far smaller than Visa’s U.S., Asia Pacific, and European regions in total payments volume, Latin America and the Caribbean was Visa’s fastest-growing region in the quarter ending March 31. The region posted volume of $189 billion, a 26.6% increase from a year earlier on a constant-dollar basis, according to Visa’s latest operational report. U.S. volume was $1.47 trillion, up 10%.
Visa says Pismo’s management team will remain in place. The deal, which is subject to regulatory approvals, is expected to close by year’s end.
