Visa buys Brazil’s Pismo for $1bn

Visa has paid $1 billion to acquire core banking platform Pismo, allowing Visa to provide support and connectivity for emerging payment rails, like Brazil’s Pix.

Brazil-based Pismo, which has operations in Latin America, Asia Pacific and Europe, will retain its management team once the deal completes.

The acquisition positions Visa to provide core banking and issuer processing capabilities across debit, pre-paid, credit and commercial cards for clients via cloud native APIs.

“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,” said Jack Forestell, chief product and strategy officer at Visa.

Ricardo Josua, Pismo’s co-founder and chief executive officer, added: “At Pismo, 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.

“Visa provides us unrivalled support to expand our footprint globally and help shape a new era for banking and payments.”

The transaction is expected to close by the end of 2023.

Pismo’s investors include Redpoint eventures, Softbank, Amazon and Accel.