Visa competes to acquire banking platform Pismo

Visa is reportedly competing to buy cloud-based banking and payment platform Pismo.

The company has increased its offer for the Brazil-based FinTech company from $1 billion to $1.4 billion, Seeking Alpha reported on Friday (March 24).

At least one other firm is also bidding for Pismo, according to the report, which was attributed to Portuguese-language Brazilian newspaper Valor Econômico and cited unnamed sources.

Reached by PYMNTS, a Visa spokesperson said the company does not comment on rumors or speculation.

A Pismo spokesperson issued a statement saying, “Pismo does not comment on market rumors.”

The FinTech company provides cloud services to banks, has expanded globally and processes 74 million accounts and 38 million cards, according to the report.

Pismo CEO Ricardo Josua told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster in October 2021 that all kinds of financial services firms looking to reshape and change their customer experiences must deal with an “accumulation of technology” and that banking application programming interfaces (APIs) and platforms can help. Banks, FinTechs, buyers and marketplaces are launching next-generation solutions without struggling with old infrastructure.

The call took place shortly after Pismo’s announcement on October 19, 2021 that it raised $108 million in a Series B funding round.

Josua said at the time that Pismo had already worked with large financial services players and processing volume, at scale, across a wide range of services.

“It differentiates us from other players who use older solutions, and from the solutions where the technology may be new, but they have not yet been tested in full volume,” said Josua.

Earlier this month, Pismo launched a lending tool that allows financial institutions to create lending solutions tailored to their customers using thousands of combinations to “create and create unique products.”

“Financial institutions have become accustomed to choosing from a range of ‘Lending-in-a-Box’ solutions, which must be inserted into their existing infrastructure,” Pismo Head of Lending and Core Banking Faisal Khan said in a March 7 blog post on Pismo’s website. – This can be time-consuming and labor-intensive. With Pismo, the process is as simple as connecting to our APIs.”

25 percent of bankers see Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) technology solutions as a critical opportunity to increase revenue, according to the March issue of the “Embedded Finance Tracker®,” a PYMNTS and Galileo collaboration.