Visa Competing to Acquire Banking and Payments Platform Pismo

Visa is reportedly competing to acquire cloud-based banking and payments platform Pismo.

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

At least one other firm is also bidding for Pismo, according to the report, which was attributed to the 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 provided a statement saying, “Pismo does not comment on market rumors.”

The FinTech company provides cloud services to banks, has been expanding 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 manner of financial services firms seeking to reimagine and change their client experiences must grapple with a “piling up of technology” and that banking application programming interfaces (APIs) and platforms can help banks, FinTechs, acquirers and marketplaces launch next-generation solutions without wrestling with old infrastructure.

The conversation took place soon after Pismo’s Oct. 19, 2021, announcement that it raised $108 million in a Series B funding round.

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

“That sets us apart from other players that are using legacy solutions, and from the solutions where the technology might be new, but they have yet to be tested at full volumes,” Josua said.

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

“Financial institutions have become used to selecting from a series 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 our APIs.”

Twenty-five percent of bankers view Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) technology solutions as a crucial opportunity to grow revenue, according to the March edition of the “Embedded Finance Tracker®,” a PYMNTS and Galileo collaboration.