Visa Taps Veteran Leonardo Collado to Lead Pismo’s Global Growth

Visa has appointed one of its executives, Leonardo J. Collado, to lead Pismo, the provider of processing solutions for bank, FinTechs and financial institutions around the world that Visa acquired in 2024.

Collado, who is currently senior vice president at Visa and head of value-added services for Latin America and the Caribbean, will become general manager of Pismo on April 1, Visa said in a Thursday (March 5) press release.

He will succeed Vishal Dalal, who has served as general manager of Pismo since 2021 and decided to leave Visa to pursue an entrepreneurial opportunity, according to the release.

Collado has 25 years of payments industry experience and deep regional knowledge, per the release.

“We are thrilled to welcome Leo to the Pismo team — his deep payments expertise and firsthand experience scaling platform capabilities across Latin America and beyond make him the ideal leader to take Pismo into its next chapter of global growth,” Kathleen Pierce-Gilmore, senior vice president, issuer solutions at Visa, said in the release.

“At the same time, we want to recognize Vishal’s invaluable contributions to Pismo over the past several years,” Pierce-Gilmore added. “His vision and leadership have been instrumental in shaping the business, and we wish him success in his next venture.”

Collado said in a Thursday post on LinkedIn that Pismo has become a “strategic growth platform within Visa.”

“Its cloud-native platform positions Pismo to be a powerful engine for growth as the industry evolves, from agentic commerce and real-time payments to digital assets and stablecoins,” Collado said.

Visa announced in June 2023 that it planned to acquire Pismo for $1 billion cash and expand Pismo’s geographic footprint, which at the time included operation in Latin America, Asia-Pacific and Europe.

The company completed the acquisition in January 2024, saying that Visa and Pismo together would provide clients with core banking and card-issuer processing capabilities across all product types via cloud-native application programming interfaces (APIs). Visa added that the Pismo platform would also enable it to provide financial institution clients with support and connectivity for emerging payment methods and real-time payments networks.

According to the Thursday press release, Pismo has expanded from five countries to more than 20 since the acquisition. It has also signed agreements with several global banks.

Dalal said in a post on LinkedIn that he joined Pismo in 2021 and that since then, the company grew from a Brazilian FinTech to one that expanded to the regions in which it now operates.

“Now, as Pismo enters its next growth chapter, the time feels right for me to turn the page too,” Dalal said. “And after 28 years — I’m going to do something I haven’t managed to do so far — catch my breath for a bit before moving on to what comes next.”