Visa Completes Acquisition of Pismo, Expands Core Banking Offerings

Visa has completed its previously announced acquisition of Pismo.

With the addition of this global cloud-native issuer processing and core banking platform, Visa and Pismo will together provide clients with core banking and card-issuer processing capabilities across all product types via cloud-native application programming interfaces (APIs), Visa said in a Tuesday (Jan. 16) press release.

The Pismo platform will also enable Visa to provide financial institution clients with support and connectivity for emerging payment methods and real-time payments networks, according to the release.

“Core banking and issuer processor capabilities are key offerings for many of our financial institution and FinTech partners’ clients,” Jack Forestell, chief product and strategy officer at Visa, said in the release. “With the combination of Visa and Pismo, we can now broaden these offerings and better serve the ecosystem.”

Pismo’s management team, including co-founder and CEO Ricardo Josua, will remain at Pismo, per the release.

“The combination of Visa and Pismo will enable our clients to launch innovative payments and banking products within a single cloud-native platform regardless of network, geography or currency,” Josua said in the release. “This closing marks a new era for banking and payments.”

Visa announced in June that it planned to acquire Pismo for $1 billion cash.

The company said at the time that this move would allow Visa to provide more solutions to its customers and expand the geographic footprint of Pismo, which had operations in Latin America, Asia-Pacific and Europe.

It had been reported three months earlier, in March, that Visa was competing with at least one other firm to acquire Pismo.

With millions of merchants and enterprises on one side of Visa’s network (and millions of consumers transacting with those entities) and the security and regulatory compliance already in place, extending the network to include new capabilities might have positive ripple effects, PYMNTS reported when the then-planned acquisition was announced in June.

In another recent move, Visa and CIBC said on Jan. 9 that they have formed a new collaboration to help the bank’s clients send remittances across borders more conveniently. This capability will be available in the coming months.