Visa to Acquire Core Banking Platform Pismo for $1 Billion

Visa plans to acquire Pismo for $1 billion cash to provide more solutions to its customers.

The acquisition will also expand the geographic footprint of Pismo, a cloud-native issuer processing and core banking platform that has operations in Latin America, Asia-Pacific and Europe, the companies said in a Wednesday (June 28) press release.

The transaction is expected to close by the end of the year, subject to regulatory approvals, according to the release.

“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,” Visa Chief Product and Strategy Officer Jack Forestell said in the release.

With the planned acquisition, Visa will be able to provide its clients with core banking and issuer processing capabilities — including debit, prepaid, credit and commercial cards — via cloud-native application programming interfaces (APIs), according to the press release.

Visa will also be able to give financial institution clients support and connectivity for emerging payment rails, including Pix in Brazil, the release said.

Pismo will retain its current management team after the planned acquisition, per the release.

“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,” Pismo co-founder and CEO Ricardo Josua said in the release. “Visa provides us unrivalled support to expand our footprint globally and help shape a new era for banking and payments.”

It was reported in March that Visa was competing to acquire Pismo, with at least one other firm also bidding.

The cloud-based banking and payments platform has been expanding globally and processes 74 million accounts and 38 million cards, according to the March 24 Seeking Alpha report, which was attributed to the Portuguese-language Brazilian newspaper Valor Econômico.

Earlier in March, Pismo debuted a lending tool to respond to increased demand for digital banking. The tool lets financial institutions create lending solutions tailored to their customers using thousands of combinations to “create and craft unique products,” the company said at the time.

Visa’s planned acquisition of Pismo comes about 15 months after Visa finalized a deal to purchase Sweden-based open banking platform Tink to enable clients to deliver consumer benefits designed to improve control over their finances.