Visa makes latest foray into fintech with Belvo investment

Visa has made its latest foray into fintech, investing in Latin American open finance API platform Belvo.

Visa’s investment is part of Belvo’s Series A fundraising round that brought in $43 million for the company. Specific details of how much Visa invested were not disclosed.

Belvo, which has been likened to a South American Plaid, works with more than 50 financial institutions and over 125 clients, including fintechs, in Mexico, Brazil and Colombia, through its API platform.

The financial institutions use Belvo's technology to build secure connections with their end users’ financial data and use the information to build better and more efficient financial products.

Visa’s investment in Belvo is part of wider collaboration between both companies, which recently announced a strategic partnership to help financial institutions and issuers across Latin America.

“As we’ve built our product and team and grown as a company, we’re now entering a new phase where market expansion and collaboration with several strategic partners is key to providing reliable and secure capabilities at scale to our clients,” said Pablo Viguera, Belvo’s co-founder and co-CEO. 

“That’s why we’re excited to continue working with a strategic partner and investor such as Visa, with whom we share a common long-term vision to enable not only fintech companies but also larger enterprises and financial institutions to embrace open finance models and leverage financial data in Latin America."

The move marks Visa’s latest move into fintech, having made some big ticket pruchases of fintechs and and smaller investments  in financial challengers in the past.

Earlier this year Visa snapped up Swedish Open Banking platform Tink for €1.8bn.

Six months later it announced it was purchasing global cross-border payments platform Currencycloud for £700m.

It has also made several smaller investments in fintechs, as looks to bolster itself amidst competition from smaller competitors.