Buying a payments infrastructure firm with clients across South America lets Visa expand its footprint and relationship with customers. 

Visa announced plans to buy Pismo for $1 billion, marking the largest fintech M&A news this year.  

Pismo’s cloud-based infrastructure provides the core banking platform through which financial institutions can issue credit or debit cards or operate digital wallets and marketplaces. The firm counts Citi, Itau, and neobank N26 among its customers and although its main customer base is in Latin America, it also operates in Europe and Asia Pacific.  

The acquisition allows Visa to expand its relationship with customers: It can now offer core banking and card issuing services to banks and financial institutions that it previously only worked with through its payment rails.  

Mastercard was reportedly eying an acquisition as well, but Visa won out. In other fintech acquisition news, Ramp just bought AI-powered customer service startup Cohere.