Visa announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Pista, a cloud-based processing and banking platform for issuers, for $1 billion in cash.

It reported that the acquisition of Pisma will position it to provide core banking and processing capabilities for issuers of debit, prepaid, credit and commercial cards to customers through cloud-native APIs. The Letters platform will also enable Visa to provide its financial institution clients with support and connectivity for new payment systems, such as Pix in Brazil.

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Pismo operates in Latin America, Southeast Asia and Europe. The company’s investors include Redpoint Events, Softbank, Amazon and Accel.

“By acquiring Pisma, Visa can better serve our financial institutions and fintechs with more differentiated issuers and banking solutions to offer their customers,” said Jack Forestell, head of product and strategy at Visa.

For his part, Ricardo Josua, co-founder and CEO of Pismo, pointed out that they strive to enable their customers to run the most modern payment and banking products, within a single native cloud platform, regardless of the rails, geography or currency used.

“Visa provides us with unparalleled support to expand our presence globally and help shape a new era for banking and payments,” said Josua, who explained that Pismo will retain its current management team.

The transaction is subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions, and is expected to be completed by the end of 2023. (I)