Visa to acquire YellowPepper to bolster payment capabilities in Latin America and the Caribbean

By Pavithra R

Visa has announced the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire YellowPepper, a pioneering FinTech with proprietary technology and partnerships that supports leading financial institutions and startups in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The acquisition builds on an investment and strategic partnership that Visa made in YellowPepper in May 2018. YellowPepper’s platform offers a wide range of APIs that allow processors, issuers, and governments to seamlessly access multiple lanes for many payment flows, through a single connection.

The acquisition of YellowPepper is expected to accelerate the adoption of Visa’s “network of networks” strategy reducing the time-to-market for issuers and processors, and the cost of accessing solutions.

“For the past three years, we have partnered closely with YellowPepper to deliver innovative solutions to customers in the region. As these solutions expand to other markets, we consider aligning ourselves more closely with YellowPepper and combining our businesses to be a natural extension of our relationship. Together, we can offer a flexible, low-cost platform to connect multiple networks for new payment flows throughout Latin America and beyond. With our acquisition of YellowPepper we will make it easier for clients to enable new use cases and expand our value-added services such as tokenization, the integration of multiple payment lanes,” said Rubén Salazar, Visa’s senior vice president of products and innovation for Latin America and the Caribbean. 

YellowPepper will facilitate easier integration to Visa Direct, the company’s real-time payments platform, Visa B2B Connect, its non-card-based B2B cross-border payments network and value-added services. Both the companies together will allow expanding enablement of digital products and services, provide engaging and secure experiences for the entire ecosystem, and grow new transactions and payment volumes.

“YellowPepper’s unique technology platform is modern, interoperable, secure and scalable. Together, Visa and YellowPepper can provide better payment capabilities, thus providing comprehensive value-added services for issuers, governments and processors in the region. YellowPepper has strived to transform the banking and payments landscape in Latin America for the past 15 years through technology, and with the acceleration of global digitization and the disappearance of borders, our clients will greatly benefit from the fact that let’s join the Visa family,” said Serge Elkiner, CEO and founder of YellowPepper. 

YellowPepper will continue to provide its brand-independent solutions commercially, and CEO Serge Elkiner will continue to lead the YellowPepper team.

Recently, Visa rolled out Tap to Phone digital payments.

Established since 1958, Visa is a global payments technology company working to enable consumers, businesses, banks, and governments to use digital currency. Its advanced global processing network, VisaNet, provides secure and reliable payments and is capable of handling more than 65,000 transaction messages a second.