Hola amig@s fintech,
This was a week where the biggest stories in fintech stopped being regional. Global fintech revenue broke $504 billion in 2025, growing four times faster than the banks it keeps eating into, and the 2026 World Cup is shaping up as the first live, planet-scale test of everything from ISO 20022 to stablecoins to biometric checkout.
Closer to home, Brazil's Pix found itself at the center of a real trade dispute with Washington, earning the country's highest trademark protection just as US officials floated tariffs over its free-payments model, while Chinese platforms are racing to plug into the same rail.
Goals are getting the headlines. Settlement times might be the real story. We’ll see.
~Vivi
🟨Editor’s Picks
Global fintech revenue just broke $504 billion, growing four times faster than the banks it's eating into.
Fintech revenues hit a record $504 billion in 2025, up 22% year over year, according to BCG and FT Partners' latest Global Fintech Report. That outpaced incumbent financial institutions by more than 4x and pushed fintech's share of total global financial services revenue from 3% to 4%, large enough to be a mature sector but still leaving real white space, especially in underpenetrated B2B verticals.
Global payments will face their biggest live stress test yet at the 2026 World Cup
The tournament will be the first major global event where real-time payment rails, network tokenization, biometric checkout, stablecoins, and the new ISO 20022 messaging standard all operate at scale simultaneously, according to a new Finnosummit report. With 48 countries, 32 currencies, and an estimated 6.5 million attendees converging across the US, Mexico, and Canada, the report frames the event as the first public stress test of the cross-border payments infrastructure built over the past several years, including Brazil's PIX, which is already live on US payment terminals through a PagBrasil-Verifone partnership, and Mexico's SPEI. For Latin America's fintech ecosystem specifically, the question is whether fans from the region can pay as fluidly as European or US travelers, a result that would mark a real maturity threshold, or whether the tournament exposes exactly where the remaining bottlenecks sit.
What financial inclusion looks like when a bank exists to support a children's foundation.
In this episode of Fintech Bar, Carlos Tejeda, Director of Financial Services at Banco Dondé, an institution where 99% of revenue funds support for 90,000 children in Mexico, breaks down how the bank is reaching customers locked out of the formal system: embedded banking, mobility cards in Estado de México and Mérida, instant payments, AI applied to credit and collections, pawn-shop correspondent banking, and a newly launched blockchain remittances product. Tejeda, who spent nearly two decades at HSBC, Banorte, and Banco Azteca before moving into fintech, also gives a frank read on where banks and fintechs actually stand today, beyond the usual partnership talk
The fintech conversation continues in our community chats.
Across WhatsApp and Telegram, thousands of founders, operators, investors, and builders connect daily to share insights, opportunities, and market intel.
🟨 This Week’s Key Moves
| Fundraising
🌎 El Dorado, the LatAm stablecoin payments and cross-border transfers platform, raised a roughly $9 million round led by Paradigm, following a $3 million seed round in 2024 led by Multicoin Capital. The company's SuperApp connects USDT and other dollar tokens to local payment rails across Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Panama, and Peru, and has surpassed 1 million users. Investor list, valuation, and use of proceeds were not disclosed.
🇲🇽 FEMSA, the Mexican retail and financial services conglomerate, is using a strategic investment from QED Investors to expand its consumer lending business, which includes the fintech Spin. Financial terms were not disclosed, but FEMSA will keep majority ownership, and QED will contribute risk management and product expertise rather than just capital.
| Exits
🇧🇷 Asaas, the Brazilian SMB financial management and payments platform, acquired Helena CRM, a WhatsApp-based conversational CRM provider, for $29 million, the company's largest acquisition to date and its second of 2026. Helena works with over 500 partners, more than a third of whom already use Asaas.
🇨🇱 PayModum, a US-based payment gateway, completed its acquisition of Floid, a Chilean entity that holds direct relationships enabling local instant bank payments for US merchants, strengthening its position in the growing US instant payments market.
| Products & Partnerships
🇲🇽 Clip, the Mexican payments platform, launched a digital wallet built with Ant International, Mastercard, and TelevisaUnivision, and has secured $500 million from undisclosed investors (still subject to regulatory approval) at a valuation above $2.5 billion. The plan includes expanding cash deposit points from 28,000 to 100,000 nationwide to bring cash users into digital financial services.
🇨🇱 Betterfly, the Chilean wellness unicorn, acquired minu, a Mexican employee benefits platform, for $100 million, in a deal both founders framed as a sign that consolidation, not fresh venture rounds, is becoming the region's main growth lever. The combined company plans to triple its Mexico footprint over three years.
🇲🇽 Clara, the Mexican corporate expense management unicorn, launched Clara Global, a multi-currency expense platform for clients expanding beyond Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. The product was built by a three-person team using Claude Code in a matter of weeks, work the company says used to take roughly two years pre-AI.
🇲🇽 Cobre, the Colombian payments platform, partnered with Toku, a recurring-payments firm, to integrate real-time collection and settlement via Mexico's SPEI rail, with the alliance expected to process more than $200 million annually in its first phase, serving high-frequency businesses like e-commerce, mobility, telecom, and subscription platforms.
| Policy
🇦🇷 Cocos, the Argentine fintech, received Central Bank approval to acquire Banco Voii, a small, already-licensed bank ranked 60th by assets among the country's 74 banks. The deal, reportedly worth $20 million in cash, is expected to close by the end of June and gives the fintech a banking license to add accounts, official dollar access, and credit to its existing brokerage business.
🇵🇪 Prex Perú, the local arm of Uruguayan fintech Prex (backed by Grupo Itaú, with operations in Argentina, Peru, and Chile), received authorization from Peru's banking regulator SBS to operate as a fully digital credit company. The license lets Prex offer loans but not take deposits, and requires it to hold capital equivalent to both a credit company and an e-money issuer.
🇨🇱 Pomelo, the Argentine fintech infrastructure platform, received authorization from Chile's CMF to operate as a non-bank issuer of prepaid cards, expanding beyond its existing role as a payments processor in the country.
🟨 On our Radar
Brazil granted Pix "marca de renombre" status, the highest trademark protection available under Brazilian law, just as the system faces mounting criticism from Washington over its zero-fee model undercutting Visa, Mastercard, and other card networks. The designation came alongside threats from US trade officials of tariffs up to 25% on Brazilian goods, and President Lula has publicly defended Pix as proof that efficient financial services don't require passing high costs onto users. What started as a domestic payments success story is now a live flashpoint in US-Brazil trade relations, and a test case for how far a country will go to protect infrastructure it considers a matter of digital sovereignty.
AliExpress, 99, and Keeta are adapting their operations to integrate with Pix, according to Hsia Hua Sheng, vice president of Bank of China's Brazil unit. The comment lands while the US is publicly pressuring Brazil over Pix's reach into card-network territory, meaning the same feature drawing fire from Washington is exactly what's pulling Chinese firms in. The two storylines together suggest Pix's next contest won't be decided by adoption numbers at home, but by which foreign powers find it more useful to embrace than to fight.
IDB Lab and Fundación Capital launched Finanzas Conectadas 55+, a $2.29 million initiative aimed at adults over 55 and small neighborhood businesses in Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Monterrey, tied explicitly to the World Cup's social legacy agenda. The program targets roughly 45,000 people in its first phase, with potential expansion to Argentina, Paraguay, and El Salvador if it works. It's a modest bet next to the billion-dollar rails the region has spent years building, but it points to a real gap: instant payments alone haven't closed Latin America's inclusion problem, and someone still has to do the slower work of training and onboarding the people the rails were supposed to reach.
TWIF Latin America editorial team
Elena, Head of New Technologies at Afirme Financial Group
Carlos, ESG Analyst at CFECapital
Editor-in-Chief: Vivi, Strategic Communications and Public Affairs Advisor
👍👎 Did you like this edition of TWIF LatAm? Take a 1-minute anonymous survey here.
Come meet us in person at amara-rewards.com/events. You can also join our global community on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
