Who's really logging in? | TWIF Latin America

🇨🇴 Grupo Cibest, parent of Bancolombia and Nequi, plans to acquire PTM, a Medellín fintech that turns about 20,000 neighborhood shops in 900+ municipalities into bank agents where people can deposit, withdraw, and pay bills. The deal awaits review by Colombia's Superintendencia de Industria y Comercio. 

🇦🇷 UnionPay, the Chinese card network with more than 2 billion cards issued, will issue cards in Argentina with Pagos Virtuales del Sur (PVS), the local fintech that also partners with Alipay. The move takes UnionPay from serving Chinese tourists to courting Argentine users, with cards that link to Alipay, WeChat, and Huawei wallets. 

🇺🇾 dLocal partnered with LinkedIn to let members in Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and Chile pay with local currency cards, tackling currency mismatches and declined payments at checkout.

🇵🇪 Banco Pichincha, the Ecuadorian banking group, launched Pibank in Peru, a fully digital direct bank that debuts with a savings account paying 5% a year in soles, with no fees or minimums. A dollar account follows in the coming weeks. 

🇻🇪 Depay, an Argentine fintech that links instant payment systems across borders, expanded to Venezuela, its sixth market, letting connected banks and wallets offer cross-border QR payments and real-time transfers, including remittances. 

🇧🇷 Agibank, a Brazilian bank that pairs a digital platform with physical branches, raised about $410 million through FIDC Agibank III, its third receivables fund, backed by payroll loans to retirees and pensioners.

🇧🇷 Asaas, a Brazilian payments and financial management platform for SMEs, raised about $58.6 million in its largest FIDC to date to advance card receivables to its business clients.

🇨🇴 KOA, a Colombian lender focused on older borrowers, raised about $25.7 million through a debt securitization on the Bolsa de Valores de Colombia to expand access to credit.

🇲🇽 Kontempo, a platform that helps industrial suppliers offer and manage trade credit to their buyers, raised a $10.5 million Series A co-led by Portage and IGNIA, with Tectonic and MS&AD.

🇧🇷 Stay, a Brazilian insurtech that helps companies offer private pension plans to employees, raised about $5.9 million in a round led by Citrino, an asset manager and multi-family office, with Norte, 17Sigma, and BTV. 

🇦🇷 UIN, which helps banks, fintechs, and wallets keep users active, raised a $2 million seed round led by Ewa Capital, a Latin American venture fund, with Driven VC, Brazilian Venture Capital, ADN, GAIN, and New Ventures, plus angels including Santiago Siri and LAN Accelerator.

🇦🇷 Berry, an app that lets Argentines invest in US stocks without a US bank account, raised a $2 million seed round led by Morgan Creek, with Coinbase Ventures, Ripio, and Social Graph Ventures.

🇧🇷 Banco Central do Brasil will intensify supervision of payment institutions, gathering more data to focus its oversight on the highest-risk firms, according to Gerson Romantini, a supervision official at the central bank.

🇧🇷 Banco Central do Brasil tightened crypto rules on October 1: transfers of $10,000 or more to or from self-custody wallets must now be reported to Coaf, Brazil's financial intelligence unit.

🇵🇪 Banco Central de Reserva del Perú approved rules for companies that let merchants accept card, QR, and instant payments, requiring them to keep merchant funds separate, publish their fees, and keep QR and instant payments interoperable. The rules take effect January 1, 2027.

🇧🇷 Banco Central do Brasil removed the fixed cap of about $98 per contactless Pix payment on October 1, so users now set their own limits in their banking apps.

🇨🇱 CMF, Chile's financial market regulator, launched ATENA with the IDB, a technology sandbox where institutions can test integrations before joining Chile's Open Finance System.

🌎 Palo Alto Networks' Agustín Robles argues that identity is now Latin America's biggest cyber risk, citing data showing compromised identities played a role in 89% of attacks and served as the entry point in 65%.

🌎 Diálogo Américas reports that organized crime is moving money through fintechs, crypto exchanges, and OTC brokers. In Brazil, six fintechs allegedly processed about $5.1 billion between 2022 and 2025 as "parallel banks" for the First Capital Command (PCC) and other criminal groups, and Chainalysis found that cartel, Chinese, and Russia-linked networks accounted for over half of illicit inflows on some Brazilian exchanges in 2025.

🇨🇴 Bre-B, Colombia's instant payment system, turned one with 36 million clients, about 67% of the population, who have registered 115.4 million keys and made 1.7 billion transactions worth about $75.8 billion.

🇧🇷 CSD BR, a Brazilian securities depository, began mirroring ownership records of BTG Pactual fund shares on the public XRP Ledger with Ripple, so authorized participants can check the blockchain copy against the official record in near real time.

🌎 IFC, the World Bank's private sector arm, mapped 448 firms using alternative data and AI to score borrowers in emerging markets, drawing on transactional, behavioral, mobile money, utility, and digital footprint data