Visa (NYSE:V) is reportedly planning to acquire YellowPepper, a payments tech company, in order to extend its global operations into the Caribbean and other jurisdictions.
Established in 2014 and fully operational in nine different Latin American (LatAm) nations, the Miami-headquartered firm serves around 50 clients and claims approximately 5 million monthly active users.
Visa’s acquisition of the payments company has come after it took part in YellowPepper’s $12.5 million Series D funding round back in 2018.
Visa and YellowPepper have been working on a real-time peer to peer (P2P) payments solution in Peru, which is a project that involves the BBVA, Scotiabank, and Interbank.
Visa Direct capabilities are used along with YellowPepper’s proprietary Alias Directory, Customer Identity profile and Smart Routing tools. These features allow customers to use an email, phone number or other credentials to exchange money through their bank accounts. Customers may choose from various different payment options.
Ruben Salazar, Head of Innovation and Products for Visa Latin America and the Caribbean, stated:
“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, multi-rail integration, identity validation, authentication and risk tools to deliver an integrated user experience.”
The YellowPepper platform provides several different APIs to allow issuers, processors and government agencies to gain access to multiple payment rails via a single connection. It also makes it simpler to integrate with Visa Direct, which is Visa’s real-time push payments solution. YellowPaper can also work with Visa B2B Connect, which is the payment giant’s non-card-based cross-border B2B payment network.
Eduardo Coello, Regional President for Visa Latin America and the Caribbean, remarked:
“YellowPepper’s technology, which acts like a ‘universal adapter’, will be key to build on our ’network of networks’ strategy to become a single point of access for initiating any transaction type and enabling the secure movement of money.”