Visa (NYSE:V) announced on Friday it has completed the acquisition of YellowPepper, a payments tech company that supports financial institutions and startups in Latin America and the Caribbean. Visa reported that the acquisition is considered the first of its kind for financial giant in the region and accelerates the adoption of Visa’s ‘network of networks’ strategy, to become a single point of access for initiating multiple transaction types and enabling the secure movement of money.
As previously reported, YellowPepper was established in 2014 and is fully operational in nine different Latin American (LatAm) nations. The company now serves around 50 clients and claims approximately five million monthly active users. The acquisition comes just two years after Visa took part in YellowPepper’s $12.5 million Series D funding round.
While sharing more details about the acquisition, Eduardo Coello, Regional President for Visa Latin America and the Caribbean, stated:
“Bringing YellowPepper into the Visa family will help us build on our ‘network of networks’ strategy, by combining Visa’s proven technology, processing and security capabilities with the complementary solutions of YellowPepper, to ultimately help support the current and future needs of governments, banks and consumers around the world.”
Visa went on to add:
“With YellowPepper, clients will be able to enable new use cases and expand Visa’s value added services, such as tokenization, identity validation, authentication and risk tools to deliver an integrated user experience. In addition, the acquisition will also facilitate an easier integration with Visa Direct, Visa’s real-time push payments platform, and Visa B2B Connect, Visa’s non-card-based cross-border B2B payment network.”