Hola amig@s fintech,
The biggest story this week is a company voting with capital. Mercado Libre is committing $4.6 billion to Mexico in 2026, its largest annual investment in the country. The number only makes sense when you look at what sits underneath it: a pending banking license that would turn Mercado Pago into a full-service bank on top of the region's largest e-commerce platform. No digital bank in Mexico has that starting point.
Also in this edition: the a16z podcast episode with Addi's CEO Santiago Suárez on what it actually takes to build full-stack fintech in LatAm, a report on why cards are becoming invisible infrastructure, and a busy week on the regulatory front across Brazil, Mexico, Uruguay, Chile, and Colombia.
As always, glad you are here.
~Vivi
🟨Editor’s Picks
Mercado Libre's $4.6 billion Mexico bet is about more than logistics
Mercado Libre committed $4.6 billion to Mexico in 2026, a 35% jump over the prior year, and has a banking license application pending with the CNBV that would unlock savings accounts, commercial loans, and mortgages through Mercado Pago. Mexico already has Nubank, Revolut, Plata, and Klar competing for the digital banking space — but none of them sits on top of an e-commerce platform processing hundreds of millions of transactions. That real-time data advantage is what makes Mercado Libre's banking ambition structurally different from everyone else's.
Cards insist they are not going anywhere
We've covered how cards are losing ground to real-time rails across the region. This report, produced by a card infrastructure company, argues the opposite. The core argument: when you tap your phone, open a wallet, or let an app pay on your behalf, the credential and authorization logic underneath are almost always still card-based. Cards are becoming the invisible layer that everything else runs on top of. The agentic commerce angle takes this further: as AI agents begin buying on your behalf, tokenized card credentials turn out to be well suited for that world precisely because they can be constrained by merchant, amount, and context. The cards are becoming a programmable infrastructure.
How Addi went from BNPL to one of Colombia's largest financial platform
In a new episode of the a16z Show, Addi founder and CEO Santiago Suárez walks through how the company expanded from a buy now, pay later product into a broader ecosystem covering payments, commerce, logistics, and banking — serving millions of consumers and tens of thousands of merchants. Suárez makes the case that in LatAm, credit access and economic growth are structurally linked, and that building enduring financial companies in the region requires getting the technology infrastructure right from the start. Worth a listen for anyone thinking about what full-stack fintech really means outside Silicon Valley.
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🟨 This Week’s Key Moves
| Fundraising
🇧🇷 Trace Finance, the cross-border payments and stablecoin infrastructure provider, raised a $32M Series A led by CoinFund, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Haun Ventures, Jump Capital, Valor Capital, Paxos, HOF Capital, Chainlink Labs and SNZ Capital. The company enables businesses to move money across LatAm and the USA using stablecoins and local payment rails such as Pix and SPEI.
🇧🇷 Vixtra, a Brazilian fintech offering working capital loans and financial management tools for importers, raised a $8M Series A led by Valor Capital, with participation from Headline, NXTP, Actyus, Bluestone and Simma Capital, to expand its stablecoin-based products for import businesses in LatAm.
| Products & Partnerships
🇨🇴 Bancolombia integrated its mobile app with Wenia, the digital asset company of Grupo Cibest, giving approximately nine million users access to global accounts to buy, sell, and convert digital dollars pegged 1:1 to the USD into Colombian pesos.
🇨🇴 Banco de Bogotá launched its Integrated Treasury Suite, an open-banking-ready transactional platform developed in partnership with Payana and HR management platform Buk.
| Policy
🇨🇴 The Colombian Financial Superintendence approved the sale of Itaú's retail banking division to Banco de Bogotá, transferring more than 270,000 customers, a $6B COP loan portfolio, and $4B COP in deposits to the Grupo Aval subsidiary.
🇧🇷 The Brazilian Federal Government identified 37 fintechs operating as unregulated payment institutions that facilitated the financial infrastructure for over 40,000 illicit digital betting apps and websites.
🇧🇷 The Brazilian Central Bank eliminated the fixed $90 per-transaction cap for contactless Pix payments, requiring financial institutions to align digital wallet limits with standard Pix parameters by October 2026.
🇨🇱 The Fiscalía Nacional Económica approved Itaú Chile's $44M acquisition of merchant acquiring network Klap, the second of three required regulatory clearances. The Comisión para el Mercado Financiero's approval is still pending.
🇲🇽 Banxico mandated that all commercial and development banks, alongside indirect system participants, standardize and simplify the transactional user interface of their mobile apps by December 14, 2026.
🇺🇾 The Central Bank of Uruguay submitted a draft Open Finance bill to the Ministry of Economy and Finance, aligned with its 2026–2030 Payments System Roadmap.
🟨 On our Radar
The Inter-American Development Bank approved a $4.2 billion Country Strategy for Uruguay covering 2026–2030, with $2.7 billion directed to public sector initiatives and $1.5 billion channeled through BID Invest for private investment. The plan targets digital transformation, entrepreneurial ecosystem development, AI capabilities, and sustainable infrastructure. For a small country that has long punched above its weight in tech and institutional stability, this is a significant vote of confidence — and a potential accelerant for its fintech and startup scene.
PayPal is winding down PayPal Ventures, its corporate venture arm, as new CEO Enrique Lores continues a broad restructuring focused on AI and core products. Founded in 2016, the fund raised $850M across three funds and backed more than 80 startups including Plaid and Anchorage Digital. The closure removes one of the more active corporate investors in fintech infrastructure from the table — and leaves a real question about how PayPal stays visible to the startups shaping the future of financial services.
Laboratoria, the social organization that has trained over 10,000 women in tech skills across 11 countries in the Americas, is running the fifth edition of its "Activa tu Carrera" program — a six-week, fully remote curriculum covering AI tools, job market strategy, and personalized coaching. The program was redesigned after 2022, when employer demand for the profiles Laboratoria trained dropped sharply following Big Tech restructurings and the rise of AI. The pivot is a useful signal: closing the gender gap in tech now requires more than teaching code — it requires actively navigating a labor market that keeps moving the goalposts.
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
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