Hola amig@s fintech,
Digital fraud in Latin America is shifting from email to social media, where threats stay live longer and are harder to trace. The real cost is not the stolen dollar — it is the $5.16 spent trying to recover it. Venezuela, Guatemala, and Nicaragua are seeing the steepest growth rates in the region, and the pattern is consistent: fraud is industrializing faster than defenses are scaling.
Everything else moving in LatAm fintech this week is in the full edition below.
~Vivi
🟨Editor’s Picks
Latin America sees sharp rise in social media-driven fraud
AppGate's Fraud Beat 2026 report maps how fraud works across the region, moving toward social media. Scams and brand impersonation on social platforms now account for 86% of detected threats, with the financial sector as the primary target. Venezuela leads the regional ranking with 228% growth, followed by Guatemala at 206%, Nicaragua at 182%, Bolivia at 170%, and Brazil at 53%. For every dollar lost to fraud, the total cost to an organization reaches $5.16 when investigation, recovery, and reputational damage are included
Latin America grows crypto users 3x faster than the US
Crypto use grew 60% year-over-year, with Latin America representing 10% of global crypto flows. Argentina leads in per capita adoption at 12% of the population — four times the regional average — while Peru doubled its user base. Stablecoins are quietly powering cross-border payments, dollar accounts, and real-time transfers. Most users never know they are using crypto at all.
Payments, remittances and crypto adoption in LatAm
In this episode of Espacio, José Fernández, VP of Ecosystem at Stellar Development Foundation, explains how Stellar made an early bet on payments and remittances as a core blockchain use case, highlighting that the future of crypto adoption in LatAm will depend less on the underlying technology and more on distribution, user experience, and interoperability.
🟨 Community and Events
Nos vamos a Bogotá el 27 de mayo para el Fintech Builders Lab, un workshop colaborativo y sesión de networking co-organizado con Interledger Foundation durante la semana de PayTech Conf. Reuniremos a builders, operadores, bancos, product managers y desarrolladores para explorar soluciones reales de pagos abiertos e interoperabilidad.
Y esto es solo el comienzo. Continuamos la serie en CDMX con Fintech Builders Lab el 3 de junio, seguido de un exclusivo Stablecoin Cocktail co-organizado con Pomelo y Stablecon el 15 de junio durante la Stablecoin Conference Week.
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
🇧🇷 Sol Agora, the Brazilian fintech for distributed solar financing backed by Brookfield, secured $120 million through its new FIDC Sol Agora 4 fund. The company finances solar installations for households and SMBs across Brazil.
🌎 Caricaco Ventures launched CV2, its second fund, targeting AI-native and software startups connected to Central America and the Dominican Republic. The firm will write first checks starting at $200,000, doubling its previous ticket size, and has backed 27 companies across six countries since turning active investor in 2021.
🇧🇷 Beepay, the Brazilian company focused on autonomous checkout solutions for physical retailers, raised a $400K Seed round led by Comunitá, the corporate venture arm of cooperative bank Sicredi, with participation from ACATE Invest and Ventiur. The company enables cashierless purchases through mobile scanning and self-service kiosks for stores, condominium minimarkets, hotels, and corporate spaces.
| Exits
🇧🇷 Visma, the Norwegian business software group, announced the acquisition of Dootax and Pag Útil, two Brazilian SaaS platforms covering tax automation and B2B payment orchestration. The move is Visma's fourth acquisition in Brazil in under a year. The Pag Útil deal remains subject to Central Bank approval.
| Products & Partnerships
🌎 Mastercard's Center for Inclusive Growth and CAF announced a partnership to expand credit access for micro, small and medium enterprises across Latin America and the Caribbean. CAF targets up to $100 million in financing over four years, with priority markets including Colombia, Peru, Panama, Ecuador, Chile, and El Salvador, and a focus on women-led businesses and climate-related projects.
🇲🇽 Banorte launched Va, a new standalone digital banking app targeting young Mexicans, offering debit and credit cards, investments, savings tools, and no account fees. The launch comes roughly a year after Banorte sold Bineo — its previous digital bank — to Klar, following losses of over 1.3 billion pesos.
🇲🇽 Grupo Salinas partnered with Anchorage Digital to integrate dollar-pegged stablecoin rails into Coinpro, its crypto platform, to compress cross-border settlement cycles. The partnership uses Anchorage's newly launched Stablecoin Solutions for Banks and could expand to Grupo Elektra's broader customer base.
🇨🇱 Scotiabank Chile announced the upcoming launch of a BNPL feature in its mobile app, allowing customers to convert credit card purchases into installments directly from the app, with personalized offers based on each customer's risk profile.
🇨🇴 Lulo Bank became the first banking app in Colombia to offer tokenized gold, integrating Pax Gold (PAXG) through Lulo X, its crypto sister platform, directly within the same app. PAXG is a Paxos-issued token backed one-to-one by physical gold held in London vaults.
| Policy
🇲🇽 Bunq, Europe's second-largest neobank, filed for a full banking license in Mexico with the CNBV, marking its first entry into Latin America. Unlike Nubank or Revolut, bunq is targeting global citizens and expats — people living and working across borders who struggle with local banking access — rather than the broader retail market.
🇲🇽 Bitget completed its regulatory registrations in Mexico, obtaining vulnerable activity registration with the SAT and completing registration with the Financial Intelligence Unit (UIF). The exchange says this makes it one of the first global platforms to complete both processes in the country, with Mexico serving as a launchpad for broader expansion across Central and Latin America.
🟨 On our Radar
With Decree 0368, Colombia joined Brazil as one of the few countries in Latin America to move open finance from voluntary to mandatory. All entities supervised by the Superintendencia Financiera — banks, insurers, pension funds, card issuers — must now share customer-authorized data through standardized APIs, with 12 months to comply per data category once standards are published. The harder deadline, as one analyst put it, is competitive: whoever builds on this infrastructure first sets the new bar.
Digital brokers and investment apps that scaled fast on low-friction onboarding are now discovering the bill for skipping tax residency data collection. As FATCA (Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act) and CRS (Common Reporting Standard) obligations tighten, platforms are being forced to go back through historical customer records to close gaps that were invisible during domestic growth but impossible to ignore once they expanded internationally. The shift underway is from remediation-heavy compliance cycles to continuous lifecycle governance — collecting and validating tax data at the moment of onboarding rather than cleaning it up years later.
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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