Hola amig@s fintech,
Tomorrow the World Cup kicks off at the Estadio Azteca, and Mexican fintech clearly wanted to score first: Clip raised $500 million and launched a consumer wallet with the tournament's own broadcaster, while Banco Plata locked in $300 million to keep feeding the fastest-growing loan book among the country's neobanks.
In Peru, we sat down with Fiorella Contreras, founder of Tappoyo, the social fintech proving that financial inclusion for vulnerable women entrepreneurs can also be a profitable, sustainable business. The interview is the latest in our Conversaciones en Español series, where we showcase the leaders building fintech across the region, in their own words and their own language.
Enjoy the edition. And yes, we'll forgive you if you read it during halftime.
~Vivi
🟨Editor’s Picks
Mexico's fintech boom is over. What comes next is the interesting part
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
Fintechs are firing their SaaS vendors and building with AI instead
Building a fintech used to mean stitching together third-party providers for fraud, KYC, and cards, plus a large operations team to hold it all together. A new Startupeable episode argues AI has flipped that equation: building in-house is now often faster than integrating a vendor. Guests Abiel Gutiérrez (Común) and Juan José Behrend (Akua) describe disappearing ops teams, support redesigned as product, and companies running on a fraction of the headcount of three years ago. The catch: for some, the AI bill already eats half the tech budget, which puts a question mark over how durable the savings are.
Una tarjeta de crédito no es solo un medio de pago: es una palanca estratégica para posicionarse como el canal financiero principal de usuarios finales y captar la mayor parte de su flujo económico.
Conoce en este ebook todo sobre la gestión integral de un programa de tarjetas de crédito y cómo lanzarlo de la forma más eficiente para tener un negocio exitoso.
🟨 Conversaciones en Español
Fiorella Contreras
Fiorella Contreras, Fundadora y CEO de Taapoyo, Fintech social peruana:
“La inclusión financiera no se logra solo con tecnología”
Fiorella Contreras creció viendo a su madre sacar adelante sola a cuatro hijos con un pequeño negocio de artesanías. Quería hacerlo crecer, pero para el sistema financiero su madre simplemente no existía: sin cuenta bancaria, sin historial crediticio, sin forma de documentar sus ingresos.
Años después, ya en la industria fintech, Fiorella vio que la tecnología podía ayudar a reducir las brechas de acceso financiero para las miles de emprendedoras que, como su mamá, siguen fuera del sistema financiero formal. Por eso, en 2018, junto a su hermano y una amiga, fundó Tappoyo, una fintech social que promueve la inclusión financiera de mujeres en situación de vulnerabilidad. Hoy opera en más de 10 regiones, con énfasis en zonas rurales.
El 2025 Forbes nombró a Tappoyo, por tercer año consecutivo, una de las 100 mejores startups del Perú. Su lema: convertir mujeres invisibles en emprendedoras invencibles. En conversación con TWIF, Fiorella nos cuenta de su modelo de negocios, de cómo lograr impacto social con rentabilidad y de las oportunidades para el ecosistema fintech en Perú.
Tappoyo se define como una fintech con impacto social. Cuéntanos qué hacen y cuál es el modelo de negocios.
Inicialmente quería enfocarme en la inclusión de mujeres a través de la tecnología. Pero a poco andar nos dimos cuenta de que el problema no era solo tecnológico, sino que existían muchas otras barreras en la vida real. Por eso, nuestro modelo es integral y combina tecnología con educación, apoyo de pares y acompañamiento.
Desarrollamos una plataforma digital propia y exclusiva, que opera vía WhatsApp para facilitar el acceso a créditos de manera simple y cercana. Dado que estas mujeres no tienen historial ni registro financiero, nuestra plataforma es un sistema de evaluación original, que utiliza variables que los bancos dejan fuera para evaluar a las candidatas a crédito. Con AI y uso innovador de datos, logramos evaluar a grupos de mujeres en cinco minutos, mientras que la competencia toma 24-48 horas. La tecnología de las billeteras digitales nos sirven para los desembolsos y las cobranzas.
Con nuestro modelo hemos logrado que 8,000 mujeres sin historial crediticio, sin una cuenta de banco, sin mecanismo para documentar sus ingresos puedan recibir préstamos formales. Nuestras clientas son invisibles para el sistema, y estamos logrando una real inclusión financiera para ellas.
¿Cómo ves el ecosistema de fintech sociales hoy en día?
Durante mucho tiempo se pensó que había que elegir entre impacto social y sostenibilidad financiera. Nuestro caso muestra que puedes tener impacto social y ser una empresa con fines de lucro. No solo las ONG logran impactos reales en inclusión financiera.
Todavía existen millones de personas excluidas del sistema financiero. Esto representa un enorme desafío, pero también una gran oportunidad para la innovación del sector de fintech sociales.
México y Brasil son los gigantes regionales del mundo fintech. ¿Cómo caracterizarías el ecosistema en Perú?
México y Brasil suelen liderar debido al tamaño de sus mercados y al volumen de inversión que reciben. Sin embargo, Perú tiene características muy interesantes que lo convierten en un laboratorio de innovación financiera. Tenemos importantes brechas de inclusión financiera, una alta capacidad emprendedora y una creciente adopción tecnológica. Esto genera oportunidades para desarrollar soluciones innovadoras adaptadas a necesidades muy concretas.
Además, durante los últimos años hemos visto una mayor colaboración entre fintechs, instituciones financieras tradicionales, aceleradoras, fondos de inversión y organizaciones de desarrollo. Entonces, creo que el ecosistema peruano todavía está en una etapa de crecimiento, pero tiene una gran fortaleza: es un ecosistema muy cercano, colaborativo y muy enfocado a resolver problemas reales.
¿Qué es lo que te quita el sueño en estos días?
No duermo pensando en qué más puedo hacer para llegar a más mujeres y generar un impacto profundo en sus vidas. Cada vez que escucho a una emprendedora contar que gracias a Tappoyo pudo hacer crecer su negocio, mejoró su calidad de vida o cumplió sus sueños, me emociona mucho, porque con cada una de esas historias sé que estoy honrando el legado de mi mamá.
🟨This Week’s Key Moves
| Fundraising
🇲🇽 Clip, the Mexican payments company, launched Mi Clip, a consumer digital wallet built with Ant International, Mastercard, and TelevisaUnivision, while raising $500 million in new funding at a valuation above $2.5 billion to finance the push.
🇲🇽 Banco Plata, the Mexican digital bank, secured $300 million in new financing from Oaktree Capital Management and Macquarie Group, part of a $500 million private credit line structured by Nomura. The neobank, which began banking operations in March and captured $213 million in deposits in its first month, will use the funds to strengthen its funding base as its loan book keeps growing faster than peers.
| Exits
🇦🇷 Cocos, the Argentine investment platform, received approval from the Central Bank of Argentina to acquire Banco Voii in a deal valued around $20 million, bringing the company one step closer to a full banking license. The transaction lets Cocos expand beyond brokerage into traditional banking, integrating investments, payments, and banking in a single platform.
🇧🇷 Laqus, the Brazilian financial infrastructure fintech, acquired goLiza, a company specialized in digital onboarding and registry automation for capital markets, its second acquisition this year. The deal extends Laqus' infrastructure to the earliest stage of the client journey, streamlining investor onboarding for asset managers, brokers, and other participants in Brazil's capital markets.
🇨🇱 Yol1, the digital banking vehicle backed by payments fintech ProntoPaga, agreed to buy 100% of Inversiones LP S.A. (formerly Cofisa), the card-issuing subsidiary of Chilean retailer abc S.A., picking up a regulated license on its path to building a neobank.
| Products & Partnerships
🌎 MoneyGram launched MGUSD, its native US dollar stablecoin issued by Stripe-owned Bridge and deployed on the Stellar blockchain. The token debuts in the US with a global rollout planned across MoneyGram's 60 million customers, targeting cheaper cross-border remittances for underserved populations.
🇺🇾 Mercado Pago expanded its ecosystem in Uruguay with four simultaneous launches: automatic daily yield on account balances, an international prepaid Mastercard, the Point Smart terminal for merchants, and its Meli+ subscription, a deliberate bet on a market the company admits was lagging in its regional roadmap.
| Policy
🇧🇷 Brazil's banking federation Febraban and government authorities strongly rejected US pressure on the Pix instant payment system, after the US Trade Representative proposed an additional 25% tariff on Brazil, defending the central-bank-operated platform as a milestone of digital sovereignty.
🇧🇷 Inter, the Brazilian digital bank, secured the definitive license from the Florida Office of Financial Regulation to begin operating its banking branch in Miami. Following prior clearance from the Federal Reserve, the license makes Inter a regulated Foreign Banking Organization, able to offer deposit and credit products directly instead of through US partners.
🇨🇴 Plata, the financial group behind Mexico's Banco Plata, is preparing to enter Colombia through Plata Compañía de Financiamiento, pending final operational authorization from the Superfinanciera. Led locally by Felipe Lega, the entity will start with fully digital debit and savings products before adding credit.
🇵🇪 Peru's banking superintendency SBS granted an operating license to Prex, making it the country's first fully digital credit entity. The authorization allows the platform to expand beyond prepaid card issuance into digital lending.
🇨🇱 Pomelo, the Argentine card-issuing and payments infrastructure fintech, obtained authorization from Chile's CMF to issue prepaid cards, expanding its footprint in a market where it already operated as a payments processor.
🟨 On our Radar
| Industry
The next payments war will be fought by software, and two incompatible visions of it are already live. Visa and Mastercard are extending tokenized card credentials so that verified AI agents can transact on behalf of consumers within existing card networks, through products like Mastercard's Agent Pay and Visa's Intelligent Commerce, while Coinbase's x402 protocol uses stablecoins like USDC for direct machine-to-machine payments that bypass cards entirely. The volumes are still tiny: AI agents settled just over $73 million across 176 million blockchain transactions in the past year, a rounding error next to the $14.5 trillion Visa processes annually, and the camps are already building interoperability bridges, with Visa announcing a collaboration with Coinbase to connect its network to x402. For Latin America the stakes are concrete: in a region where stablecoins already move remittances and where dollar rails matter more than anywhere else, whichever architecture wins agentic commerce will arrive here first through payments infrastructure players, not through consumers.
| People
🇧🇷 Nubank, the Brazilian digital banking giant, appointed John Walton as Chief Information Security Officer (CISO).
🇨🇱 Xepelin, the Chilean fintech focused on financial solutions for SMEs, appointed Lucas Rencoret as Country Manager for Chile.
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.
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
👍👎 Did you like this edition of TWIF LatAm? Take a 1-minute anonymous survey here.
Come meet us in person at www.thisweekinfintech.com/events. You can also join our global community on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
Photo Credit: cronista.com
