Want AI to Handle Your Money? | TWIF Latin America

🇧🇷 C6 Bank acquired 100% of Alymente, a corporate benefits card startup serving over 100,000 beneficiaries across 1,200 companies, entering Brazil's $28.8 billion benefits market currently dominated by Ticket, Alelo, Pluxee, and VR.

🇧🇷 Celcoin, the Brazilian financial infrastructure and technology company, announced the acquisition of Vert Capital, an independent provider of services for Brazil’s credit market, marking its entry into the capital markets and its eighth acquisition since receiving backing from Summit Partners in 2024 . 

🇲🇽 Mercado Pago launched "Cuenta Negocio" in Mexico, a free integrated platform combining payment collection, financing, and management tools for SMEs, with preferential rates for higher-volume businesses.

🇧🇷 Bitso and Mercado Bitcoin entered a strategic partnership in Brazil, migrating Bitso's retail users to Mercado Bitcoin starting October 1 while combining infrastructure to offer corporate clients cross-border payments in local fiat currencies and stablecoins across Latin America.

🇧🇷 PicPay integrated Claude from Anthropic into its app, letting customers check balances and bills through natural-language commands, following a similar plugin it launched on ChatGPT. 

🇨🇱 Racional, a Chilean stock and ETF investment platform, partnered with financial infrastructure provider Pomelo to launch "Racional Money," expanding into payment accounts and physical and virtual prepaid cards.

🇨🇴 Kala launched a securitization program of up to COP 1 trillion, with a first issuance of COP 195,000 million whose senior tranche was subscribed by Gramercy Funds Management, a US emerging-markets credit specialist managing $7.2 billion in assets.

🇨🇴 Plenti, a Colombian company providing multicurrency accounts and investment services to consumers and businesses, raised a $3 million Seed round led by Tether, with participation from Verda Ventures.

🇧🇷 Bull, a Brazilian company providing credit-as-a-service infrastructure, raised a $3.7 million Seed round led by Maya Capital and Caravela, with participation from Canary.

🇦🇷 UIN, which helps banks and fintechs re-engage inactive users through gamification, secured a $2 million seed round led by Bogotá-based EWA Capital to expand across Argentina, Mexico, Peru, and Ecuador.

🇲🇽 Mexico’s federal government will submit a Digital Economy Law to Congress alongside its 2027 Economic Package to establish phased timelines aimed at gradually reducing cash usage, accelerating the shift toward digital payments, and driving financial inclusion across micro and small businesses.

🇧🇷 Ant International received a Payment Institution licence from Brazil's Central Bank, strengthening its local and cross-border payment capabilities alongside its existing merchant platform, Antom, which already lets Brazilian merchants accept Pix, credit cards, and alternative payment methods.

🇨🇱 Tether-backed Orionx, a Chilean crypto exchange operating across four LatAm markets, is shutting down after a forensic audit found a $7 million custody gap, and has filed a criminal complaint against two former co-founders. 

🇧🇷 Brazil's fintech expansion added roughly $308 billion to GDP between 2016 and 2026, an amount comparable to Chile or Colombia's entire annual output. Competition from digital financial institutions also pushed traditional banks to lower rates, saving consumers and businesses billions in interest and fees, according to a study by Reglab, commissioned by fintech association Zetta.

🇧🇷 unico IDtech partnered with Didit to open its IDCloud biometric database, which covers 96% of Brazil's economically active population, to smaller businesses through a self-service API and no-code interface, a market it had previously reached only through custom enterprise deals.

🌎 a16z partner Anish Acharya argued that the AI opportunity is shifting from execution to ambition and judgment, comparing the industry's current stage to the early iPhone era and urging entrepreneurs to focus on deciding what is worth building, not just what can be built.