Visa acquires digital financial solutions provider YellowPepper

Visa has acquired YellowPepper, a Miami-based digital financial solutions provider that caters to financial institutions and startups across Latin America and the Caribbean.

The digital payments giant announced the acquisition in October 2020. However, Visa did not disclose the financial terms of the deal, which marks its first of its kind in Latin America.

Visa acquisition of YellowPepper is expected to speed up the adoption of the former’s ‘network of networks’ strategy, allowing it to become a single point of access for initiating multiple types of transactions and facilitating the secure movement of money.

The acquisition follows a strategic partnership and investment made by Visa made in the digital financial solutions provider in May 2018.

Visa acquires YellowPepper – Ruben Salazar, Head of Innovation and Products for Visa Latin America and the Caribbean; Serge Elkiner, CEO & Founder of YellowPepper; Eduardo Coello, Regional President for Visa Latin America and the Caribbean, and Alexander Sjögren, CTO of YellowPepper are pictured at the Visa Miami Innovation Center in October 2018. Photo courtesy of Business Wire.

YellowPepper’s platform provides a rich set of APIs to help issuers, processors, and governments to access multiple payment rails quickly and securely for several payments flows via a single connection.

Commenting on Visa acquisition of YellowPepper, Eduardo Coello – Visa Latin America and the Caribbean Regional President said: “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.”

The combination of Visa and YellowPepper is expected to cut down the costs and time of issuers and processors in launching financial services.

Visa said that with YellowPepper, clients can enable new use cases and expand its value added services that include tokenization, authentication, identity validation, and risk tools to provide an integrated user experience.

Apart from that, Visa acquisition of YellowPepper will also enable easier integration with Visa Direct, the former’s real-time push payments platform, and Visa B2B Connect, a non-card-based cross-border B2B payment network.

Earlier this year, Visa signed a $5.3 billion deal to acquire Plaid, a California-based fintech company that lets people securely link their financial accounts to the apps they use for their financial management. (Read more about Visa acquisition of Plaid here)