Building a Global Hardcore Financial Technology Company from Brazil: Ricardo Josua, CEO of Pismo (Part 1)

We don’t hear of hardcore B-to-B technology ventures coming out of Latin America very often.
Ricardo is building one that caters to banks and financial institutions, has raised over $100M in financing, has over $25M in revenue, and has major Latin American banks as customers.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Ricardo Josua: I was born and raised in Brazil. I went to business school right after school. I was always very interested in technology.

Sramana Mitra: You did your college in the US?

Ricardo Josua: In Brazil. My life has been spent in Brazil.

Sramana Mitra: Are you in Brazil now?

Ricardo Josua: I’m in Toronto.

Sramana Mitra: But your company is based in Brazil?

Ricardo Josua: The company has four different offices. The headquarters is still in Brazil but we have a growing business in the UK, US, Singapore, and India.

Sramana Mitra: What year did you finish business school?

Ricardo Josua: 1997. In 1996, I became an analyst in an investment bank in Brazil called Garantia. Garantia is owned by Jorge Paulo Lemann who later became the main investor of InBev. It was during the first stable period in our economy. It was a Goldman Sachs model of management in was a very exciting time. This company was later acquired by Credit Suisse. I kept working for Credit Suisse for a couple of years.

In 1999, I was working for the M&A team. I went to co-found a company that was later called Conductor. At that point, it was a BPO. It got a control investment from a private equity fund in Brazil. I helped do the deal and then stayed there while building this credit card processing company. It became the largest credit card processing company in Brazil.

Sramana Mitra: How long was that?

Ricardo Josua: This was 1999. I worked as CEO until 2012. I left the company in 2014. It was 15 years all in all.

Sramana Mitra: Since we’re doing an entrepreneur journey, I always like to listen to some of the first-venture journey. In your case, the first venture is this BPO company. What are some of the highlights of that journey?

Ricardo Josua: It was a completely different environment. For people who haven’t lived with an abundant flow of capital from VCs, it was a completely different environment. It was in Brazil which is outside of capital access although the country was growing at that point.

Sramana Mitra: So you built a bootstrapped outsourcing company?

Ricardo Josua: It was a call center that was partly owned by my family. They were selling it. When they sold the control to this venture capital firm, I negotiated to stay there and launched a new business under it that was a proxy company. At that point, everything that was available for financial services proxy was mainframe solutions that were very expensive.

We had a lot of demand from smaller businesses and smaller banks that were impossible to build on mainframes. We started a business to build from scratch. It was a long journey. This unit was funded around $100,000 and that was it. The rest had to come from business revenues. We were growing as far as we could generate cash from the business.

Sramana Mitra: How big did it become revenue-wise?

Ricardo Josua: By the end, it was making about $25 million. Then we sold it. I sold my shares alongside the controlling private equity.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Building a Global Hardcore Financial Technology Company from Brazil: Ricardo Josua, CEO of Pismo
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