Building a Global Hardcore Financial Technology Company from Brazil: Ricardo Josua, CEO of Pismo (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Your core value proposition when it comes to the global market is the combination of payments and core banking?

Ricardo Josua: This is one of the main features. You have everything rolled up in a single integration. The second one was that this is not a monolithic solution. It can provide all the systems, but you can build around them. One of the pains that we try to solve was that we don’t want to be the bottleneck in the development of products from our clients. We have to make sure that we have out-of-the-box solutions if you want a basic product.

If you want something more sophisticated, you can access the primitive layers of our APIs and build your own orchestrations. Anything you want to do in terms of banking or payments, as long as it’s moving fungible assets, you could use our system.

Sramana Mitra: Who was the first client in the US?

Ricardo Josua: We don’t have clients in the US yet. We are just now closing a deal in the US.

Sramana Mitra: In October, you decided to set up shop to start selling outside. You haven’t started selling outside yet.

Ricardo Josua: We have now. We have operations that have gone live in India and the UK. We have partnerships in Southeast Asia.

Sramana Mitra: For the global expansion, you have raised more money.

Ricardo Josua: That was the point. We needed to bring someone that could validate our thesis. We didn’t have any international experience with this business. We know the players. Most of the players are global. We knew the lay of the land, but we didn’t know the details.

The first step towards that was getting someone that was very deep into the international markets. We are fortunate to have a former McKinsey Senior Partner. When we started to think about expansion, I called him and said, “Would you mind helping me find someone to build this expansion?” This conversation ended up with him joining us. He left McKinsey to work with us. He’s now our CEO for international expansion.

Sramana Mitra: Who is the funding from?

Ricardo Josua: Mainly Accel, Softbank, and Amazon.

Sramana Mitra: How much have you raised?

Ricardo Josua: $128 million. We had raised $10 million from seed to Series A. Then $108 million last year.

Sramana Mitra: At that point, how much business did you have in Latin America?

Ricardo Josua: We had about 25 million accounts processed and about $15 million in annual revenue.

Sramana Mitra: They really bought into the hypothesis that you can scale internationally.

Ricardo Josua: I think there was some skepticism. They said, “If you do it well within Latin America, you don’t need to go abroad.” In terms of technology for banking, there’s no Latin America. There’s no common regulatory landmark. There’s no integrated financial system.

They’re a bunch of different countries, most of which speak Spanish. We don’t speak the language. We’re just close to each other geographically. I keep telling people that if we’re doing something in logistics, then LatAm is a market. If we’re doing something in software, it just doesn’t matter.

Sramana Mitra: What is the justification for opening so many markets at once? It sounds like there is a lot of founder-led selling going on. Opening up new markets is so complicated.

Ricardo Josua: We have set some ground rules for international expansion. We got a salesperson, Vishal, so I’m not doing sales myself. He has his network. He understands the market. The second thing is that the conditions to sell in international markets are, they use the same basic components that we provide. All countries are using the same API. Last-mile integrations and regulatory integrations are done outside of our system. For the partnership in Southeast Asia, we are partnering with OneConnect that is a technology player. They’re packaging our solution to deploy in this market. It’s the same with India.

Sramana Mitra: Is there a partner like that in India? India is very competitive.

Ricardo Josua: India has been such an amazing experience for us to work with. There are so many integration partners ready to work with us. In 34 days, we had Visa cards and accounts in the hands of our client’s customers. It was very easy.

Sramana Mitra: You have found solid integration partners who are taking you into these accounts.

Ricardo Josua: That makes such a difference. There’s such a diverse and dynamic ecosystem that implementing a solution like ours becomes easy. It’s harder in other markets. For example, in Argentina, there are two players. The ecosystem around them is non-existent. The more dynamic a market is, the more fitting our offering becomes.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Building a Global Hardcore Financial Technology Company from Brazil: Ricardo Josua, CEO of Pismo
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