Latin America’s Fintech Stack Is No Longer a Neobank Story

Latin America’s fintech story is often reduced to one spectacular number: the rise of the neobank.

That description is increasingly incomplete.

The more interesting story is structural. Latin America is building an increasingly sophisticated financial stack, where digital banks sit at the top, payment infrastructure provides the rails, specialised lenders finance businesses and consumers, and stablecoins and blockchain infrastructure begin to connect the region to global liquidity.

The four-floor framework presented by Dmytro Kysliuk is therefore particularly useful because it moves the discussion away from individual fintech brands and toward how the financial system itself is being reconstructed.

And the numbers increasingly support that interpretation.

Latin American fintech attracted roughly $2.8 billion of venture funding in 2024, according to one regional analysis, with Brazil remaining the dominant market. More importantly, capital has become more selective: investors are increasingly looking for revenue, credit economics, infrastructure and sustainable business models rather than simply user growth.

The implication is important:

The next phase of Latin American fintech will not be won simply by acquiring customers. It will be won by controlling financial flows.

1. The first floor: digital banks

At the consumer level, the scale is extraordinary.

The companies highlighted in the original framework include Nubank, Inter, C6 Bank, PagBank, Ualá and Plata.

Their numbers illustrate why the neobank narrative became so powerful.

Nubank is the clearest example. In Q2 2026, Nubank reached 139 million customers globally, including almost 118 million in Brazil, 15.8 million in Mexico and more than 5 million in Colombia. The company also reported quarterly net income above $1 billion for the first time.

That is no longer simply a challenger-bank story.

It is the emergence of a large-scale financial distribution platform.

Inter&Co has similarly moved beyond the traditional definition of a digital bank. It reported more than 45 million customers in Q2 2026 and is expanding its ecosystem into investments and international financial services.

Then come C6 Bank, PagBank, Ualá and Plata, each attacking different combinations of retail banking, payments, credit, cards and financial services.

The important point is not which bank has the largest customer base.

It is that the customer relationship itself is becoming the distribution infrastructure for everything else.

A bank account can become a credit product.

A payment relationship can become a merchant relationship.

A wallet can become an investment account.

A consumer can become a borrower, an investor, an insurance customer and a payment user without ever leaving the same ecosystem.

This is where the economics become much more interesting than the headline customer numbers.

2. The second floor: payment infrastructure

This is where the architecture becomes deeper.

The framework identifies Mercado Pago, CloudWalk/InfinitePay, dLocal, Clip and Pismo.

These companies are fundamentally different from consumer neobanks.

They provide the machinery through which money moves.

Mercado Pago is perhaps the most important example.

In Q2 2026, Mercado Pago reached 88 million monthly active users. Total payment volume reached $101 billion, while its credit portfolio exceeded $16 billion. Its assets under management reached $23 billion.

Those figures change the way we should think about the company.

Mercado Pago is not simply a wallet attached to an e-commerce company.

It is becoming a financial operating system for consumers and merchants.

And then there is CloudWalk, behind InfinitePay.

CloudWalk reported more than 7 million monthly active users across Brazil and the United States in 2026, while its AI infrastructure processes more than 60 billion tokens per day. The company has increasingly integrated payments, credit and AI into the same operating model.

That is particularly significant because AI is beginning to change fintech economics.

If underwriting, fraud detection, customer support, merchant onboarding and operational processes become increasingly automated, the competitive advantage may shift from simply having a large technology platform to having a lower marginal cost of serving every additional customer.

dLocal represents another critical layer.

Its importance comes from solving one of Latin America’s fundamental problems: cross-border fragmentation.

Different currencies, payment systems, regulations, banking infrastructures and settlement mechanisms make the region difficult to navigate.

The company that simplifies those connections can become more valuable than the institution sitting directly in front of the customer.

And then there is Pismo.

Visa completed its acquisition of Pismo in January 2024, bringing cloud-native core banking and issuer-processing capabilities into Visa’s infrastructure. Pismo’s platform supports banking, card issuing, lending and digital wallets through APIs.

This is strategically important.

The future of banking is not only about who owns the customer. It is also about who owns the infrastructure that allows thousands of financial products to be created.

3. The third floor: business credit

This may ultimately prove to be one of the most economically important layers.

The framework identifies Konfío, Creditas, Clara and Xepelin.

The opportunity is enormous because Latin American SMEs remain structurally underserved by traditional financial institutions.

The problem is not necessarily a lack of demand for credit.

It is the difficulty of underwriting risk efficiently.

Traditional banks often depend on historical financial statements, collateral and conventional credit histories.

Fintech lenders can instead combine transactional data, invoices, payment flows, accounting information and behavioural data.

That creates the possibility of turning previously “unbankable” businesses into financeable businesses.

Konfío illustrates this model through SME credit, cards and payments.

Creditas focuses on secured consumer and SME lending.

Clara operates across Mexico, Brazil and Colombia, combining corporate cards with expense and spend management. The company says more than 40,000 companies use its platform across Latin America.

And Xepelin represents another critical trend: using invoices and business cash flows as the basis for financing.

This is where fintech starts becoming something more profound than “digital banking.”

It becomes financial infrastructure embedded directly into the operating system of a business.

The distinction matters.

A bank asks an SME to come to the bank.

Embedded finance increasingly puts the bank inside the SME’s workflow.

4. The fourth floor: stablecoins and crypto rails

This may be the most underestimated part of the entire structure.

The original framework identifies Koibanx and Félix Pago.

Koibanx represents the infrastructure side: blockchain-based financial rails designed to connect banks, institutions and payment systems.

Félix Pago represents the consumer application: remittances through WhatsApp with settlement using stablecoins.

This is where the Latin American fintech story intersects with global monetary infrastructure.

Stablecoins are particularly relevant in Latin America because the region has a combination of factors that make digital dollars economically useful: currency volatility, inflation histories, large remittance flows, fragmented payment systems and demand for easier access to international liquidity.

A 2025 analysis from OpenTrade estimated that stablecoin transactions accounted for $324 billion of $730 billion in on-chain crypto received across Latin America, with stablecoin activity up 89% year over year.

The broader trend is also visible in institutional finance. The IMF has noted that stablecoins have become increasingly important in global payments and settlement, while the largest stablecoins have experienced enormous growth in market capitalisation and transaction activity.

This does not mean stablecoins will replace banks.

Quite the opposite.

The more plausible scenario is that banks, fintechs and stablecoins become increasingly interconnected.

The fifth layer nobody puts on the chart: regulation

There is, however, one additional layer that deserves to be placed underneath all four floors:

regulation and trust.

Every successful fintech eventually encounters the same constraints:

• capital requirements;

• credit risk;

• regulatory compliance/regulatory compliance;

• fraud;

• consumer protection;

• data governance;

• cybersecurity;

• payment regulation;

• licensing;

• cross-border compliance.

Latin America is particularly interesting because real-time payment infrastructure is expanding rapidly. The BIS notes that most countries in the region are implementing fast payment systems and that these systems can support greater access to savings and credit, while also creating challenges around fraud, cybersecurity, interoperability and fees.

This means technology alone will not determine the winners.

The winners will increasingly be those capable of combining:

technology + distribution + data + capital + regulation.

From fintech companies to financial ecosystems

This is ultimately why the four-floor framework is so powerful.

The companies are not all competing for the same prize.

Nubank, Inter, C6 Bank, PagBank, Ualá and Plata compete primarily for financial relationships and customer distribution.

Mercado Pago, CloudWalk, dLocal, Clip and Pismo operate deeper inside the payment and financial infrastructure layer.

Konfío, Creditas, Clara and Xepelin attack the enormous financing and operating needs of businesses.

Koibanx and Félix Pago point toward a future where blockchain and stablecoins become part of the plumbing of international finance.

And increasingly, these layers are beginning to converge.

That convergence is the real story.

A successful digital bank can build payments.

A payments company can build credit.

A merchant platform can become a bank.

A lending platform can embed payments.

A stablecoin company can become a remittance infrastructure provider.

A core banking platform can power banks that customers never even know are using it.

The boundaries between fintech categories are disappearing.

The strategic question is no longer “Who has the most customers?”

This is perhaps the most important conclusion.

Customer acquisition was the first phase of Latin American fintech.

The second phase is monetisation.

The third is infrastructure.

And the emerging fourth phase is interconnection.

The strongest companies may therefore not be those occupying a single floor.

They may be those capable of connecting several floors simultaneously.

That is why Mercado Pago matters.

That is why CloudWalk matters.

That is why Pismo matters.

That is why SME lenders matter.

And that is why stablecoin infrastructure deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed as another crypto cycle.

Latin America is not simply digitising banking.

It is rebuilding the financial stack around data, real-time payments, embedded finance, alternative credit and increasingly programmable money.

The winners will be determined not only by scale, but by how deeply they become embedded in the flow of money.

And that is a much bigger opportunity — and a much more complicated competitive battlefield — than the neobank revolution initially suggested.

Roberto Balbino — CEO, Fintech SCB
Independent analyst of finance, economics, geopolitics and global markets.