Latin American fintech Prometeo launches ‘borderless banking’

Prometeo, a Latin American fintech, has launched what it calls “borderless banking” for business-to-business payments between the U.S. and Latin American countries. 

According to the company, Prometeo has developed middleware that integrates U.S. and Latin American financial infrastructures through a single application programming interface. 

Users can access local accounts to receive payments, automate collections, and disburse international payments with real-time tracking and visibility of balances across all accounts. All of Prometeo’s products come with account verification, according to Ximena Aleman, Prometeo co-founder and co-CEO.

“We help global companies and global financial institutions plug into the banking rails in Latin America,” Aleman said. “Our vision has been to bridge the infrastructure gap between the different countries in Latin America – first Mexico, Brazil, Panama, etc., and now we are taking the step to bridge the U.S. with the rest of the opportunities in Latin America.”

Prometeo is the only account validation provider in Latin America and has secured investments from the likes of PayPal Ventures and Samsung Next. The company told American Banker it supplies four out of the five major global companies that offer cross-border validated payments, and Prometeo expects to secure the fifth this year. 

The payment fintech declined to disclose transaction specifics, but stated the volume of cross-border validations processed by Prometeo increased sevenfold in 2024 with the majority of the traffic coming from Mexican accounts.

Remittances, or funds sent often by migrant workers to family in their home country, is huge for the Latin American market. Aleman said on average Latin America makes three times more remittances than the rest of the world.

“Remittances are a huge pain in Latin America which has a huge migrant population both within Latin America and outside Latin America to the U.S.,” Aleman said. “This migrant population creates 17% of the market share of remittances worldwide. That’s almost 20% – one fifth – and that population is just 5% of the global population.”

Aleman said these remittances can be extremely costly and the economic growth of the region is partially dependent on easing that. “Remittances are really, really expensive,” Aleman said. “And when it comes to B2B payments, it’s the same. Companies that want to make cross-border operations have to pay much more to make those. If we want to boost global commerce in Latin America, from Latin America to the outside and from the outside to Latin America, we need to provide a better banking infrastructure, a better cross-border payment infrastructure and that’s our vision.”

The fintech company currently services over 1,500 connections to 1,200 financial institutions across 11 countries. Prometeo is partnered with several large financial firms including Citi, MercadoLibre, OpenPay, Banco Santander, Rappi and Bancolombia. A source familiar added that the company is partnering with J.P. Morgan. 

Latin America is a huge potential market for payments, Aleman said. Imports from North America to Latin America hit $507 billion in 2022; regional trade among Latin American countries amounted to $228 billion that same year. The market, though, is still largely manually processed with only 30% of payments being digitized. 

Venture capital firm Quona Capital, which specializes in emerging market fintech companies, found in an October report that cross-border payments globally are projected to increase at an 11% compound annual growth rate over the next decade, hitting a projected $1.368 trillion in total volume and creating revenue in the range of $57 billion and $303 billion.

Initially, the program is being offered in the U.S. Mexico, Brazil, Colombia and Argentina but the company plans to expand. 

Last June, Prometeo launched its U.S. Bank Account Validation product allowing Latin American businesses to connect with 100% of U.S. banks through a single integration with one provider and application programming interface.