Anabel Perez and the business of making money move

Anabel Perez takes fiction, nonfiction and company annual reports seriously enough to read them for pleasure. Asked about her hobbies, she included 10-Ks in the same breath as novels. Frequent flights gave her time to read; curiosity supplied the itinerary. It is a useful introduction to someone whose working life has involved persuading banks, technology companies and payment networks to understand one another.

The annual report is an unusually appropriate travelling companion for a payments founder. It asks what is happening beneath the attractive surface: where the money comes from, where it goes, and what must work for the whole enterprise to keep moving. Perez has spent much of her career on those underlying arrangements. The customer sees a payment. She sees the institutions that must cooperate to complete it.

Her company, NovoPayment, grew out of work inside a Venezuelan bank and developed into a provider of digital financial infrastructure across the Americas. Its services sit behind other businesses' banking, payment and card offerings. By November 2024, it served 15 markets. Perez, its co-founder and founding CEO, now serves on the board and advises other businesses. Her story begins much earlier, with a lawyer learning how a bank works.

A lawyer in the machinery

Perez grew up in Caracas, watching her father run a technology services company. Technology was part of the family scenery before it became her business. She studied law at Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, then built her career in banking. That combination put her close to two things a financial technology business would eventually need: an understanding of institutional rules and an appetite for changing how work gets done.

At Venezolano de Crédito, she rose to senior vice president and led a team of more than 1,000 employees. She was the only woman on the executive board. Those responsibilities preceded the startup years; she arrived at entrepreneurship with experience of managing people and working inside an established financial institution. The bank also gave her sustained contact with retailers, payment businesses and customers dealing with cash.

That experience matters to the origin of NovoPayment. Its early problem was practical: how to replace cumbersome cash processes with electronic alternatives. Payroll, employee benefits and prepaid programs offered starting points. For a business handling repeated payments, the apparently simple act of distributing money brings a collection of tasks: keeping records, controlling access and making sure the recipient can actually use what arrives.

Perez had support within the bank. Its leadership helped sponsor the venture, and shareholders supplied seed capital. Entrepreneurship here involved carrying relationships and knowledge into a new company. Her banking years had produced both a problem worth working on and people prepared to back the attempt.

Before the fashionable vocabulary

The enterprise's roots reach back to Caracas in 2004; its headquarters moved to Miami in 2007. Those dates describe successive stages of a business that began as a banking project and became a technology company. The early proposition involved prepaid cards and electronic payments. Over time, the work expanded toward supplying the systems through which other businesses could deliver financial services.

In a 2014 account of her work, Perez described trying to make payroll and benefit payments easier for people with and without bank accounts. That is a more concrete starting point than an ambition to transform an industry. Someone needs to be paid. A company needs to account for the payment. An arrangement that makes both sides easier has a reason to exist before anyone chooses a fashionable name for it.

By 2011, Perez had received the Paybefore Industry Achievement Award. She became the first Hispanic-American woman to receive that recognition for contributions to payments and financial inclusion. NovoPayment and its subsidiaries also accumulated seven Paybefore awards between 2008 and 2017. The sequence reflects a business developing in the payments trade, well before its later institutional funding announcements.

A continent does not come with one instruction manual

Regional expansion gave Perez a recurring problem: Latin America contains many financial systems. Different regulations, institutions and payment arrangements make a single regional promise difficult to execute. A company may want to offer a familiar service in another country, but the connections underneath it still have to work there. Geography has a way of making a persuasive presentation considerably longer.

Her answer was to let customers and partners determine where NovoPayment went. In 2022, she explained that the company required a client or collaborative partner before entering a new market. The rule attached expansion to an actual relationship. It also meant that entering a country involved a reason to be there and someone with whom to do the work.

She discussed Peru, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela, alongside activity in Central America and the Caribbean. The demanding part was local integration: connecting the platform to each financial ecosystem while maintaining standards for security, reliability and data integrity. A regional platform earns its usefulness through those individual connections. Each one is a piece of work a customer should not have to repeat from the beginning.

By 2024, her explanation of the business put particular emphasis on local requirements and the consumer's freedom to choose how to transact. A platform might support remote banking, a QR payment or another way to pay. Its value depended on whether a financial institution could turn those capabilities into a service that fitted its customers and its market.

The shop at the other end

One example Perez described involved a Mexican financial network serving small neighbourhood shops. Its arrangements were fragmented and relied on analogue processes. NovoPayment helped it move to digital connections for domestic transactions involving different banks. She described improvements in access to information, operating costs and the movement of money. The network itself was unnamed in her account.

The example brings a seemingly remote infrastructure business back within walking distance. The beneficiary can be a small shop whose customers need access to financial services. The chain runs through a network and its banking connections, but the final interaction is ordinary. An owner wants a transaction to go through and enough information to understand what happened.

There is a useful tension in that work. The infrastructure must accommodate complicated institutional requirements while allowing the service at the counter to become easier. A customer has little reason to admire the sophistication of an integration. Getting on with the day is sufficient applause.

Capital arrives after the operating years

In April 2022, NovoPayment announced $19 million in its first institutional fundraising. IDC Ventures and Fuel Venture Capital were new investors. The planned uses included adding more than 100 engineers, business development and product specialists, as well as opening offices in San Francisco and Austin. The business already had roughly 350 employees as of that February.

These were expansion plans for an existing operation. At the time, its customers included Colombian neobank RappiPay and Mexican financial services business Kubo Financiero. Most of its client base was in Latin America, and Perez wanted to develop its US business further. The funding connected an established regional operation with a wider commercial ambition.

Access to investment had required persistence. Perez participated in the 2020 Women STEMpreneurs competition as a finalist. In 2022, IDB Lab and We-Fi made a $2.5 million equity investment as part of the Series A financing. Their interest included the potential for smaller financial institutions and other providers to extend services to underserved customers.

On November 12, 2024, Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital announced a $20 million investment. NovoPayment's services then covered 15 markets across Latin America, the Caribbean and the United States. Its offering included digital wallets, account and virtual card issuance, real-time payments and cross-border transfers. The investment was intended to support product development and commercial growth.

A different seat at the table

Perez's professional network became another place to put her experience to work. Selected as an Endeavor Entrepreneur in December 2014, she joined Endeavor Miami's board in June 2018. She was the first entrepreneur from the organisation's own network to join that local board. Having received help with an advisory board and access to experienced leaders, she moved into supporting other entrepreneurs.

Her own education continued alongside the company. In 2015, she attended the Stanford-Endeavor Innovation & Growth executive program. Her formal studies had already included law and marketing. The progression gives some substance to that reading habit: banking, legal training, technology and company building each supplied a different way to examine the same transaction, and the people responsible for it.

She later announced her departure from NovoPayment's CEO role while retaining a board seat. Her farewell thanked family, colleagues, customers, partners, investors and mentors, including the company's present and former “NovoStars.” The list suited a career built around getting groups to work together. Even a founder's departure announcement could look rather like a map of relationships.

By March 2026, her work included advising fintech companies backed by private equity and venture capital, guiding investment firms and mentoring Endeavor entrepreneurs across the US and Latin America. Her reflections now stressed focus: learning to decline opportunities so the important work could receive enough attention.

“Build with conviction, but stay adaptable.”

Anabel Perez, 2026

That advice sits comfortably beside the expansion rule. Both make ambition answer to a practical question: what deserves the next commitment of time, people and money? Perez's career has moved from bank operations to company building and onward to board and advisory work. The responsibilities change. There is still plenty to read, and a good deal to understand beneath the surface.