A customer taps a phone. Somewhere, a balance must be checked, a card recognized, a rule applied and a payment sent to the right place. The screen makes this look like one action. Behind it sits a small committee of systems, each with its own responsibilities. NovoPayment earns its place by helping those systems communicate. The pleasure of a good banking app is that you never have to meet the committee.
- Financial infrastructure for banks, fintechs and businesses.
- Modular accounts, card programs, payments and wallet capabilities.
- More than 310 million transactions processed in 2024, the company reports.
- An Americas focus, with 15 markets reported in March 2025.
The bank that discovered it was a technology company
In a 2017 interview, co-founder Anabel Perez described an unusual beginning. NovoPayment started as a project within a bank. It became a separate business when the team recognized that what it had created was a technology company. Perez and fellow co-founder Oscar Garcia Mendoza came to the problem from inside financial services. That matters: a bank has obligations that a promising prototype can politely ignore.
The origin helps explain its approach to customers. Perez described bank leaders interested in deposits and revenue, corporate customers concerned with experience, and technology and compliance teams focused on reliability and regulation. Selling to this collection of people requires several conversations about the same product. Her advice was wonderfully economical: listen to what each group needs, and spare them a lecture about how complicated banking is.
“Everyone knows that this is a complicated business. There’s no need to remind them.”
Anabel Perez · Finnosummit interview, 2017
The bottleneck behind the beautiful screen
A bank’s problem can be quite ordinary. Customers want a new capability; the existing infrastructure cannot readily provide it. In a 2023 study released by NovoPayment with Forrester Consulting, 71% of surveyed digital transformation decision-makers said customers wanted capabilities that could not be built into their existing infrastructures. The survey covered more than 200 leaders at local and regional banks and credit unions with less than $10 billion in assets.
NovoPayment’s response included Orchestra 2.0, released in July 2023. This middleware layer was designed to connect legacy cores with new applications. At launch, its more than 60 integrations covered such functions as identity checks, payment networks, foreign exchange and enterprise systems. A bank could add capabilities around its existing infrastructure. The practical appeal is less disruption; the remaining work is making all the pieces behave together.
Who gets to say yes to a payment?
The company’s card documentation offers a revealing detail: three processing models. In switching, NovoPayment routes the transaction to the issuer. In pre-authorization, it checks configured program rules before passing the transaction to the issuer for final approval. In full authorization, it decides the outcome using configured rules and available balances or credit limits, with customer and account information held in its banking core.
Those choices allocate responsibility. An institution can retain authorization while using the switch, or buy a broader set of functions. Program settings include spending limits, permitted channels, fees and merchant restrictions. Imagine an employee expense card with a daily cap: the interface is the pleasant part; the enforceable rule makes it useful. That example follows the documented capabilities, rather than claiming a particular customer deployment.
Its current product names describe the jobs: NovoCard for card programs, NovoSpend for corporate expenses, NovoFlow for payment networks, NovoFlux for cloud-based switching and NovoCredit for credit management. The developer hub adds the details: accounts and onboarding, customer information, aliases, QR payments and wallet provisioning. Clients can assemble financial journeys while keeping their own customer-facing brand.
The expensive part is the connection
Geography gives this business its texture. A regional payment service needs connections that work in individual markets. Visa expanded its NovoPayment partnership in December 2019, alongside a strategic investment, after work on Visa Direct and token services. In February 2024, NovoPayment announced Mastercard certification to switch and process transactions in Mexico, following issuer-processing certifications in Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela.
That is a more specific selling point than simply being in the cloud. Pomelo also markets API-based card infrastructure in Latin America. NovoPayment’s position combines payment and banking capabilities with regional connections and experience working with institutions. The buyer’s useful comparison is which provider covers the required market, processing model and integration. A feature list becomes meaningful only when attached to the transaction it must support.
Growth capital raised, not customer pricing or the cost of building the platform.
The business is sold as financial infrastructure through a vertical SaaS model. The disclosed capital gives a sense of the resources behind expansion: a $19 million Series A announced in April 2022, followed by a $20 million Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital investment in November 2024. The later investment was intended to support scaling and commercial partnerships. For buyers, a practical cost calculation must include integration and ongoing operations alongside the commercial proposal.
A new cast, the same backstage
March 2025 brought Rodrigo Rodas as CEO and the return of Rama Ituarte as chief technology officer. The company’s announcement emphasized technology investment, simpler integrations and platform capabilities. Days later, a LoanPro partnership connected NovoPayment’s issuing processing with LoanPro’s credit ledger, origination, servicing and collections. It addressed a related problem: launching credit also means managing the account after the first enthusiastic application.
Start with one journey
For a team considering the platform, the sensible starting point is one complete customer journey. Pick an account opening, a card payment or a wallet transfer. Decide which institution holds the records and approves the transaction. NovoPayment’s developer workflow allows teams to register, create a project, select APIs and test in a free sandbox. Moving to certification or production requires approval; tokenization documentation also requires an access request.
The limits belong in that early conversation. Payment rails vary by market, onboarding must accommodate country requirements, and APIs still need a team to integrate them. A sandbox experiment cannot establish every condition of a live service. The copyable lesson is to settle responsibilities and test the money flow before falling in love with the screen. NovoPayment’s story makes the backstage an unusually useful place to begin.