He named his bank after the Caribbean word for "buddy." Then he set out to make sending money home feel like sending a text.
The operator who walked out of the corner office. Twelve years in Caribbean banking, then a fresh start in Miami.
An immigrant in Miami sends $200 to her mother in Santo Domingo. By the time it lands, roughly $12 has evaporated into fees. Multiply that by tens of millions of people, every month, and you have one of the quietest, most regressive taxes on earth.
Piero Núñez Del Risco built Pana to make that number disappear. Pana is a cross-border neobank: borderless USD accounts that move money instantly, with zero fees. Open one with a passport. No Social Security Number, no branch visit, no awkward conversation with a teller who has never had to send a paycheck across a border.
The premise is almost insultingly simple. The 62 million Latinos living in the United States generate a fortune in remittances, yet many of them are locked out of the formal banking system by a single missing nine-digit number. Pana treats the passport as enough. For millions of people, it has to be.
"Pana" is slang - Dominican, Venezuelan, Caribbean - for buddy, for your close friend, for the person who has your back. That is the whole brand argument in one word. A bank that behaves like a friend rather than an institution. It is the kind of naming choice you only make if you grew up hearing the word.
- Piero Risco, founder & CEO of PanaPana is removing the financial barriers for Latinos in the USA.
Industry average vs. the Pana promise
Money moves instantly through a closed-loop network of borderless USD accounts.
Most remittance businesses make their margin precisely where Pana refuses to. The legacy model charges for the privilege of crossing a border, then again on the exchange rate, then sometimes a third time on pickup. Pana's bet is that if you remove the friction, the volume more than makes up for the fee.
The early signal: payment volume reached $12 million while growing 57% month over month. That is the kind of curve that makes Visa pick up the phone - which it did, bringing Pana into its Fintech Fast Track program in 2022.
The longer arc is bolder. Pana has framed its destination as a "global bank on chain" - a single, secure USD account that blends traditional dollars and stablecoins across 125 countries. The neobank for Latinos is the beachhead. Borderless money is the war.
Before Pana, Piero was not a coder in a dorm room. He was an insider - the rare founder who learned exactly where the machine breaks by spending years operating it.
He started in 2005 at Banco Popular Dominicano, in digital banking and payments, back when "digital banking" mostly meant a website that occasionally loaded. He then spent more than a decade at Grupo Universal, one of the Dominican Republic's financial giants, rising to Commercial Director and Head of Retail and Corporate Wealth Management.
Restless inside the institution, he founded his first fintech startup, meSuma, in 2016, and was elected vice president of the board of ADOFINTECH, the country's fintech association - putting him at the center of the Dominican Republic's emerging startup scene rather than on its sidelines.
Then came the test that reads like a founding myth. As Head of Digital Banking at Scotiabank's Digital Factory, he hired and led a team of more than 130 engineers, designers, and product owners to rebuild a complete mobile and web banking platform - for 2 million customers, across 11 countries, in the middle of a pandemic. Most people would call that a career. He called it research.
A founder does not build a bank alone, and he did not. Piero co-founded Pana with Luis Peña, a fellow second-time fintech founder with more than a decade in software and a stint as a tech lead at Rover. Piero brings the banking scar tissue; Peña brings the engineering. Between them, they have run distributed teams across time zones and shipped products at scale - the unglamorous prerequisites that separate a deck from a working bank.
Miami was the obvious base. The city is the de facto capital of the Latin American diaspora, a place where Spanish and English braid together on every block and where the remittance corridor is not an abstraction on a slide - it is the family at the next table. Pana set up in Florida and pointed itself squarely at the people who line up at corner stores to wire cash home.
The Y Combinator stamp in summer 2022 did what it does: it took a credible regional operator and dropped him into the most competitive founder network on the planet. Backed by YC and partnered with Visa, Piero suddenly had the distribution and the credibility to chase a market the incumbents had priced as too small to bother with and too poor to serve well.
Founder & CEO. Twelve-plus years in Caribbean banking; ran a 130-person rebuild of Scotiabank's platform before going solo.
Co-founder & CTO. Second-time fintech founder, 10+ years in software, former tech lead at Rover, builder of distributed engineering teams.
There is a version of this story where Pana is just another neobank chasing a demographic. That version misses the point. The remittance market is enormous and ancient - billions of dollars cross borders every month carried on the backs of people who can least afford the toll. The technology to move that money cheaply has existed for years. What was missing was someone willing to refuse the fee, and someone who understood, viscerally, why a missing Social Security Number should not be a life sentence of financial exclusion.
Piero's whole biography is an argument that he is that someone. He grew up with the word "pana." He watched, from inside three financial institutions, how the system quietly skims from the people it claims to serve. He learned to build digital banking products at scale and then chose to point that skill at the customers banks usually ignore. The closed-loop network Pana is building - borderless USD accounts that settle instantly between members - is the technical expression of a moral position: that crossing a border should not cost a tax.
And the chain piece is not a buzzword bolt-on. Stablecoins are, in the end, dollars that move at the speed of the internet. For a remittance network, that is not a feature - it is the entire physics of the thing. By blending fiat and stablecoins, Pana aims to make the dollar itself borderless, then hand that borderless dollar to the people who need it most. It is an ambitious, slightly audacious plan. Audacity, it turns out, is the only thing that ever moved an entrenched market.
- The thesis, in one lineSending money home should cost minutes, not 6%.
"Pana" is Caribbean slang for close friend. It is a deliberate rejection of cold institutional banking - a promise that the product should feel like someone who has your back, not a fortress with a logo.
No SSN required. By treating a passport as valid identity, Pana dismantles the single biggest wall keeping millions of immigrants out of formal finance. It is a small product decision with an enormous human footprint.
A second-time founder who has lived and studied across the Dominican Republic, Spain, and the United States. He learned the banking machine from the inside, then quit to take it apart.
Piero earned his BA in Business Administration at Universidad Iberoamericana (UNIBE) in Santo Domingo, then crossed the Atlantic for an MBA at the Universitat de Barcelona and Barna Management School. Later, he completed Stanford University's Business Management and Scaling program - the kind of finishing school founders attend right before they decide to bet everything.
Forbes Dominicana eventually named him to its #30PromesasRD - the 30 Promises of the Dominican Republic - a list reserved for the people a country expects to define its next decade.
Piero's stated ambition is to build the first secure, end-to-end global USD account - one that seamlessly integrates fiat and stablecoins across 125 countries, for the immigrant communities the financial system has always treated as an afterthought.
It is a tall order, and he knows the graveyard of "bank for the underbanked" startups is crowded. But few of those founders rebuilt a real bank for two million people first. Piero is not guessing at the problem. He has run the spreadsheet from inside three of them. Pana is what happens when an insider stops filing the report and starts shipping the fix.
Watch his founder story in his own words on the Semilla VC interview below, and follow Pana's links to see where the buddy bank goes next.