Ricardo Josua and the value of changing your mind

Ricardo Josua’s first response to the idea that would become Pismo was a refusal. He had already spent years building a card-processing business. When his former technology chief returned from Silicon Valley in 2015, excited about what cloud computing could make possible, he was hardly waiting by the door with a fresh business plan. His recollection of the answer was admirably economical: “No way”.

Daniela Binatti kept showing him what she had found. She had gone back to learning the basics of cloud computing, despite already having been a CTO. The tools had changed. A new company could attempt work that previously demanded much more money and a much larger team. Eventually, Josua joined her. Experience had supplied his objection; fresh evidence overcame it.

In June 2023, Visa agreed to buy Pismo for $1 billion in cash. The transaction closed the following January. That makes the original refusal rather entertaining. It also makes it useful. A founder’s story can look inevitable when read backwards, especially with a round number at the end. Josua has been unusually willing to describe the parts that failed to follow the script.

The first company had to pay its own way

Born and raised in Brazil, Josua studied business administration at FGV in São Paulo. He began working in investment banking in 1996, before finishing business school in 1997. His employer was Garantia, later acquired by Credit Suisse. By 1999 he was working in mergers and acquisitions, learning how companies changed hands before taking on the rather different job of building one.

The opening came through a call-centre business partly owned by his family. When control was sold to an investment firm, he negotiated to stay and develop a new operation. That business became Conductor. There was demand from smaller banks and businesses for card-processing technology, but the mainframe systems available were expensive. The gap was commercial as much as technical: customers wanted something they could afford to use.

Josua recalled starting the unit with roughly $100,000. After that, expansion depended on revenue. Hiring and growth had to wait for the cash to support them. He remained CEO until 2012 and left the company in 2014. The long apprenticeship helps explain why, years later, he would approach abundant venture funding with some caution. He had already learned entrepreneurship with a cash register attached.

Back to the living room

Between Conductor and Pismo, Josua pursued other ventures, including structured finance and education technology. Starting again in payments meant returning to familiar territory with unfamiliar tools. Binatti’s proposition was compelling enough to get him involved while he still had other businesses. By late 2016, he wanted institutional backing for the undertaking.

Pismo’s founding group brought together Josua, Daniela Binatti, Juliana Binatti Motta and Marcelo Parise. Their shared work history mattered. These were experienced executives choosing to become a small working team again, with all the unglamorous jobs that implies. A senior title is very little help when the application still needs to be drawn.

They spent days in their living rooms discussing the product. Josua worked on the front-end design while his partners wrote code. By the time they sought investment, they had a functioning proof of concept with a small client. It gave investors something to examine beyond a presentation. Their earlier careers supplied credibility; the running software supplied evidence that they could still do the work themselves.

“There are a lot of adjustments and missed bets.”Ricardo Josua, 2022

The customers they hadn’t expected

The original expectations needed revision. Digital wallets had seemed likely to occupy a larger role in the future of payments. That particular prediction did not work out as the team had imagined. The broader need for new infrastructure did. Josua’s account leaves room for that distinction, which is more revealing than a retrospective claim to have foreseen everything.

The team also expected to begin with newer financial companies. Its investors encouraged conversations with much larger institutions and helped open doors. One of the early approaches was to Brazil’s largest bank. A contract followed. Suddenly, a young infrastructure company had a demanding customer and a reference that other prospective buyers would take seriously.

A large institution brought scrutiny as well as status. Governance and controls had to meet expectations far beyond those of a small initial customer. Josua remembered the pressure. He also valued the feedback. At Conductor, the company had moved gradually towards bigger clients and patched gaps as they appeared. Pismo encountered the examination earlier. The sale was an achievement, and then the customer began assigning homework.

A product that could travel

The product’s ambition was to combine core banking and payments within one platform. Its commercial logic depended on giving clients components they could use to build their own services. A bank with a large engineering team could develop around Pismo’s APIs, rather than put every request into the supplier’s queue and wait for its turn.

That choice also shaped international expansion. The same underlying building blocks could serve customers in different markets, while local integrations and regulatory requirements were handled around them. An account ledger does not acquire an entirely new purpose when it crosses a border. The surrounding financial system, however, may have quite different requirements.

Josua was sceptical of treating Latin America as a single natural software market. Neighbouring countries did not share one banking system or one regulatory framework. Brazil itself speaks Portuguese in a largely Spanish-speaking region. Geography offered proximity, but it did not remove the work of entering another market. If software could travel, the team had reason to consider destinations beyond the nearest countries.

English before the overseas customers

Pismo’s global intention showed up in a decision that could seem inconvenient at home: documentation was written in English from the beginning. Brazilian clients initially had a fair question about why their teams needed English-language guides. The founders were accepting friction in the present to make the product easier to use internationally later.

Josua described that decision in his 2023 conversation with Miguel Armaza. He also explained the continuing importance of established banks. Pismo had more fintech customers than incumbent customers, yet the incumbents contributed a disproportionate share of revenue. The newer companies might dominate the conversation about financial innovation; established institutions still represented substantial business.

His technical argument was equally practical. A modern platform still needed to communicate with older banking protocols. Connecting to them did not mean allowing them to dictate the architecture of everything being built. The business had to inhabit two periods at once, serving institutions with long histories while making room for services those institutions wanted to launch next.

The unfashionable arithmetic of staying in business

By 2021, Pismo was raising money on a different scale from Conductor’s early operation. Its $108 million Series B brought backing from SoftBank, Amazon and Accel. The funding supported an international push. It also placed Josua inside a startup economy whose preferred measurements he was prepared to question.

In 2022, he pushed back on the fascination with fundraising valuations. A high price could make subsequent financing awkward and complicate incentives for employees. The eventual result for founders and investors depended on what happened at an exit. A valuation announced during a funding round was an intermediate judgment, however pleasing it looked in print.

He also preferred measuring the time needed to reach break-even over merely counting the months until another injection of capital would be required. That preference fits the earlier Conductor experience, where growth had followed cash generation. Pismo could now attract large investors, but the old constraint had left an impression. Money available to spend and a business able to support itself remain different calculations.

A billion dollars, with the work still attached

Visa announced the acquisition agreement on 28 June 2023. Pismo’s cloud-based platform offered the buyer capabilities in core banking and card-issuer processing, alongside connectivity to emerging payment systems such as Brazil’s Pix. It was a purchase of the infrastructure that financial institutions could use to build services for their own customers.

When the deal closed on 16 January 2024, Pismo retained its management team under Josua. His stated ambition was to help clients launch banking and payment products across networks, currencies and geographies. The transaction gave that ambition a new owner and a broader distribution context. It did not erase the years of product decisions that had made the company useful.

There is a pleasing mismatch between the size of the purchase price and the obscurity of much of the work. Consumers can admire a new banking app without knowing who processes the account beneath it. Josua had spent much of his career in that less visible layer. Eventually, a very visible buyer put a price on it.

Passing the chair, keeping the connection

On 16 April 2025, Pismo announced Vishal Dalal as global CEO and Josua’s transition to an advisory role. Dalal had led the company’s business across North America, Europe and Asia since 2021. The international expansion Josua had wanted was now part of the experience his successor brought to the top job.

The other three co-founders continued in their leadership positions: Daniela Binatti in technology, Juliana Binatti Motta in product and Marcelo Parise in engineering. Josua spoke of new markets, prospective clients and improvements to the platform under Visa’s ownership. His departure from the CEO position was a handover within a company whose founding team still had work underway.

In 2026, Josua appeared in Endeavor Brasil’s work on international expansion, sharing the experience of building a global product from Brazil. The emphasis was on experienced people who understood customers and could represent the company abroad. Software could cross borders; someone still had to establish the relationships on the other side.

His career gives the first refusal a different meaning. Saying no was a starting position, open to argument. Daniela Binatti made the argument, the team built the product, and customers helped reshape the business. A billion-dollar ending makes a tidy headline. The more human story is the experienced executive who was persuaded to sit down and begin again.