Visa-owned Pismo is expanding its footprint in India, leveraging its platform to enable faster product launches for banks and fintechs amidst growing competition in the country’s payment infrastructure expansion.
Visa-owned Pismo is broadening its footprint in India, where the cloud-based core banking and card processing platform is already live with about eight financial institutions and is being treated as one of the company’s priority markets this financial year. Leonardo Collado, Pismo’s senior vice-president and general manager, told Business Standard that the company now operates in 19 markets after Visa completed its acquisition in 2024, up from five markets at the time of the deal, and expects to reach around 30 markets by the end of this year.
Pismo sits behind products rather than in front of consumers, providing the plumbing for card issuance, processing and core banking across debit, credit and prepaid cards, as well as retail and corporate banking and lending. Visa has positioned the platform as part of its value-added services strategy, and Collado said the appeal in India lies in helping banks and fintechs launch products faster without being constrained by older systems. He said Pismo is designed to be network-agnostic, supporting rival schemes including Mastercard and RuPay, and that most of the transactions it processes globally are not Visa transactions.
In India, the platform is already being used on card-related applications, including a multi-currency foreign exchange card being launched with a fintech partner. Pismo is also exploring wider use cases tied to lending, including credit lines on the Unified Payments Interface, as banks look to build on the growth of UPI and the spread of RuPay credit cards on the rail. That push comes as India’s payments infrastructure continues to expand, creating more room for core banking and processing providers that can help institutions modernise more quickly.
Pismo is entering a market that already has a number of competitors offering similar services, including Zeta, Fiserv, Euronet, Infosys Finacle and TCS BaNCS. Visa argues that owning Pismo gives it a stronger route into banks that want quicker product launches, especially where legacy systems have slowed development. The platform is built around more than 500 interchangeable microservices, allowing institutions to configure products more directly. Pismo has pointed to Brazil as an example, saying one bank needed 37,000 IT hours to launch Apple Pay on legacy infrastructure but only 237 IT hours when using Pismo.
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