Visa’s core banking and card processing platform Pismo is live with around eight financial institutions in India, and the country is among its priority markets for the ongoing financial year, a senior company executive said. The global card network acquired São Paulo-based Pismo in 2024, when the platform operated in five markets. Pismo has since expanded to 19 markets globally, including India, and expects to be live in around 30 markets by the end of this year, said Leonardo Collado, senior vice-president and general manager, Pismo.

Pismo supplies the technology that sits underneath a financial institution’s products, such as card issuance and processing across debit, credit and prepaid cards, retail and corporate banking, and lending. It is part of Visa’s value-added services play globally.

“India is an important market for us and this is a market where we’re thinking differently about how to bring this kind of platform. So it would be one of our priority markets for FY27 and one of the top markets that we would serve,” Collado told Business Standard.

The platform is network-agnostic and supports issuance and processing on rival schemes, including Mastercard and RuPay, Collado said, adding that a majority of transactions processed on Pismo globally are not Visa’s.

“Pismo is a technology provider which is different from what people in India are used to seeing Visa as a network. It is a technology partner for banks… It serves across all payment spectrum wherever our clients need to be, we’re going to be there,” he added.

He further added, “It is scheme and payment agnostic. I am the payment orchestrator that connects our clients to whatever the market offers. The majority of the transactions that we process today in Pismo are not Visa transactions.”

In India, the platform is launching a multi-currency forex card with a fintech, along with other card-related use cases. The platform is also exploring enabling use cases such as credit line on Unified Payments Interface (UPI) for banks, which runs on the lending capabilities that it has developed.

Core banking capabilities offered to Indian banks present a window of opportunity for the company as payment infrastructure scales with expanding UPI adoption, including the RuPay credit card on UPI offering.

Pismo’s deepening play in India comes at a time when there are other participants offering similar services, such as Zeta, Fiserv, Euronet, Infosys Finacle, TCS BaNCS, and others.

But Visa’s ownership of the platform gives it a route into financial institutions that want to launch products faster, a challenge for the network, whose innovations often stalled at banks running older systems.

Institutions can configure products themselves on Pismo, drawing on more than 500 interchangeable software components called microservices, rather than raising change requests with a vendor and waiting months for a release.

For instance, in Pismo’s home market, Brazil, the company claims to have enabled a faster launch of Apple Pay with its systems compared with the bank’s legacy controls.

“One of our leading institutions in Brazil that uses Pismo, launched Apple Pay under legacy infrastructure and under Pismo. Under legacy infrastructure, it took them 37,000 IT hours. With Pismo, they did the same launch in 237 IT hours. So it’s a tremendous difference to be able to build products in legacy infrastructure versus what it is to build on Pismo,” Collado added.