According to Statista, fintech in Latin America (LatAm) suffered in 2023, with less than $2billion invested in fintech ventures – a drastic drop from 2021’s value of $6billion. Nonetheless, in the face of this hardship, fintechs have still continued to emerge and find success in the region, and across 2024, investment levels surged back up over $2billion again. With the future of fintech looking optimistic in 2025, Em Conversa looks to explore how the LatAm region can prosper once more.
Prometeo is a fintech infrastructure platform that helps organisations across LatAm and the United States. In March 2025, it announced its new Borderless Banking offering to help firms make easier payments following the Bank Account Validation offering announced in June 2024. The firm’s expertise is not limited to payments, though.
We previously explored how Prometeo’s open banking services are impacting LatAm, specifically in Chile and Uruguay. Now, we turn our attention to one of the hottest topics in fintech: AI and automation, hearing from Rodrigo Tumaian, co-founder and co-CEO of Prometeo.
Can you tell me more about the company and your role within it?
I’m the co-founder and co-CEO of Prometeo, the fintech infrastructure platform operating across Latin America and the United States. Our mission is to help companies streamline their operations and scale across borders more efficiently.
We currently offer over 1,500 connections to more than 1200 financial institutions in 11 countries. This allows companies to embed financial services, automate workflows, and scale across markets more quickly, without having to navigate each country’s fragmented systems from scratch.
In my role, I lead the company’s vision and innovation strategy, with a strong focus on automation, product development, and security. My background in cybersecurity and finance deeply informs how we build: with safety, efficiency, and intelligence at the core.
What are some AI and automation trends we’re seeing in Brazil?
Brazil is one of the most advanced AI-ready financial ecosystems globally. Open finance has seen strong adoption, and Pix is arguably the most successful real-time payment system in the world, both in terms of scale and impact.
Brazil’s Central Bank registered 4.8 billion API calls in June 2023 — more than four times the UK in the same period. This surge has created the perfect testing ground for AI: from credit models using behavioural data to AI-powered KYC and fraud detection, we’re seeing financial institutions and fintechs moving beyond automation toward autonomous decision-making.
We’re also seeing growing adoption of generative AI across Brazilian banks and fintechs. Some institutions are already deploying foundational models for customer service automation, predictive risk analysis, and internal process optimisation. Use cases go beyond chatbots — we’re talking about AI co-pilots that assist human analysts, generate insights from unstructured financial data, and even handle routine compliance tasks autonomously.
Brazilian regulators have also played a role by fostering a climate of innovation without over-restriction. This balance has encouraged both incumbents and startups to experiment more boldly with AI, making the country an early mover in testing agentic finance models, where AI systems can act, decide, and evolve within financial environments.
What’s happening in Brazil it’s foundational. The infrastructure is being laid not just for faster processes, but for agentic systems that can navigate and act within financial environments on behalf of users.
What is Prometeo doing to improve the automation sector in Brazil and Latin America?
At Prometeo, we’re building the infrastructure that powers the next era of financial automation — one where intelligent systems don’t just assist, but operate independently within real financial environments.
In Brazil, we enable companies to automate everything from payment initiation and reconciliation to identity validation and enriched financial data retrieval. Thanks to our unified API, businesses can connect directly to a wide network of banks and institutions, streamlining operations without having to manage dozens of separate integrations.
But Latin America isn’t a single, cohesive market — it’s a complex patchwork of financial systems, regulations, and standards. That’s where our value multiplies. Instead of just integrating APIs, we abstract complexity. We give companies the tools to operate with one logic across multiple countries while meeting local compliance demands.
And now, we’re pioneering the shift from automation to autonomy through our latest innovation: Agentic Banking Infrastructure. This new layer of our platform is designed specifically for AI-native use cases. Through our proprietary Model Context Protocol (MCP), it allows AI agents to interact securely and contextually with financial APIs, not just reading data, but taking real action.
Imagine an AI system that can open and validate accounts, initiate local and cross-border payments, retrieve balances and transaction data, and manage banking sessions — all without human intervention, and all on behalf of the user. That’s what Agentic Banking Infrastructure makes possible.
How does the Brazilian AI sector compare to that of the rest of the region?
Brazil is setting the benchmark for Latin America’s AI ecosystem. It leads the region in research and development, adoption, and data infrastructure — but more importantly, it’s become a visionary force in how AI can be embedded into real financial systems.
What sets Brazil apart is its ability to combine scale with action. The country has managed to align public policy, private sector innovation, and user adoption in a way that’s rare in emerging markets. Initiatives like Pix and Open Finance created the foundations for an AI-native financial ecosystem. Brazil didn’t wait to follow global trends; it built its model of digital finance and is now exporting that vision to the rest of the region.
This leadership is influencing how other Latin American countries think about innovation. Brazil has shown that with the right regulatory environment, technical infrastructure, and commitment to interoperability, it’s possible to leap ahead, not just incrementally, but structurally. As AI adoption deepens, Brazil is uniquely positioned to define how intelligent systems can operate securely and ethically in finance, setting both the pace and the standard for Latin America.
What are some unique challenges associated with Latin America and Brazil in the AI and automation space?
The biggest obstacle is fragmentation — technical, regulatory, and infrastructural. In most LatAm countries, financial data isn’t standardised, and the plumbing beneath the surface wasn’t built for AI. So, training reliable models becomes expensive, slow, and messy.
On the policy side, privacy laws and AI governance frameworks are still maturing. There’s also a lack of clarity around what’s allowed, especially when it comes to automated decision-making or algorithmic bias.
Even in Brazil, which is ahead of the curve, access to cloud infrastructure and stable internet varies drastically by region. So while innovation is thriving in urban hubs, scaling that innovation nationwide — or across borders — remains a work in progress.
What are your plans for the future?
We’re expanding our teams and products in the United States, Brazil and Mexico. We’re consolidating our presence in the US, where we see a strong opportunity for American banks and corporations that need to operate financially with Latin America, and Prometeo has become a key player to provide them with the financial connectivity they need. Everything we do is rooted in infrastructure. We’re building the foundation for autonomous finance in the Americas.
Final thoughts
Latin America is leapfrogging. The region has all the ingredients to lead the future of finance: massive adoption of digital tools, strong regulatory momentum, and growing AI capability.
At Prometeo, we believe the next big shift won’t come from new apps or features, but from a new type of user: AI agents that understand and navigate financial systems, just like humans do.
We’re building the infrastructure to support that evolution across Latin America, the US, and beyond.
