Fintech
Argentine FinTech Tapi Raises $22M as It Expands Into Mexico
Payment processor based in Argentina Caps reportedly raised $22 million in new funding.
The company will use the Series A funding to help fuel its expansion into Mexico, co-founder/CEO Thomas Mindlin he said in an interview with Bloomberg News interview Friday (July 12).
According to the report, Tapi processes payments for large Latin American consumer platforms such as Mercado Pago and cryptocurrency exchange Lemon. The company expects to process about $400 million in payments this year across the five countries it operates in, four times the amount it handled last year.
Tapi raised $9 million in a seed funding round in 2022. Mindlin told Bloomberg that he expects Mexico to become the company’s fastest-growing market in the next two years.
“We will partner with FinTechs that are going to grow more, continue to do more financial inclusion and transform cash payments into digital payments, so Mexico is very important to us,” Mindlin said. “I would say in a year we will have 80% of the bankable population in Mexico working with our infrastructure.”
Bloomberg says Mindlin declined to comment on the valuation of his company, which has about 70 employees, mostly in Argentina. He added that total payments volume is expected to grow fivefold by the end of the year, to 10 million transactions a month.
The report noted that the name Tapi is a portmanteau of Mindlin’s first startup project, a digital wallet called TAP, and API (Application Programming Interface), the technology that powers his current company’s system.
PYMNTS examined the digital payments landscape in Mexico as part of that country’s edition of the “Global Digital Shopping Index 2024”, a series of reports commissioned by Visa Acceptance Solutions to explore which digital capabilities are resonating most in different corners of the globe.
This report found that almost half of consumers shop in-store without using any digital shopping features. Not because they prefer it that way. Rather, it’s because merchants in Mexico aren’t offering the features shoppers want, with 62% of consumers looking for digital features that aren’t yet available there.
The reason why shoppers in Mexico want digital shopping features is because they often allow them to save money and improve their overall in-store experience.
In other words, just as PYMNTS Intelligence discovered when examining consumer behavior in Brazil, the U.K., the U.S. and elsewhere, these local shoppers also like to upgrade their physical shopping adventures with digital capabilities — an otherwise known as Click-and-Mortar™ shopping.
See more in: Argentina, Financial Technology, financing, fundraiser, Latin America, Mexico, News, Payment Processors, PYMNTS News, Caps, Thomas Mindlin, What’s new