LatamList – JP Morgan recently acquired a minority stake in Brazilian fintech startup FitBank. Apart from the capital injection, the company entered into a strategic partnership to serve JP Morgan and its corporate clients. However, details of the investment were not disclosed. The money will be used to expand to new countries in Latin America.
FitBank, founded in 2015 by Otavio Farah, Mauricio Zaragoza, and Rener Menezes, describes itself as the largest open banking platform in Brazil, providing a white-label platform that lets banks and fintechs offer bill payment, online treasury, banking, financial management, transfers, and escrow services.
“The system is intelligent, it knows what happens behind each transaction. As a certain event happens, it triggers a trigger for another payment,” said Otavio Farah, the President of FitBank.
According to local news site Valor, roughly 96 clients use its technology for 180,000 accounts. In 2019, it traded more than $372M (R$2B).
“The strategic investment in FitBank is an important addition to sustaining and growing our leadership in wholesale payments within Latin America,” said Renata Vilanova Lobo, the Head of Wholesale Payments at JP Morgan in Brazil, who will be joining the FitBank board.
In 2017, after two years of operation, the company attracted the first investors. After leaving XP Investimentos, Eduardo Glitz, Marcelo Maisonnave, and Pedro Englert decided to invest $502K (R$2.7M) in the purchase of 24.5% of capital in the startup.
