Daniela Binatti, Co-Founder and CTO at Pismo, was a panellist at CEO Conference Brazil 2023, held by BTG Pactual bank. This symposium brings together financial market leaders to discuss political, economic, and technological trends transforming the investment industry.
Daniela joined the panel “Financial Infrastructure and Banking: New Technologies Challenging Traditional Markets.” She debated how emerging financial services technologies are changing the path in an industry still supported by legacy systems.
Pablo de Mello Leonardo, COO of the payment network company CloudWalk, and Vinicius Roveda, CEO of the ERP provider Conta Azul, also participated in the conversation. Marcos Xavier, Associate Partner at BTG Pactual, mediated the session.
Technology and regulation drive new players
In the past few years, two factors enabled the emergence of innovative financial services: the availability of new technologies and significant changes in the regulatory environment.
This combined move led, for example, to a range of new digital banks rising in the last decade. However, in many cases, the innovation happened only on the presentation layer, which ran on outdated infrastructure.
Daniela says she founded Pismo with three partners to solve this contradiction by providing next-generation infrastructure for banks and fintech companies.
“We have a cloud-native platform comprising microservices that connect with this legacy infrastructure via APIs. So banks and fintech companies can build new products quickly while ensuring high levels of security and availability.”
She adds that years ago, financial institutions had to decide between building a banking system from scratch or buying an end-to-end solution. The first option required a lot of money and time, while the second didn’t allow the bank to differentiate easily from competitors. Pismo proposes an intermediary option that enables institutions to build their financial products quickly using APIs. So they control their product roadmap.
New technology aimed at end users
Daniela says specialisation is the key to great results when acting as a technology provider. That’s why Pismo offers only the infrastructure layer to customers. She believes that besides new technologies, many other aspects can benefit the end user:
“When you deliver modern infrastructure to a financial institution, it can provide unique products to its customers. Besides making it easier to build these products, modern platforms have lower operational costs than traditional ones. This means decreased fees, so the end user is the main beneficiary.”
Looking at the future
Regarding hot trends in financial services like embedded finance and open finance, Daniela says specialised players tend to drive innovation.
“The construction of an ecosystem with several specialist companies will allow the offering of sophisticated, elaborate, and easy-to-use financial products,” she concludes.
