Dive Brief:

• Visa plans to acquire a majority stake in Prosa, a payments processor in Mexico that handles 10 billion transactions annually, the U.S. card giant said in a press release Friday.
• Existing shareholders, including the banks Banorte, HSBC Mexico, Invex, Santander Mexico, Scotiabank Mexico and Banjército, will hold the minority stake, according to the release.
• While the purchase is still subject to regulatory approvals, Visa expects to close the transaction in the second half of next year, the company said in the release. The company didn’t provide the financial terms of the deal and a spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Dive Insight:

San Francisco-based Visa has actively engaged in building out its international network over the past decade, and the company’s new chief executive, Ryan McInerney, is likely to continue spearheading that effort, given his past work building the brand globally. He was promoted to the top post last year and became CEO in February.

In June, Visa said it planned to buy the Brazilian digital card-issuing and banking services company Pismo for $1 billion in cash, according to a press release, noting the acquisition would help extend its digital payments and banking services internationally.

The well-funded card network expects that the Prosa acquisition will help accelerate the digitization of payments in Mexico. Visa had $16.3 billion in cash and cash equivalents as of the end of September, according to its annual filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission last month.

Despite new backing from Visa, Prosa will continue to operate as an independent company with its own technology framework, brand-agnostic offering and current management team, the release said.

For Visa, the transaction will allow for continuing to build out its international network of networks and will also let the company sell services, such as tokenized payments and data services, through Prosa, the release said.

“With the enhanced technology infrastructure provided by Visa’s global payments network, we are setting the groundwork to develop new, innovative ways to pay and be paid for consumers and small businesses alike alongside local issuers and acquirers in Mexico,” Visa’s regional president for Latin America and the Caribbean, Eduardo Coello, said in the release.