BNamericas spoke with Jorge Iglesias, CEO of Topaz, the financial technology and core banking company of Brazil’s multinational Stefanini, about the company’s strategy, the different stages of digitalization in Latin America, instant payments and the sovereignty risks associated with the use of artificial intelligence.
Founded 37 years ago, it is part of the Brazilian group and currently serves more than 300 financial institutions in 25 countries, including tier 1 and tier 2 banks, credit unions, fintechs and fully digital banks. The company operates under the full bank platform concept and has developed a single platform, Topaz One, which covers everything from digital onboarding and physical and digital channels to core banking, payments and treasury.
BNamericas: To start, can you give an overview of Topaz’s operation — number of clients, geographic footprint, business model?
Iglesias: Topaz has been around for 37 years. We’re a technology and products company that builds solutions to accelerate the digitalization of the financial sector. Today we have more than 300 financial institutions in 25 countries using our technologies, and we work under a full bank platform concept: a 360-degree view of everything a bank needs to digitalize, from fully digital origination and onboarding, physical and digital channels–mobile, internet banking–and the security of that process, to the back-end, with core banking products, payments [PIX, SPB, digital wallets] and treasury and investment.
We serve a wide range of institutions: tier 1 and tier 2 banks, credit unions, fintechs and fully digital banks with no branches. That gives us a competitive edge. We work on a single platform, Topaz One, and much of what we develop for Brazil we can take to Mexico, Colombia, Uruguay or Argentina, and vice versa. Brazil is well ahead of the other countries, and that becomes a benchmark within the market.
We believe finance is increasingly borderless. Eight or ten years ago, having a global account was unthinkable; today it’s simple. Rappi, for example, bought a financial institution in Colombia and is already a superapp — the customer orders food, but can also check their balance, pay bills and get a loan, while the restaurant selling through the app receives advances and credit.
Banco Mercantil, in Brazil, with Mercantil Mais, brings non-financial services such as insurance and health plans. We’re bringing both as highlights to Febraban Tech [Latin America’s leading financial-sector technology and innovation event, organized by Febraban, which starts on August 24 in São Paulo].
Over the next five to ten years, the relationship between customers and institutions will stop being purely financial and start covering wellbeing more broadly, with AI-driven hyperpersonalization.
BNamericas: There’s still a strong gap in financial digitalization between countries in the region. What’s moving that agenda in each market?
Iglesias: It varies a lot. In Guatemala, for example, the market is still pursuing basic technology modernization; there’s no talk yet of digitalizing processes. Mexico has already gone through that stage and is building complete digital journeys. Each country is at its own moment, and that’s directly tied to the size of its economy: larger countries, such as Mexico, Colombia and Argentina, have already modernized their back-ends and are pursuing digital journeys to expand financial inclusion. Smaller countries, such as Guatemala, El Salvador and Ecuador, are still in transformation, but they’ll get there.
One important point: to use artificial intelligence for real, you need to be digitalized. If the infrastructure hasn’t been modernized–with organized data, clear processes and controls–AI stays limited to isolated initiatives and never transforms the operation as a whole. Since AI is evolving so fast, that’s going to trigger a big wave of infrastructure modernization in the region. And that’s also a major opportunity for Topaz.
BNamericas: On instant payments: CoDi (Cobro Digital), in Mexico, didn’t take off as expected; now Colombia is launching Bre-B, inspired by PIX. How do you assess that trend across different markets?
Iglesias: Argentina had Pagos 2.0, which also didn’t move forward; Mexico, Panama and Peru had similar initiatives. The difference lies in public infrastructure. In several countries, each institution built its own infrastructure and only later sought interconnection–incentives end up diverging and the model doesn’t take off. Brazil’s big success was having the central bank build the core infrastructure so everything could run on it.
Colombia did the same: the key registry belongs to the government, just as in Brazil, and that guarantees interoperability–we took part in that effort alongside Colombian regulators.
Other countries keep separate registries with key-sharing between them, which looks simple but is vital for the model to evolve.
PIX was born as a peer-to-peer transfer tool and is now a payments powerhouse; Colombia, like Paraguay, which also has a centralized-registry model, is still at the transfer stage, not yet at payments proper.
Colombia took advantage of clearing houses that already existed, the way Brazil did in the days of TED and DOC, and made them run 24 hours a day. The difference is that Brazil’s central bank was always more than a regulator: it also provided infrastructure and pathways.
Someone leading the Colombian project told me the country doesn’t have, at home, a culture of being a technology provider–they’re much more regulators, and running an operation inside the central bank would be a major cultural shift. That evolution, from regulator to enabler, should be on the agenda for other central banks in the region.
BNamericas: Is it possible to envision a kind of regional “leapfrog,” with instant payment systems talking to each other across countries, including PIX being used outside Brazil?
Iglesias: Yes, Brazil’s central bank is already encouraging that interoperability–PIX already reaches Argentina and Uruguay, along with Chile. But it’s still a network enabler, not full integration: whoever receives money in another country generally needs an account in Brazil, so that journey still needs to be built. Innovation is built step by step, not all at once.
The bigger leap, in my view, will come with the digital currency, Drex. A stablecoin with one-to-one parity, not just another crypto asset. That’s when reconciliation, conversion and exchange-rate losses disappear and circulation becomes truly borderless. Since Brazilians are already highly digitalized, adoption tends to be exponential–nobody will want to buy foreign cash to travel anymore, they’ll simply pay in their own currency.
BNamericas: Given the recent election cycles in the region, does the agenda of new governments favor financial digitalization?
Iglesias: There’s no government today that doesn’t put technology on the agenda. That’s no longer optional, especially with AI now entering the picture as a sovereignty issue. Technology adoption is an irreversible trend, even if the intensity varies from government to government.
BNamericas: But is regulation keeping up with that trend?
Iglesias: Brazil went through a period of regulatory opening to broaden competition, with fintechs, and now we’re seeing a slight tightening, largely because of fraud–that’s part of the model’s maturing, because innovation is an evolving process, not a static one, and legislation needs to keep pace.
Brazil’s central bank stands out for continuously adjusting regulation, without being tied to past decisions. In other countries, basic questions are still being debated, such as specific licenses for fintechs or credit companies, and there are places where you still need to sign paper in person to open an account.
Countries that fall behind tend to lose competitiveness and appeal for future investment.
Paraguay is a good example of a turnaround: it used to be a more stagnant country, and today, with clearer laws and defined incentives, it’s attracting strong investment. I was there two weeks ago, and the transformation in Asunción is visible — tall buildings where there used to be only low-rise construction, new industries arriving, banks modernizing as the flow of money increases. The economy is driving the need for technology.
BNamericas: Is the geopolitical debate around technology — data sovereignty, cloud control — in any way slowing the pace of financial-sector digitalization?
Iglesias: That’s the million-dollar question, and I don’t have a ready answer. There’s a real debate around big tech, both American and Chinese: to make the most of artificial intelligence, which they own, you need to feed it data. At the end of the day, you’re handing over data to get something back later.
A lot of that information is part of a company’s own business strategy, and the guarantees are buried in the fine print of a contract.
I can’t say how much that might mean, in the future, in terms of lost sovereignty for a country, a company or an entire sector. It’s still too new a space in the technology market for anyone to be certain.
BNamericas: There’s talk of some attempts to play down the issue, such as repatriating data to local data centers, or stricter encryption requirements, like in the UK. Is that a viable path, or is it not enough?
Iglesias: It’s a debate that needs to stay open and ongoing, because AI models keep changing all the time. But this topic is already on the agenda in conversations with the financial sector, also tied to fraud and to the risk of weakening the financial system’s own infrastructure.
(This content was originally written in Portuguese)