The Stablecoin Card Question in LATAM Isn't "Which Country" — It's "Which Issuer"

Most of the public conversation about stablecoin cards in Latin America is a conversation about jurisdictions. Which country legislates first. Which central bank publishes the framework that finally makes everything legible.

That conversation matters. But if you are actually trying to ship a card — one that lets a wallet holder in São Paulo or Buenos Aires spend a stablecoin balance at a real merchant — the binding constraint usually shows up somewhere else. It shows up in whether an issuing partner will sponsor your BIN, whether their compliance desk will carry a crypto-adjacent programme, and whether their stack can go live inside your runway.

Companies, not legislatures, make those decisions. And several of them have made moves worth reading.

Signal 1: A funding round that states where the product is going

In January 2026, Pomelo announced a $55M Series C co-led by Kaszek and Insight Partners, with participation from Index Ventures, Adams Street Partners, S32, Endeavor Catalyst, monashees and TQ Ventures. Founded in 2021, the company has raised $160M to date.

The headline number matters less than what the company said the money is for. In its own announcement, the company states the capital will "expand its portfolio of globally scalable products—including a stablecoin-native global card, payment tokenization, and AI-powered chargeback management—and develop new business units related to modern payment solutions."

A term sheet is not a roadmap, and a roadmap is not a shipped product. But a Series C is a public, underwritten statement about where a company intends to point its engineering for the next few years. When an issuer names a stablecoin card as one of the products the capital is for, that is information you can act on today.

One more detail that matters if you are mapping the compliance path rather than just the API: Pomelo is authorised by the Brazilian Central Bank as a payment institution, as both an electronic money issuer and a postpaid payment-instrument issuer.

Signal 2: Two companies that skip the local stack entirely

Pomelo's approach assumes you want a partner with local BIN sponsorship in-market. Two other companies are betting that a lot of programmes won't need that at all.

Bridge — Stripe's stablecoin infrastructure platform, acquired by Stripe in February 2025 for roughly $1.1B — has partnered with Visa on a programmable stablecoin-linked card product. As of Visa's March 2026 announcement, the programme was live in 18 countries, with a stated plan (not a completed rollout) to reach over 100 countries across Europe, Asia Pacific, Africa and the Middle East by the end of 2026. Developers issue Visa cards funded directly by stablecoin balances through a single API; through Bridge's partnership with Lead Bank, those card transactions can be settled onchain with Visa.

Rain, a global stablecoin card infrastructure provider, announced a $250M Series C in January 2026 at a valuation of roughly $1.95B. It reports over 200 partners and says its cards are accepted in more than 150 countries, including remittance players such as Western Union.

Neither company is a licensed regional BIN sponsor in the way Pomelo, Dock or Evertec are — they're infrastructure overlays, built for programmes centred on stablecoin spend rather than full local banking infrastructure. That's a different question than "which issuer sponsors my BIN in Brazil": it's "do I need a BIN sponsor at all, or a rail that already runs on Visa's network." Worth confirming current country-by-country coverage directly with either company before scoping a programme around them.

Signal 3: A volume number that quietly changed meaning — and a disclosure worth reading closely

Evertec is a large processor in this region. None of what follows makes 10 billion a bad number, and it doesn't make Evertec a bad candidate. It makes both figures — the volume and the incident — things you read together rather than in isolation.

Evertec's Q2 2026 release states that its electronic payment networks in Puerto Rico process over ten billion transactions annually. That figure sits on top of a business that has been consolidating: Evertec completed its acquisition of a controlling stake in Tecnobank in October 2025, and announced the Dimensa acquisition (R$950 million, roughly $181 million at the time) in February 2026, subject to regulatory approval. It also signed a multi-year agreement with Transbank in Chile, expected to contribute to revenue from 2027.

The second item is more recent. In a Form 8-K filed on June 9, 2026, Evertec disclosed that on May 13, 2026 it had learned of potential unauthorized access to customer data through a third-party support platform. The filing states that an unauthorized party obtained certain financial institution clients' information related to transaction records, payment card numbers of some customers and, in some instances, customer names and contact information. It states that the incident primarily impacted Evertec's financial institution clients in Puerto Rico and their respective customers, without naming them. The filing also states that the company has not yet determined the full impact of the incident, and that it expects to incur investigation and remediation expenses.

The company's Q2 2026 net income fell to $5.4M from $40.5M a year earlier, a decline it attributed in part to non-recurring items including impairment charges from exiting an equity-method investment and costs related to cybersecurity incident response and remediation.

The other axis is breadth and certification: operations across 26 Latin American countries, all of the Visa Ready issuing certifications, and membership of Mastercard's Network Enablement Partner programme.

Signal 4: Integration as the product

Dock, based in São Paulo, raised $110M at a valuation of over $1.5B in 2022. What defines its position is less any single product than how the products are joined up.

Through its 2021 acquisition of Cacao, Dock combines card issuing, acquiring and BaaS capabilities on a single integrated platform — a combination Dock describes as one no other Brazilian provider offers. Its platform also incorporates BPP, a Brazilian BaaS provider, and Muxi, which specialises in POS and e-commerce transaction capture and was acquired by Dock's predecessor, Conductor.

For a team standing up a card programme, integration is not a matter of taste. Every extra vendor in the chain is another contract, another integration, and another party that has to independently agree to carry a crypto-adjacent programme. Fewer counterparties is a structural advantage — and it is specifically what Dock is offering.

Five moves, two different theories of entry

Read together, these aren't five versions of the same story. They point to two different theories of how to enter this market.

One theory says: partner with a company that holds a local licence, sponsors your BIN, and understands the market in-country — Pomelo, Dock and Evertec each make that case differently (speed, depth, scale). The other theory says: skip the local stack and plug into a rail that's already running on Visa's network globally — which is the bet Bridge and Rain are each making, from different starting points.

Which of them fits your situation depends on variables only you can weigh: which market you enter first, how fast you need to be live, how much compliance work you can carry in-house, and what your volumes look like in year one.

Working that through — provider by provider, market by market, including the six others we looked at beyond these five — is what our latest research on LATAM card issuing does.

If you're working on this

The Evertec disclosure above is a good example of why this matters: it's the kind of thing that's easy to miss if you're comparing providers off their own marketing pages. The full report applies the same scrutiny to all eleven.

If you are evaluating issuing partners in Latin America, or trying to work out whether a stablecoin programme can clear a sponsor's compliance desk, the full report is here: Card Issuing Partner Research — Latin America

A note on sources. Figures are as of September 2026, drawn from company announcements, public filings and regulatory disclosures: Pomelo's Series C announcement (20 January 2026) and its Brazilian regulatory status; Visa's March 2026 announcement on the Bridge partnership; Rain's Series C disclosure (January 2026); Evertec's acquisition, transaction-volume and certification disclosures, and its SEC Form 8-K filing (June 9, 2026) regarding the May 2026 security incident and related Q2 2026 earnings impact; Dock's disclosed valuation, capital raised and acquisitions. Transaction-volume figures are as reported and are not restated for acquisition accounting. Chaintech sells research covering some of the providers discussed above. Nothing here constitutes legal or financial advice.