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Card economics
Issuers often pay more in network and scheme fees than they should, and rarely see it line by line. Novavista helps banks find where the leakage is, how to recover it, and how to keep it from coming back.
Payments infrastructure for Latin America.
Novavista connects banks, wallets, and fintechs in Latin America with the payment infrastructure they need, and helps infrastructure providers reach qualified demand in the region.
Panamá · San Francisco, CA
Issuers often pay more in network and scheme fees than they should, and rarely see it line by line. Novavista helps banks find where the leakage is, how to recover it, and how to keep it from coming back.
Rail selection, payout partners, and corridor unit economics for remittances, B2B, and ecommerce. Margin, FX, and pricing design built on the local rails that actually move money in the region: PIX in Brazil, Bre-B in Colombia, SPEI in Mexico, and the bank and wallet networks traditional remitters underuse.
USD wallets, on/off-ramps, and treasury flows on regulated infrastructure, with compliance designed in from day one. Stablecoins where they reduce settlement cost and time, not where they add regulatory complexity.
Bank-fintech partnerships, provider selection, and sell-side M&A for payments companies. For banks, that includes turning existing physical and digital networks into payout rails the fintech ecosystem will pay for.
Novavista's approach comes from running cross-border payments, not just advising on them. Before founding Novavista, Jaime Téllez ran US to Latin America corridor strategy at Remitly across 20+ countries.
Rails commoditize. The economics go to whoever owns liquidity, last mile, compliance, and distribution.
The US-to-LATAM corridor is no longer a race between Western Union, MoneyGram, and Remitly.
The interesting share moves are happening in corridor-specific challengers and the local infrastructure they ride on. Underwriting this market on a 2018 mental model is mispricing it.
The unlock for banks in cross-border is not launching new remittance products.
It is repositioning existing physical and digital infrastructure as monetizable payout rails for the fintech ecosystem, with proper API depth and pricing discipline. This is where most of the value sits, and where most banks are leaving it on the table.
Stablecoins matter in cross-border, but the value lands in settlement and treasury, not at the consumer layer.
Companies confusing the two are building solutions to problems users do not have.
Card programs in the region carry network costs few issuers have itemized.
Before renegotiating with the card brands, a bank should know exactly what it is paying for, line by line.
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Panama is a dollarized economy at the center of the region's financial system: a banking hub with direct corridor exposure to the Caribbean, Central America, and the Andean region, and a fast-growing fintech ecosystem.
Novavista operates from Panama, with roots in San Francisco, after years building payments and pricing expertise across San Francisco, São Paulo, and Santiago.
Novavista Fintech is a payments advisory and partnerships firm based in Panama, with roots in San Francisco.
It was founded by Jaime Téllez, a payments and partnerships operator with 15 years across Latin America and the US: corridor strategy at Remitly, distribution partnerships at Sonder and Barsala, and pricing and revenue management at LATAM Airlines. MBA from UC Berkeley Haas, engineering degrees from Universidad de los Andes.
Eight years in San Francisco, earlier in São Paulo and Santiago, now Panama City. English, Spanish, and Portuguese. Member of Cámara Fintech de Panamá.
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contact@novavistafintech.com