Host Sasha Pilch sits down with Gaston Irigoyen, co-founder and CEO of Pomelo, to unpack why waiting a full year to launch a card program became the startup thesis behind one of Latin America’s fastest-growing fintech infrastructure companies. Drawing from his experience scaling fintech in LATAM, Gaston shares how infrastructure bottlenecks around issuing, processing, and credit card management pushed Pomelo to rethink how modern payments infrastructure should work.

The conversation explores how banks and fintechs across the region are racing to launch products faster, from co-branded cards and remittances to crypto-linked offerings, while moving away from legacy providers. Sasha and Gaston also dive into Latin America’s increasingly “multi-rail” payments ecosystem, where cash, cards, real-time payments like Pix, and stablecoins all coexist. They discuss stablecoin settlement, cross-border payments, and what early agentic commerce experiments reveal about the future of tokenized money movement and fraud prevention.

Subscribe for more conversations on fintech, payments, stablecoins, and the future of financial infrastructure.

Connect with the Hosts & Guest

Sasha Pilch: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sasha-pilch

Gaston Irigoyen: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gastonirigoyen/

About This Week in Fintech

This Week in Fintech’s Podcast is where the decision makers shaping the future of finance come to talk candidly about what’s working, what’s breaking, and what’s coming next in fintech. The show goes beyond headlines to unpack the real stories behind product decisions, regulation, and market shifts with leading founders, C-suite execs, and ecosystem veterans. This is your front-row seat to the people and ideas moving money into the future.