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Sebastián Salazar, co-founder and CEO of Chilean payments fintech ProntoPaga, used a recent interview to lay out the company’s next major market push: opening Argentina this semester with the country’s leading betting and gaming operators, ahead of a planned Mexico launch in the first half of 2027 – expansion he frames as central to a target of processing $10bn across the region in 2027, up from a projected $4bn this year.
From slot machines to payments infrastructure
Salazar’s path into fintech runs directly through the gambling industry rather than traditional banking. He previously chaired FIDEN, the Chilean association representing neighbourhood slot machine operators, before founding EstelarBet, an online casino platform, during the pandemic – an operation he still owns outright. Building EstelarBet exposed him directly to the gap he’d go on to build ProntoPaga around: the absence of fast, reliable, regulation-compliant payment infrastructure for Latin America’s iGaming industry.
He co-founded ProntoPaga with Evans Concha at the end of 2021, and the company turned profitable in October 2023 – after which, in Salazar’s own description, growth turned “explosive.” Gambling remains the core of that growth: by his own account, the vertical accounts for roughly 70 per cent of ProntoPaga’s transactions and 80 per cent of its revenue, even as the company works to diversify into e-commerce, healthcare and subscription payments.
What opening a new market actually requires
Salazar was candid about what expansion into new jurisdictions demands: securing individual licences market by market – already completed in Argentina, Peru and Chile – while navigating regulatory shifts that hit both sides of ProntoPaga’s business at once, since changes to online gambling rules and to fintech/payments regulation land on the company simultaneously in every market it operates in.
He described the company’s approach as “compliance first” – a framework applied in three directions at once: vetting the merchants ProntoPaga serves for their own regulatory compliance, holding the banks and financial partners it connects with to the same standard, and reporting directly to each country’s financial intelligence unit (Peru’s UIF, Chile’s UAF, and equivalents elsewhere), which in turn feed into GAFILAT, the regional body overseeing financial integrity across Latin America. For an industry where payment providers sit squarely inside anti-money-laundering scrutiny, that layered compliance structure functions as much as a commercial differentiator as a regulatory obligation.
The product edge behind the expansion: instant payouts
Central to ProntoPaga’s pitch to operators, Argentina included, is payout speed. Salazar credited the company with inventing the instant-withdrawal standard in the region – the “pronto paga” (pay promptly) the company is named for – moving from an initial 20-minute payout promise, at a time when competitors took 48 to 72 hours, to today’s sub-60-second commitment. For betting operators specifically, where a winning customer’s ability to withdraw funds quickly is a direct driver of trust and retention, that speed is arguably as important to Argentina’s incoming operator relationships as licensing itself.
A broader bet: from payments processor to regional neobank
The Argentina and Mexico pushes sit alongside ProntoPaga’s parallel move into consumer banking through YOL1, a neobank Salazar described as building on the company’s existing regional payments infrastructure rather than starting from scratch. His broader thesis is that digital-first financial behaviour – already visible in how Latin Americans shop through platforms like MercadoLibre or Temu – is inevitably coming to banking too, and that ProntoPaga’s regional footprint positions it to import proven European neobank practices into Latin American markets before larger international players do.
Salazar’s five-year outlook centres on two verticals specifically: continuing to lead in gaming and gambling payments processing, and building out digital infrastructure for cross-border trade between Latin America and Asia – a considerably broader ambition than the payments-processing business ProntoPaga started as, but one he frames as a natural extension of the same underlying infrastructure.
