ProntoPaga’s Peru chief named among Forbes’ most powerful women

Micha Calmet, Country Manager of ProntoPaga in Peru, has been named to Forbes Peru’s 2026 list of the 50 Most Powerful Women in the country – recognition that, read alongside the fintech’s actual performance numbers, doubles as a useful case study in how payments infrastructure has become one of the quieter growth stories behind Peru’s iGaming boom.

A market entry that outran its own projections

ProntoPaga, a Chilean payments fintech, entered Peru in 2024, but 2025 was its first full year of operation there – and the results beat the company’s own forecasts by a wide margin. The company processed roughly $650m in payments, more than 300 per cent above its original projection, with local headcount growing from seven or eight people to over 30 across the year. Peru has become disproportionately important to ProntoPaga’s broader regional business: the market now accounts for roughly a third of the fintech’s total processed volume and more than half of its regional transaction count, even though the company also operates in Chile (via MACH and MercadoPago) and Ecuador (via PayPhone).

The single biggest driver of that growth has been ProntoPaga’s alliance with Yape, the Peruvian digital wallet with more than 18 million users, which accounted for 55 per cent of ProntoPaga’s transaction volume in 2025. The partnership deepened last year with the integration of “Yape On File” and “Yape One Shot” – tools enabling one-click recurring payments and frictionless single-transaction approvals – and ProntoPaga says it was the first payment services provider to bring Yape On File specifically into Peru’s online entertainment vertical, a claim Calmet has highlighted as a point of technical differentiation.

Roughly 60 per cent of ProntoPaga’s Peru portfolio is concentrated in entertainment, sports betting and online gaming, and the company has set an aggressive near-term target of processing payments for 60-70 per cent of Peru’s ten largest betting operators by the end of the first quarter – up from four currently. For an industry where instant payouts, security and embedded, low-friction checkout are increasingly what operators compete on when choosing a payments partner, that kind of concentrated specialisation is itself a competitive position.

What’s next: doubling down, and diversifying

For 2026, ProntoPaga is projecting roughly $1.2bn in processed volume – close to double 2025’s figure – while also working to extend its infrastructure beyond gaming into e-commerce and other digital services, including a planned integration with Plin, Peru’s other major interoperable digital wallet, alongside continued work with BCP on additional payment products. Calmet has described the pace of Yape adoption specifically as faster than the company anticipated, suggesting Peru’s underlying digital-payments infrastructure is maturing quickly enough to support the kind of embedded, high-volume gaming transactions operators need as the licensed market scales.

The recognition, in context

Forbes Peru’s Most Powerful Women list, now in its fourth-plus year, is organised alphabetically rather than ranked, with honorees selected by the outlet’s editorial team across categories the magazine describes as hard power (resources managed), dynamic power (audience and industry influence) and soft power (impact on closing structural gaps). This year’s list spans sectors from mining technology to gastronomy to academia, and Calmet’s inclusion places Peru’s iGaming payments infrastructure – a B2B, largely behind-the-scenes layer of the industry – alongside far more consumer-visible business leaders, a signal of how central payments specialists have become to the commercial story of Peru’s regulated gaming market as it continues to formalise.

Calmet’s path to the role draws on more than 18 years in business development, marketing and commercial growth, including leadership positions at retail group Cencosud, La Calera, AsesoresB24 and fintech PayCash – a background spanning retail, consumer goods and financial technology that she’s carried into leading ProntoPaga’s regional expansion across Latin America.