Quick Answer:
Zappts, a Brazilian company that builds artificial intelligence agents for the financial sector, is weighing new offices in Chile, Colombia and Mexico during 2026, according to BNamericas. The move follows a regional deal the company signed with Visa; the report itself describes the decision as something Zappts is still evaluating.
Key Takeaways:
- Company and sector: Zappts is a Brazilian company that builds artificial intelligence agents for the financial sector, according to BNamericas.
- Countries mentioned: BNamericas reports Zappts is weighing new offices in Chile, Colombia and Mexico during 2026.
- Trigger for the move: The possible expansion follows a regional deal Zappts signed with Visa, per the same report.
- Stage of the decision: BNamericas' own headline uses the word mulls, meaning the decision is still under evaluation.
- Broader signal: The report is part of a wider wave of deals between payment networks and AI companies across Latin America's financial sector.
A Brazilian company built around artificial intelligence agents for banks and payment providers is looking beyond its home market. According to BNamericas, Zappts is weighing new offices in Chile, Colombia and Mexico during 2026, a move that follows a regional agreement the company signed with Visa. The report describes this as a decision the company is still evaluating, which matters for anyone tracking how AI adoption is spreading across Latin America's financial sector.
Whether you run a business in Houston, Miami, Bogota, or Mexico City, the underlying story is the same one playing out across industries right now: artificial intelligence is moving from an experiment inside a single company to a tool that shapes how entire regions do business with each other. A Brazilian AI company weighing three new countries because of a partnership with one of the world's largest payment networks is a small data point in a much larger shift, and it is worth understanding what BNamericas actually reports and what it signals for your own market.
What BNamericas Reported About Zappts and Visa
According to BNamericas, Zappts is a Brazilian company that specializes in building artificial intelligence agents for the financial sector, technology designed to support automated, conversational, and transactional functions that banks and payment companies are increasingly experimenting with. The report states that Zappts is weighing whether to open offices in three new countries, Chile, Colombia and Mexico, sometime during 2026.
BNamericas ties the possible expansion directly to a regional agreement Zappts recently signed with Visa. What is clear from the report itself is the choice of verb in its own headline: Zappts mulls new offices, language that signals evaluation rather than commitment.
That distinction is not a technicality. Business journalism regularly covers companies at the exploratory stage of a decision, because those early signals matter to markets, competitors, and potential partners. Readers, especially other businesses trying to read the direction of AI investment in Latin America, should treat weighing and confirming as two different stages of a company's decision process. One is an option on the table. The other is a commitment with a start date.
What "mulls" actually signals: When a news outlet reports that a company mulls or weighs a decision, it means the company is evaluating an option that has not been finalized. That is different from announces, launches, or confirms. For Zappts, the Chile, Colombia and Mexico offices described by BNamericas remain a possibility tied to a Visa partnership, not a locked commitment with a signed lease.
What AI Agents in Financial Services Actually Do
Setting aside the specifics of this one report, it is worth understanding the category of technology Zappts is reported to build. Artificial intelligence agents in financial services generally refer to software systems designed to carry out tasks on behalf of a bank, a payment provider, or a customer, tasks that previously required a person to click through several steps.
In practice, this can include a conversational interface that answers a customer's banking questions in natural language, a system that flags a suspicious transaction before it clears, or a tool that compares offers and initiates a payment once a set of conditions is met. The common thread across these use cases is that the software is not just displaying information, it is acting, within defined limits, on behalf of a person or a business.
Financial services has become one of the more active sectors for this kind of technology because the stakes and the structure both favor it: transactions are already digital, the rules that govern them are well defined, and the volume of repetitive decisions is enormous. A payment network the size of Visa has an obvious interest in supporting companies that build these kinds of agents, since more automated, AI assisted transactions on its network is a direct business benefit for the network itself. This is also why a partnership between a global payment network and a smaller, specialized AI company is a pattern worth watching generally: large financial infrastructure companies often do not build every specialized AI tool in house, and instead partner with companies that focus deeply on one type of problem.
Why partnerships like this tend to happen (general industry pattern, not a fact specific to Zappts confirmed in the BNamericas report):
- Fintech and AI companies often prefer entering a new country through a partnership with a network already established there
- A relationship with a global payment network can shorten some of the relationship building that new market entry usually requires
- Financial regulation varies by country, so companies typically evaluate expansion market by market rather than launching a full region at once
What This Means If You Run a Business in Houston or Latin America
For a business owner in Houston, Cypress, Monterrey, or Bogota, a report like this one is not really about Zappts or Visa specifically. It is a signal about where money and attention are flowing. Financial services companies are willing to fund and partner with AI agents that can research, compare, and even complete transactions without a person clicking every step. That same shift is happening in how customers find businesses like yours, and it is happening whether or not any single company's expansion plan ever becomes official.
The practical takeaway is not that every business needs to build its own AI agent. Most do not, and most never will. The practical takeaway is that the systems customers now rely on, from a bank's payment agent to a general purpose assistant answering a question about local services, all depend on the same underlying requirement: clear, structured, verifiable information about who you are, what you do, and where you operate. A company evaluating a multi-country expansion because of a payment network partnership and a small business deciding whether an AI tool can recommend it correctly are dealing with versions of the same problem, just at very different scales.
Just as a bank's AI agent can search, compare, and select a payment option on a customer's behalf, tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews are increasingly the ones searching, comparing, and recommending a business when someone asks a question such as who handles a given service nearby. If an AI system working on a customer's behalf cannot find clear, structured information about your business, it recommends a competitor whose information it can find.
This is the same principle behind Answer Engine Optimization, or AEO: structuring your website, your business data, and your online presence so that AI systems, whether they are financial agents, shopping agents, or search agents, can confidently identify and recommend your business. As more of the economy shifts toward AI systems acting on behalf of people and companies, being legible to those systems stops being optional. MerchandisePROS covers this work under its Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) service; see the full breakdown on the services page.
MerchandisePROS built a free audit specifically to answer one question: can AI tools find and recommend your business right now? The audit checks the structured data, citations, and answer ready content that AI agents rely on, and it returns a score along with a clear list of what is missing.
"AI agents are not just changing how banks move money. They are changing how customers find businesses in the first place. If an AI cannot find you, it recommends someone else."
Diego Medina F., Founder of MerchandisePROS
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Zappts?
According to BNamericas, Zappts is a Brazilian company that builds artificial intelligence agents for the financial sector. The report describes the company in the context of a regional deal it signed with Visa.
What are Zappts' expansion plans for Chile, Colombia and Mexico?
According to BNamericas, Zappts is weighing the possibility of opening offices in Chile, Colombia and Mexico during 2026. The report's headline uses the word mulls, meaning the decision is still under evaluation, tied to a regional deal the company signed with Visa.
What are AI agents in financial services?
AI agents in financial services are software systems that can carry out tasks such as answering customer questions, flagging suspicious transactions, or initiating payments on behalf of a bank, payment provider, or customer, generally within defined limits and rules.
How does this news relate to Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)?
It reflects the same broader shift AEO addresses: AI systems are increasingly acting on behalf of people and businesses, whether searching for a service provider or completing a financial transaction. Businesses that AI systems cannot find clearly risk being skipped in favor of competitors who are easier to identify.