Plata, founded by former Tinkoff employees, is exploring the Brazilian market

The fintech startup Plata, founded by former top executives of the Russian bank Tinkoff, plans to continue its international expansion. Plata is exploring the Brazilian market, according to Anton Tarasenko, the company’s director of business platforms and a member of the founding team, who spoke during the LatAm Insights webinar.

During his presentation, Tarasenko outlined the main criteria Plata uses to assess a market’s attractiveness. First, Plata is interested in countries with large populations: it’s easier to scale a business there. Second, these must be unregulated markets: Plata’s main product is credit cards, and interest rates on them must not be regulated by the government. Third, there should be no monopolistic competitor in the market: the presence of such a competitor indirectly indicates problems with regulation or protectionism.

According to Tarasenko, Plata “is actually looking at Brazil,” despite the fact that there is a strong local player there—Nubank. “To be honest, that scares us a lot. Because you have to enter that market with a very strong product,” he admitted.

In addition, Tarasenko named Argentina and Peru among the interesting countries in the Plata region.

Oninvest sent a request for comment to Plata.

Plata was launched in 2023 by Neri Tollardo, Alexander Bro, and Danil Anisimov, all former employees of the Russian bank Tinkoff. In the early stages, Tinkoff founder Oleg Tinkov and Baring Vostok founder Michael Calvey invested in the company. Together with Plata’s top executives and third-party investors, these business partners have collectively invested $300 million. Calvi and Tinkov are involved in developing Plata’s strategy and help coordinate relations with investors and regulators, but they do not handle operational processes. Plata has obtained licenses in Mexico and Colombia and has become Mexico’s largest digital bank, valued at $5 billion during its latest funding round. This is exactly half of the valuation that Tinkov hopes to achieve during Plata’s future IPO.

According to the IMARC research group, Mexico’s fintech market reached $22.5 billion in 2025 and could grow to $67.2 billion by 2034. Its main driver is the realization of pent-up demand for credit in Mexico, a country of 130 million people, where more than half the population works in the informal sector.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor