Open finance, agentic banking, and cross-border payments collide as Prometeo connects 7,500+ financial institutions through a single API and pushes into the US market with account verification covering 85% of American bank accounts. Tedd Huff, Founder and CEO of fintech advisory firm Voalyre and founder of Fintech Confidential, sits down with Ximena Aleman, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Prometeo, to break down what it takes to build financial infrastructure across fragmented markets. Tedd brings his own client-facing perspective on the US-to-Latin America corridor, which he identifies as the largest for B2B payments in the world, and a problem set he works on directly. Ximena brings credentials that speak for themselves: backing from PayPal Ventures, Samsung Next, and Antler, recognition as a top 100 woman in fintech in 2024, and a fresh Nacha preferred partner designation for account validation and open banking announced on April 15.

The core problem is one Tedd sees across Voalyre's advisory work: global trade has accelerated, expectations for real-time settlement have compressed from minutes to milliseconds, and the infrastructure connecting countries was designed for local scale. Tedd points out something that often gets overlooked; the sheer volume of transaction traffic flowing from Latin America into the US, not just the other direction. Most people default to thinking about outflows and diaspora remittances, but the inbound corridor appears to be just as massive. Ximena confirms the structural issue from the other side: each of the 30 countries Prometeo operates in speaks its own banking language, with different formats, rules, and behaviors. That fragmentation creates inefficiency every time systems need to work together.

Tedd sharpens the US side of this with a line he says gets repeated across his payments network: the US is great at creating new ways to move money and terrible at getting rid of the old ones. Without government mandates to retire legacy rails, they stack. Every rail has its own rules, timing, and infrastructure. He calls normalizing all of it exhausting, and that framing sets up why Prometeo's standardization experience matters. Ximena adds the uncomfortable observation that the US banking system, once you look past the credit card rails from Visa and Mastercard, may feel mediocre from an infrastructure standpoint. Tedd agrees and extends it: the US system itself is mature, but the underlying technology may be overly mature, meaning at the end of its useful life, which introduces its own problems for speed, accuracy, and the number of players required to move a single payment.

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Prometeo's answer is standardization. Five years of connecting Latin American institutions taught the team how to strip noise from data, identify what must be present in a normalized view, and build a layer that works above fragmentation. That playbook is now being applied to the US. Their account verification product enables name matching across roughly 85% of US bank accounts, a capability Ximena says improves what is currently available. The Nacha preferred partner status, FDATA membership in January, and Name Match feature launch in December were sequenced deliberately. Tedd notes the US fragmentation goes deeper than most realize: at least 50 jurisdictions, each with their own layers of rules, and within those, hundreds more. No central repository of banking data ties it together.

Skeptics will ask why a company from Uruguay would be positioned to fix US banking infrastructure. The founding team came from outside the financial sector entirely. Ximena's background spans journalism, marketing, and an MBA in tech. Co-founder Rod came from cybersecurity, CTO Eduardo from API development. That outsider perspective let them focus on how banking should work rather than accepting how it already works. They shipped before regulators mandated standards and created gravity through execution.

The conversation turns sharply practical on agentic banking. Prometeo has built modules that allow AI agents to connect to their platform and operate bank accounts. Tedd draws an important distinction here: there is a difference between AI tools used inside fintech companies for things like integration, and AI agents that execute financial actions such as initiating payments or opening accounts. He pushes Ximena to clarify which path Prometeo is pursuing, and whether the distinction matters. Her answer is that it is symbiotic for Prometeo, but the highest value comes from enabling agents to operate their own bank accounts. The design principle is constraint: by limiting the scope of what a bank account can do, you limit what the agent can do. Every agent must be onboarded through a B2B relationship, so a company is always responsible for its agent's actions.

Tedd puts on what he calls his compliance hat and presses on how Prometeo handles auditability and liability when the entity initiating a transaction is a large language model. He identifies this as the number one concern he hears from financial institutions and agentic companies alike. Ximena explains that their system is fully auditable, with monitoring that tracks agent behavior and flags anomalies; the same controls that already exist for card transactions and human-initiated payments. Tedd frames the broader industry state as being in the "bookends" phase: strong tools exist on the information side, agents exist on the execution side, and the unresolved questions sit between them. He credits Prometeo's infrastructure as a serious attempt to connect both sides into something usable.

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The open banking pricing debate surfaces when Tedd references a conversation he had with David Glaser, CEO of Alloy, about JPMorgan charging for open banking access. Ximena argues that access to personal financial data should be partially free because it is a user right. Value-added APIs built on top of that data can and should be monetized, but if every API call carries a price, adoption drops. Tedd adds the pushback he hears directly from community banks and credit unions: they worry they are paying to give members the ability to share data with competitors. His own view leans altruistic; the data belongs to the user, not the institution. Ximena warns that fully pricing access entrenches the largest banks and creates a cycle where smaller institutions fall further behind.

Looking ahead, Ximena's prediction for when agentic banking becomes undeniable is specific: everyday payments used by ordinary people, her sister buying a school uniform for her daughter. On regulation, she sees CFPB 1033 as an accelerant for Prometeo's US expansion. Only about 2 to 3% of venture capital goes to female-led startups globally, and she calls it a systemic issue requiring systemic acknowledgment. Her advice for builders: a decision is not right or wrong, you make it right or wrong. Success comes from what you do after the decision, not from predicting the outcome.

For anyone building in payments, compliance, or cross-border infrastructure, this conversation pairs an advisory perspective grounded in US market realities with an operator's perspective forged across 30 fragmented Latin American banking systems, and makes the case that the arrival of AI agents makes that infrastructure more valuable than when they started building it.

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Five years of stitching together 30 fragmented Latin American banking systems gave Prometeo something no US-born competitor has: a standardization playbook built under the hardest possible conditions. Tedd Huff, Founder and CEO of fintech advisory firm Voalyre and founder of Fintech Confidential, sits down with Ximena Aleman, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Prometeo, to break down how that experience now translates into the American market. The company already verifies accounts across 85% of US bank accounts, earned Nacha preferred partner status in April, and joined FDATA in January; all sequenced to build credibility fast. Tedd pushes on why the US, with at least 50 jurisdictions and no central banking data repository, may need outside perspective more than it realizes. Ximena explains how Prometeo's constraint-based approach to agentic banking, open finance pricing, and cross-border infrastructure addresses problems US companies have been working around instead of solving. This conversation stays specific and moves fast.

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Ximena predicts that in the near future, APIs will no longer be integrated by human developers but by AI agents connecting directly to financial platforms. This shift reframes how open finance infrastructure gets adopted, turning documentation and onboarding into agent-readable protocols instead of developer workflows.

Customer expectations for payment settlement have compressed from 12 hours to minutes to seconds, and some institutions now define real-time as sub-millisecond processing. That behavioral acceleration is outpacing the ability of global banking infrastructure to upgrade, creating a widening gap between what users expect and what systems deliver.

The perception of a mature US financial system holds up only because Visa and Mastercard rails handle most consumer transactions, hiding the inefficiencies underneath bank-to-bank plumbing. Once you look past card payments, the gaps in American banking infrastructure mirror the same structural problems found across Latin American markets.

Across Latin America, financial inclusion expanded primarily through neobanks, wallets, and alternative payment methods rather than traditional credit card networks. That distinction matters for agentic banking because the infrastructure being upgraded for AI agent workflows sits at the bank account level, not on card rails.

Early investors repeatedly asked "infrastructure for what?" because the use cases available at the time, personal finance managers and credit scoring, seemed too small to justify the buildout. The arrival of agent-based AI years later validated the original bet that unknown future applications would make open finance infrastructure essential.

Every AI agent operating on Prometeo's platform must be onboarded through a verified B2B relationship, meaning no unaffiliated agent can open or access bank accounts independently. This corporate accountability layer assigns clear ownership of every agent action, making compliance and liability addressable at the company level rather than the model level.

The US already has functioning open banking through companies that built interoperability networks and proved market demand, validated by moves like Mastercard acquiring Finicity and Visa's attempted purchase of Plaid. Latin America's regulatory conversation around open banking is more advanced, but the US market adoption and commercial proof points are years ahead of anything in the region.

When a home market is too small to sustain a business, the only option is to build for an entire region from day one. That constraint may explain why companies from smaller economies tend to develop standardization skills faster; they have no choice but to solve for fragmentation across dozens of countries before they ever touch a larger market like the US. 

The same transaction monitoring systems that flag suspicious card activity, trigger SMS alerts, and verify purchases already apply to AI agents operating bank accounts on Prometeo's platform. Agent behavior surveillance is not a new security concept invented for AI; it is an extension of cybersecurity controls that financial infrastructure has used for years.

Prometeo's co-CEO argues that selling infrastructure and advocating for open finance policy cannot happen in sequence; they have to run at the same time. The company joined FDATA in January, earned Nacha preferred partner status in April, and launched Name Match in December, stacking credibility milestones that make the sales conversation easier while pushing regulators to move faster. 

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Everyone calls US financial infrastructure "mature" and moves on. Ximena Aleman points out that maturity looks different when you disaggregate the components; card rails from Visa and Mastercard perform well, but the bank-to-bank plumbing underneath has not kept pace. Pull apart your own payment stack and assess each layer independently, because calling the whole thing mature when only one layer actually works is how gaps stay hidden until they cost you money.

Uruguay alone was too narrow to sustain a business, so Prometeo built for 30 countries from the start, and that regional thinking is what made their US expansion possible. If you are building payment or verification infrastructure, stop designing for a single market and identify the highest-volume corridor your customers actually operate in. The US-to-Latin America B2B payments corridor is the largest in the world, and companies that build specifically for corridor-level demand will outperform those optimizing for one side of the border.

Career bankers know the system cold, but that deep familiarity can make broken workflows feel normal. Prometeo's founders came from journalism, cybersecurity, and API development, and that distance from the industry is what let them spot infrastructure gaps that insiders had stopped noticing. You don't have to be a banker to get it right; sometimes the best hire for your product team is someone who looks at your process and asks "why do you do it that way?" The fresh eyes cost nothing and the blind spots they catch could save you everything. 

Community banks and credit unions in the US push back on open banking because they see it as paying to hand their members' data to competitors. If you want those institutions on your platform, build a revenue stream into the adoption model so they benefit from participation rather than just bearing the cost. Ximena argues that partially free access for basic data rights paired with monetizable value-added APIs creates the driver smaller institutions need, while full pricing entrenches the JPMorgans and widens the gap.

Early pitches for Prometeo described API middleware, and investors kept asking "infrastructure for what?" because the middleware itself was not the story. Reframe your pitch around the outcomes and future capabilities your infrastructure unlocks, not around the plumbing you built. The companies that positioned themselves as enabling future use cases attracted patient capital; the ones that led with technical specs got stuck answering "so what?" in every meeting.

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Ximena Aleman is Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Prometeo, the largest open banking API platform in Latin America. Based in Uruguay, she started her career in journalism before moving into media, marketing, and sales leadership roles, including serving as Digital Publishing Director at EME and Marketing Head at Dentons Uruguay. She completed an MBA in Technology Business at Universidad ORT Uruguay and co-founded her first fintech startup in 2018. Ximena has built three fintech companies and has been a vocal advocate for open finance adoption across the Americas since before "open banking" was a recognized term in the region. She was named one of the Top 100 Women in FinTech in 2024, is a World Economic Forum Agenda Contributor, and has spoken at Money20/20, PYMNTS, and other major industry stages. Her published work on agentic banking frameworks has appeared in The Financial Revolutionist and American Banker.

Prometeo is an open finance infrastructure company that provides a single API for cross-border banking, connecting over 7,500 financial institutions across Latin America and the United States. Founded in 2018 and headquartered in Montevideo, Uruguay, the company enables account verification, account-to-account payments, bank data aggregation, and treasury operations through one standardized integration. Prometeo's agentic banking infrastructure allows AI agents to validate accounts, initiate payments, and manage treasury with built-in compliance controls and audit logging. The company is backed by PayPal Ventures, Samsung Next, Antler, DN Capital, COMETA, and Magma Partners. In April 2025, Prometeo was named a Nacha preferred partner for account validation and open banking in the US, and the company joined the Financial Data and Technology Association (FDATA) in January 2025. Prometeo operates across 11 countries with offices in Uruguay, Mexico, Peru, Chile, and Colombia.

Tedd Huff is CEO of Voalyre, a fintech advisory firm, and founder of Fintech Confidential. Over the past 25+ years, he has contributed to fintech startups as an Advisory Board Member, Co-Founder, and Chief Experience Officer, providing strategic and tactical direction for global companies. His expertise focuses on growth while delivering process improvements and user experience-driven value to simplify the complexity of payments. As host and executive producer of Fintech Confidential, Tedd brings entertaining and informative content focused on fintech industry insights, market trends, and stories from fintech leaders, thinkers, and doers. He is a recognized thought leader and U.S. Army veteran known for making complex financial technology approachable and engaging through his conversational storytelling style and deep understanding of global payments, cross-border transactions, and payment localization.

DD3 Media is a multimedia and marketing agency founded by Tedd Huff that specializes in content creation and production for the fintech and payments industry. As the production company behind Fintech Confidential, DD3 Media produces podcasts, live streams, video content, and onsite interview events that deliver engaging, educational content to global audiences. The company simplifies complex financial technology topics through storytelling and expert interviews, helping fintech companies and financial institutions build thought leadership across YouTube, podcast platforms, and social media. 

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