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One of them is Alex Pereira, founder and CEO of PMI (Payments Made Intelligent), who identified early on that friction in international payments was not an isolated failure, but a symptom of a global system that no longer responded to the needs of companies and talent in a remote, digital and borderless world.
PMI is a platform that allows global companies and workers to send and receive money between countries quickly, transparently and aligned with the digital age. It combines a network of local banks and partners with modern technology. Its purpose is as clear as it is ambitious: to make paying and collecting abroad as simple as making a local transfer, rethinking systems that had had limited changes for years.
From Hollywood sets to the fintech world
His story does not begin in technology or finance, but behind the scenes in Hollywood. After studying communications at Boston University, Alex Pereira moved to Los Angeles and started in the mailroom of a major talent agency, just as Hollywood was beginning to turn its attention to Latin America for its creative talent and more competitive costs.
Pereira became a natural bridge between the logic of the studies and Latin American realities. That role led him to found Paraíso Pictures, from where he produced content for industry giants, coordinated shoots in multiple countries and ensured the orderly and timely payment of teams distributed throughout the region, an often underestimated part of the process that changed his relationship with the industry.
Without yet speaking in terms of “fintech”, I was already working on challenges related to moving money between different jurisdictions: transferring funds efficiently across different countries. That was where the seed of what is today PMI was planted.
While the world was just beginning to talk about cross-border digital payments and borderless banking, Pereira developed an internal system designed to streamline contracting and payment processes. When he sold his production company’s content catalog, he made a strategic decision that defined his next entrepreneurial stage: he gave up the creative side, but kept the knowledge and payment technology.
That step marked the beginning of a larger-scale mission. In 2019 he launched PMI with an idea that at the time seemed against the grain.
The pandemic accelerated a change that was already underway. As many companies improvised remote models and redefined their payroll and payment processes, PMI already had the infrastructure, local partners and operational understanding necessary to process payments in multiple countries without relying on traditional rails or endless chains of intermediaries, and the number of people, companies and countries connected to the platform multiplied.
Alex Pereira’s leadership style is rooted in his own journey. Before leading teams, he built payment flows, attended support chats, and became certified in regulatory compliance. That experience keeps him close to the details and drives him to encourage anyone on the team to try new tools if they can improve the customer experience.
The company uses AI to automate onboarding, organize legal and compliance documents, and analyze a broad user base for fraud prevention and compliance purposes. The technology is also present in daily operations and, in some international payments, PMI uses stablecoins as a middle rail. For the user, everything happens in pesos or dollars, but along the way a backed digital dollar circulates, with the aim of speeding up times and managing costs without requiring direct interaction with crypto assets.
Pereira defines PMI as “the fintech behind fintechs and banks”, an additional layer of intermediation within an infrastructure that connects currencies, countries and systems that were never designed to operate in real time. Today, the platform supports a high volume of payments and works with a broad enterprise customer base. Still, the key metric within the company is not volume, but how close the international payment experience is to being as seamless as a local transfer.
That approach is reflected in PMI Business, the product designed to become the HUB where a company centralizes multi-currency accounts, card payments, local collections and reconciliation in a single control panel.
The battle is not for the international market, but for the role of orchestrator of the new multinational payments system. If Pereira’s bet turns out to be correct, PMI will no longer be seen simply as a fintech born in Latin America and will operate as a global infrastructure, as daily and transparent as instant domestic transfers are today.
When paying abroad is as simple as sending a SPEI, the system will have changed. And if Pereira’s vision continues to advance, PMI will be one of the pieces that helps make that simplicity possible.
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