Zoop

Founded in 2013 by Fabiano Cruz and Rodrigo Miranda, Zoop is a Brazilian fintech company operating on a "fintech as a service" model to democratize financial services in Latin America. The company was fully acquired by iFood in June 2024, a process that began with investments from iFood's controller, Prosus, starting in 2018. Despite the acquisition, Zoop operates autonomously, similar to AWS within Amazon, allowing it to serve a diverse client base that includes major players like Nubank, OLX, and Itaú, in addition to iFood itself.

Zoop provides a white-label platform that enables businesses from any sector to create and offer their own branded financial products. Its core offering consists of APIs and SDKs that cover payments, Banking as a Service (BaaS), and credit. This allows partners to build their own digital banks, manage accounts, process both online and offline payments, and offer services such as prepaid cards, transfers, and bill payments under their own brand. The business model is structured like a lego set, where companies can select and integrate the specific financial services they need to enhance their customer relationships and create new revenue streams.

A significant milestone for the company was receiving authorization from the Central Bank of Brazil in November 2023 to operate as a Payment Institution (IP) and an electronic currency issuer (EMI). This license grants Zoop direct access to the Brazilian Payment System (SPB) and the Instant Payment System (SPI), enabling it to expand its portfolio with services like direct bill settlement and Pix as a service. The company has demonstrated substantial growth, forecasting it would process 20 billion transactions by the end of 2020 and raising a total of $29.7 million over two funding rounds, with the latest Series B in September 2020 led by Movile.

Keywords: fintech as a service, white-label payments, Banking as a Service, BaaS, payment gateway, financial APIs, digital accounts, Latin America, iFood, credit solutions