“Can a LATAM-grown, hybrid API + web-scraping Open Finance stack become the default payment-initiation and bank-data layer for Chilean and Argentine merchants before global open-banking players arrive?”
Khipu started in 2011 as a bank-transfer-based payment initiation service in Chile, letting merchants accept payments directly from a payer's bank account instead of via card rails. Over a decade it broadened from pure payment initiation into a wider Open Finance / WaaS (web-scraping-as-a-service) layer — pulling account, identity, and credit data from banks and government services across Chile and Argentina via a hybrid of bank APIs and scraping where APIs don't exist. It now positions itself as the LATAM open-banking infrastructure provider for merchants, lenders, and KYC use cases.