Visa’s Innovation Center has released The State of Innovation in Latin America, a first of its kind report examining indicators, trends and benchmarks of the most innovative companies in Latin America and the Caribbean from the perspective of payments and financial services.

Conducted by Americas Market Intelligence (AMI), the report assess the level of innovation in companies across key markets in the region, including Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Colombia and Peru.

The study focused on different types of companies, including financial institutions, merchants, payment gateways, aggregators, and fintechs. To assess their degree of innovation, AMI and Visa evaluated the companies according to four key pillars, including internal support for innovation, the ability to execute, the use of new technologies and the capacity to scale solutions.

The companies that attained the highest levels of innovation included digital-native companies and leading banks, as well as some brick-and-mortar retailers. Upon analyzing their approaches to innovation, the study indicated that the most innovative companies in Latin America share several key characteristics:

• A dedicated innovation center, team or department

• Innovation labs and open spaces within offices to promote cross-departmental collaboration

• Embrace innovation both internally and externally, with an average of 140+ APIs and partnerships with an average of 15 start-ups per year

• 80 percent use leading industry technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and machine learning

• Successful ability to scale their solutions internationally to more than five markets

• Produced an average of 57 proofs of concepts in the last three years

• Developed solutions in less than five months