By PYMNTS | October 12, 2026
PayJoy, a financial service provider for underserved consumers in emerging markets, has acquired Mexican FinTech Finia.
The deal is designed to let PayJoy apply Finia’s technology and expertise to its platform, enhancing its underwriting capabilities and expanding its services for customers with limited access to formal credit, the company announced in a news release Monday (Oct. 12).
“Finia has developed valuable technology and deep insights that can help address one of the fundamental challenges in financial inclusion: how to assess creditworthiness when traditional financial data is limited,” said Jose Luis Gonzalez, head of growth for PayJoy Mexico.
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“Bringing these capabilities to PayJoy will strengthen our platform, enhance how we assess risk, and broaden our product offerings. We see a meaningful opportunity to extend the impact of Finia’s work across the markets we serve.”
The release notes that PayJoy has more than 20 million customers throughout Latin America, Africa, and Asia, offering products like digitally secured smartphone financing, credit lines and the PayJoy Card. By acquiring Finia, the company can bring technology designed especially for smaller and informal businesses to a platform that reaches global markets, PayJoy said.
“Finia built its AI underwriting capabilities to serve micro-businesses with limited financial data and owners with little or no formal credit history,” the release added. “The venture-backed fintech developed new ways to assess creditworthiness and applied them to offer financial products including credit cards and installment loans.”
As PYMNTS wrote last week, a limited credit history can be a drag on smaller businesses trying to get funded. The PYMNTS Intelligence report, “Keeping Score: Why Data Quality Determines Lending Decisions for the Smallest Firms,” based on 350 financial institution executives in the U.S. and the U.K., found 57% pointed to inaccurate or incomplete business records as an underwriting obstacle. Outdated information was mentioned by 52% of executives, inconsistent information by 52% and limited financial history by 48%.
The same research found that credit applications for microbusiness had a 77% approval rate, versus 95% for large enterprises. Roughly 19% of applications were rejected because they lacked sufficient information to determine creditworthiness.
As covered here last month, additional PYMNTS Intelligence into small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) has found that microbusinesses reported greater levels of exposure to lay payments and cash flow strain.
“The smallest SMBs have barely grown compared with their larger counterparts and report substantially lower confidence in their ability to survive the next two years,” the report said.