Principal Software Engineer

Circle targets Latin America's payments market with USDC settlement pilot in Colombia. * C. Monasterio * Published: October 27, 2026 * 10:30 pm * Updated: October 27, 2026 * 10:31 pm Table of Contents * Circle partnered with technology firm ACI Worldwide to integrate settlements using the USDC stablecoin into existing banking infrastructure in Latin America. * The initial pilot project is being implemented in Colombia through the Bre-B interoperable instant payment system and the ACI Connetic cloud platform. * The initiative aims to demonstrate the coexistence of digital and traditional rails without disrupting current treasury processes and banking governance. In the middle of the trading day on Tuesday, October 27, Circle announced that it is joining forces with ACI Worldwide to deploy a USDC settlement pilot program aimed at the banking sector in Colombia. The agreement links the technical infrastructure of the digital token with ACI Connetic, the cloud-based payment orchestration platform developed by ACI Worldwide. According to the official report, the core purpose is to demonstrate to financial institutions how stablecoin rails can operate in parallel with traditional clearing and settlement networks, rather than attempting to replace them. Technical integration with the Bre-B instant payment network. They will initially target the Colombian market, where ACI Worldwide previously developed the core infrastructure of Bre-B, the national interoperable account-to-account instant payment network managed under the supervision of the Banco de la República. The pilot directly evaluates how a backed digital dollar can be incorporated into this real-time environment to build what both entities refer to as a multi-rail ecosystem. According to statements by Craig Ramsey, global head of account-to-account payments at ACI Worldwide, the banking debate surrounding stablecoins has shifted from technical speculation toward operational viability. Ramsey noted that financial institutions are currently seeking solutions to integrate regulated digital assets into their existing treasury, compliance, and daily settlement workflows. For his part, Circle's Chief Business Officer, Kash Razzaghi, stated that institutions across the region are actively exploring how stablecoins can complement the evolution of institutional payments using technical infrastructures that are already proven and in production. Context of institutional adoption and remittances in Latin America. The initiative in Colombian territory is part of a broader strategy by Circle to consolidate its presence in emerging markets. Previously, the issuing company established a direct footprint in Latin America following the technical integration of USDC into Mercado Pago's regional platform, facilitating access to dollarized balances in Argentina and other Southern Cone markets. Colombia represents a strategic testing ground due to the steady flow of cross-border transfers and local users' familiarity with US dollar-pegged instruments amid exchange-rate volatility. Operational data from the project indicates that the technical architecture deployed on ACI Connetic is agnostic to the underlying technology. Although the trial phase relies exclusively on USDC, the technology platform was designed to support other payment networks and digital asset providers as the country's regulatory framework evolves. The progress of the pilot in Colombia marks the formal start of technical testing between traditional banking rails and Circle's digital standard, with operational evaluation phases scheduled to report interbank settlement results over the upcoming quarters of implementation.

Smarsh taps former ACI Worldwide executive Alessandro Silva as Chief Growth Officer to drive its next phase of global expansion. * People Moves * 15.10.2026 01:07 pm Smarsh, the global leader in communications data and intelligence, today announced the appointment of Alessandro Silva as Chief Growth Officer. In this newly created role, Silva will unite Smarsh's Enterprise, Corporate, Public Sector, and Global Channel business units under one commercial strategy, accelerating execution, and driving the company's next phase of international growth. The move comes as organizations worldwide face rising volumes of digital communications, new forms of AI-driven collaboration, and increasingly complex regulation. A unified go-to-market organization will speed decision-making, deliver a more consistent customer experience, and still adapt to the needs of different industries, regions, and regulatory environments. "Smarsh has an exceptional foundation for global growth: trusted technology, talented people, and a customer base that includes 80% of the world's top global banks," said Kim Crawford Goodman, CEO of Smarsh. "Alessandro brings the global perspective and proven leadership we need to turn that opportunity into sustained growth." Silva joins from ACI Worldwide, where as Chief Revenue Officer he led the global commercial organization, including sales effectiveness, go-to-market strategy, and customer success. He previously held senior sales and general management roles at Western Union, GE Capital, and The Carlyle Group. "Growth may be my mandate, but it is a shared mission, and every team across Smarsh has a role in achieving it," said Silva. "My focus is turning our strengths into a connected commercial strategy that helps us serve customers more effectively and scale with greater speed and consistency." Momentum behind the appointment Silva joins as Smarsh sets the pace for AI innovation in communications data and intelligence. In 2026, Smarsh launched Discovery Agent, its MCP Server, AskSmarsh AI, and MySearch Agent, and extended capture to Claude Enterprise, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Workspace so regulated firms can adopt AI with confidence. The company was also named to the Inc. 5000 for the 19th straight year, a Leader in the 2025 Gartner(R) Magic Quadrant(TM) for the ninth consecutive year, and winner of a 2026 Business Intelligence Group AI Excellence Award for Fraud Detection and Prevention.

ACI Worldwide and Cognizant demonstrate strong card processing performance on Amazon web services (AWS). * Cloud * 29.09.2026 01:04 pm Cognizant, a leading AI builder and technology services provider, and ACI Worldwide, an original innovator in global payments technology, today announced the results of joint performance testing of BASE24-eps, a foundational component of ACI's card acquiring and issuing solutions, on AWS. Under simulated point-of-sale load, BASE24-eps sustained more than double its target transaction load for 30 minutes with no failed transactions. Across the full test, it processed more than 4.6 million transactions without a single failure. For banks, the case for the cloud comes down to scaling with growth, absorbing volume spikes without buying hardware for the peak, managing cost and keeping tight security and control over systems their customers rely on every second. This testing adds to the evidence that BASE24-eps, which already processes card payments for institutions worldwide, delivers the performance banks count on, now on AWS. The common assumption is that moving card processing to the cloud means adopting a newly built platform, a multi-year program that brings its own cost and risk. This testing put BASE24-eps, software banks already rely on, onto managed AWS services. Card processing runs on peaks, from holiday shopping to payday. Running at more than double its target leaves room to spare when volume surges. The environment ran on Amazon EC2 with Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, a managed database service, and observability was instrumented to the OpenTelemetry standard and monitored through Amazon CloudWatch. Operations teams could watch transaction flow, system health and throughput in real time. Cognizant, a long-time trusted partner for ACI, ran the program end-to-end in a non-production environment, designing the target architecture, provisioning the environment and deploying BASE24-eps using an AWS account operated by ACI. Installation and deployment were automated, which cut the manual work of standing up the software in a new environment. "Agility and cost are why banks look at the cloud, but they can't give up the performance their card business depends on to get there," said Ajmal Syed, Chief Architect and Technical Fellow, ACI Worldwide. "This testing put BASE24-eps under sustained load on AWS, and it ran well past target without a failed transaction. A bank planning a cloud move can start with a card platform that has already been through that test." "Banks do not move payment systems on optimism. They move on evidence," said Nitin Bahl, Strategic Business Unit Head, Fintech and Payments, Cognizant. "Our engineers built a working environment on AWS and ran sustained load through it." Production deployment is a further step, requiring resilience across availability zones, failover and disaster recovery testing, security hardening, additional nonfunctional testing and payment network certification. This test answered a narrower question: whether an experienced partner could deploy the tested release on AWS using managed services and sustain the target load.