Case Study Akua - Abstracta

Meet Our Client

Akua is an AI cloud-native financial infrastructure company transforming the acquiring ecosystem in Latin America. Through its acquiring-as-a-service model, Akua provides the core infrastructure that enables traditional financial institutions and payment players to seamlessly integrate the newest capabilities in the market, without the need to replace their legacy systems.

Its API-first platform leverages artificial intelligence to optimize transaction processing, risk management, fraud prevention, and real-time decisioning, delivering secure, scalable, and high-performance payment operations with bank-grade security and full regulatory compliance.

Through Green Akua, they also promote environmentally responsible practices that extend beyond their daily operations.

Operates in Colombia, Uruguay, Argentina, and Perú, set to expand to Chile, Brazil, and Mexico.

55+ professionals with certifications in PCI DSS Level 1, SOC2, PCI PIN, and ISO 27001

Seed funding: USD 13M Backed by investors: Propel, Flourish Ventures, Cathay, Atlantico, HTwenty Capital Innovation, Rallycap, HoneyIsland, Simma Capital, PlugandPlay, and ICVentures.

Founding team combined industry experience: 45+ years in LatAm payments

Understanding Challenges

Akua was preparing to begin operations in Latam and needed a partner capable of applying AI to enhance the efficiency of their compliance and regulatory processes. Meeting Mastercard's detailed specifications required analyzing a 3,600-page document, generating datasets, and preparing compliance tests.

The task demanded precise interpretation to produce country-specific configuration files aligned to Akua's internal mapping rules. With plans to expand later into all of the markets of Latin America, scalability became an essential priority. For this reason, Akua turned to Abstracta to bring efficiency through AI and strengthen their compliance process.

Solutions and Activities

We executed a focused, project-specific engagement to create an AI agent tailored to Akua’s process. Our team focused on deeply understanding Akua’s business, Mastercard’s protocol, and ISO8583 to achieve a high success rate in performance and accuracy.

Building on this foundation, we exposed the agent through an MCP tool in AWS Bedrock Agent Core, enabling secure and controlled releases. To strengthen quality, we incorporated automated evaluations across multiple AI models, allowing us to compare results programmatically and select the best option for Akua’s needs.

With this approach, the agent processes the complete Mastercard protocol specification in a PDF format. It applies Akua’s internal mapping rules and generates configuration files prepared for country-level deployments.

Results and Achievements

Our work delivered tangible acceleration for Akua’s rollouts across Latin America.

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Accelerated a 3-month manual process to roughly 3 to 5 days through partial automation with the AI agent, significantly shortening rollout cycles while maintaining oversight where manual steps remain.
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Increased accuracy and consistency with a 95% success rate in configuration generation, as the agent processed the full specification and applied internal mapping rules.
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Strengthened operational security and consistency through deployment on AWS Bedrock Agent Core, integrating with Akua's platform for controlled releases.
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Compressed time to value with an initial working version in 20 days, delivered through focused development and automated model evaluations.
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Advanced regional financial inclusion goals by supporting Akua's mission to deliver more affordable, efficient payments in Latin America through scalable automation.

Our collaboration supports Akua's broader vision to make payments in Latin America more accessible. We laid a practical foundation for ongoing innovation and are starting a new agent for Visa next.