How DEUNA Uses Slash to Test and Manage Payments Around the World

"It’s been a great experience.”

When Roberto Kafati founded DEUNA in 2020, he set out to solve one of the hardest problems in global commerce: helping businesses accept payments anywhere, through any method, without having to build and maintain a different integration for every new market. Six years later, that vision has now raised over $38 million from firms including Activant Capital, Valor Capital, and L Catterton, as well as angel investors like Will Hockey and Carlos García.

DEUNA is a payments orchestration platform that sits between some of the world’s largest organizations and the payment providers those companies depend on. In total, DEUNA supports over 200 payment methods and 400 payment providers/gateways across 181 countries. The last 12 months alone has seen the company grow 44x in live TPV (Total Payment Volume).

Running this kind of platform means DEUNA has to operate globally. International markets vary dramatically in how payments work, which providers are available, and what a customer expects to see at checkout. Roberto and the team constantly have to test new integrations as they expand to make sure they function correctly and obey local regulations. To make it all easier, they decided to adopt a business banking platform that offers unlimited virtual cards, global payments, and granular spending visibility. That platform is Slash.¹

181 Countries, Unlimited Cards, One Dashboard

As DEUNA entered new countries, trial-running integrations and setups wasn’t easy. "Before Slash, we were very scrappy in how we grabbed cards or used cards to test new integrations,” said Roberto. With a platform that offers unlimited virtual cards, he no longer has to worry about how he’ll handle further expansion. “As we grew across that time, we were able to also leverage Slash to be able to test in a lot of different markets."

When DEUNA is integrating with a new local payment provider, such as a processor in Paraguay, someone on the team needs to test that integration before it goes live. To do this, Roberto needed a valid payment instrument on hand that was separate from his main business card. Before Slash, sourcing an extra card quickly enough to keep integration timelines moving was tough. Unlimited virtual cards were the answer. “Being able to spin up a card to be able to test that automatically in a programmatic way is very, very useful for us."

Each virtual card is a version of the Slash Visa® Platinum Card, a charge card that earns up to 2% back on every purchase. While Roberto doesn’t earn cash back on integration testing, he can as he pays local contractors and providers that offer their services in other countries. Slash’s global payment infrastructure and programmatic cards fit DEUNA’s needs perfectly. "We needed a global first provider, and that's where Slash came in. We have a lot of different needs at a local level with local providers, and having Slash has been super useful in having flexibility in how we pay them."

Roberto has also enjoyed the visibility that Slash provides across DEUNA's distributed teams. A company operating across multiple markets, each with their own employees and vendors, should have a single place to see what's being spent and by whom. That’s exactly what Slash’s dashboard was built for. "Slash has been super useful in order to, at a high level, manage the overview spend from all of the different parts of the organization without spending a lot of time and resources doing so. Doing that in a global way has become a very important part of what we do and how we do at DEUNA."

Building Infrastructure to Match the Mission

The Slash Visa® Platinum Card allows DEUNA to more easily help international clients build out their payment infrastructures. Slash’s Global USD Card can then help those clients connect their operations to the United States and access the US Dollar.³ Today, businesses in 130+ countries can use Slash’s Global USD Cards to hold dollar-based funds, send & receive ACH/Wire, and make stablecoin payments all without forming a US entity.⁴

As a company headquartered in New York City, all DEUNA needs to span the globe is the Slash Card and its integrated financial dashboard. With these tools, the company's energy can stay focused on building their product and expanding into new markets instead of scrambling to find new ways to test integrations and pay foreign contractors.

In Roberto’s words, "It’s been a great experience.”