Sebastián Salazar: From Gaming to Fintech—The Controversial Path to Chile's Emerging Neobank

On a Thursday in late May, the board of La Polar voted to sell off a piece of itself—Inversiones La Polar, the retail giant's financial unit—to Yol1, an emerging neobank still under construction. The buyer was Sebastián Salazar's Pronto Paga group, and the prize was substantial: a license to issue prepaid cards, an existing credit card business, and the infrastructure to build and sell payment solutions to other fintech companies. For Yol1, which had been grinding through its own regulatory approvals from scratch, the acquisition represented a shortcut of at least two years. The deal still needed final sign-off from Chile's financial regulator, expected before year's end.

The sale made operational sense. ABC, the holding company born from the merger of ABCDin and La Polar, had ended up with duplicate licenses after the combination. La Polar's card-issuing authority became redundant. Negotiations had moved with unusual speed—starting just two months earlier—and the parties kept the purchase price confidential. Market sources suggested it was roughly ten times what another company had paid for a smaller payments operation in 2023. To finance the acquisition, Yol1 borrowed from a Peruvian bank.

Salazar, now 47, had taken an unconventional path to fintech. He studied law at Universidad SEK, worked his way through school as a waiter, and quickly realized litigation wasn't for him. What drew him instead were industries with low barriers to entry and questionable reputations. In his twenties, he and his younger brother built a hip-hop event production company. That evolved into a decade-long venture operating seven or eight gaming machine arcades across Santiago under the Skill Games brand, importing equipment from the United States. He served as vice president of FIDEN, the industry association pushing for regulation, and even attempted to expand into Brazil before retreating.

In 2015, Salazar traveled to the ICE gaming conference in London and returned with supplier contacts for an online betting platform, but shelved the idea. Four years later, after the social crisis and pandemic had passed, he revived it. Working with Evans Concha, a technician who had previously worked in the gaming machine sector, they founded Estelar Bet in 2021, operating under a Curaçao license. The company made two unconventional bets: it became the first sponsor to pay for advertising assets in Chilean women's football, eventually backing twelve teams, and it promised to pay out winnings in twenty minutes instead of the forty-eight to seventy-two hours competitors required.

That rapid-payment mechanism became the seed for Pronto Paga, launched in 2022 and profitable by October 2023. Today the company projects processing four billion dollars annually, with nearly sixty million in revenues and almost three hundred employees spread across Chile, Peru, Ecuador, and Brazil. The group operates from London—Worldwide Payments LLP, registered at Companies House with an address on Compton Street—with Salazar and Concha each holding forty-eight percent ownership and Constanza Muñoz Torres, the legal chief, holding the remainder. The company has never raised outside capital, with Salazar saying the founders invested roughly four hundred million pesos of their own money.

Gambling now represents seventy percent of Pronto Paga's operations and eighty percent of its income. When asked why he entered industries with such poor reputations if his goal was to build a bank, Salazar acknowledged the contradiction but defended his choice. He argued that someone needs to work within the gambling sector to improve it, and that companies like Bet365 and bwin would come to Chile regardless—they would simply choose payment processors with expertise in fraud reduction, data security, and cybersecurity. He positioned himself as that partner. On the state's role, he said Chile needed to protect minors and ensure betting sites paid their taxes.

Yol1's acquisition of La Polar's card unit is the most visible piece of a larger pivot. The company is preparing its first institutional capital raise and planning to shift its revenue mix. By 2027, Salazar projects gambling will drop from seventy percent of income to around thirty percent, replaced by new businesses: virtual accounts for international commerce flows between Latin America and Asia, plus expansion into insurance, e-commerce, and health services. When asked whether his history—the gambling operations, previous legal troubles, the controversial path—would make fundraising harder, he acknowledged difficulty but said it wouldn't be worse than bootstrapping alone. He has three children, the oldest eight years old. Asked what he would do if his son started betting online at thirteen, he said he wouldn't be angry, only hopeful he could teach him to treat it as entertainment. Reflecting on his career, Salazar called it "my controversial and difficult story," but said if he could choose again, he would take the same path, though he wished it had been simpler and required less explanation.