What is the current state of payments in Latin America?

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Let’s take a trip back to 2019. 

Oh, the world was much simpler then, wasn’t it? An egg somehow became the most-liked Instagram photo ever. Folks attempted to kick bottle caps off of bottles for some reason. And, mercifully, Taylor Swift finally ended her beef with Katy Perry making the world a safer place for everyone, really setting the tone for the incredibly amazing year that 2020 would end up being. 

In the midst of all of this—and not to be outdone by any of the aforementioned—PaymentsFN took place at the Carolina Theater in Durham, NC, hosting payment engineers, product professionals, and many others who work with payments technology. 

When this panel convened during that conference, global payments were already moving into a more ambitious phase. Cross-border expansion was accelerating, digital commerce was spreading quickly, and companies were beginning to test how far their existing models could travel. 

What Latin America brought to the conversation was not a warning, but a proving ground. It showed, in real terms, how different currencies, payment instruments, and consumer habits could coexist at scale, and how brands that paid attention to those differences could build systems that worked locally without losing their global footing. 

For many teams expanding from the United States or Europe, the region became a place where technically sound checkouts turned into commercially complete experiences by design, not by assumption.

The point, we hope you’ll find, is that the issue of expanding into Latin America is more structural than anything else. 

What does that mean? Read on, reader. You’re about to find out.

Innovation, as described by people who have to deploy it

You can’t have a conversation about expanding into specific markets without asking the bigger question: what is payments innovation actually for?  

Most of the conversation the panel got into centered on how product teams in mature markets tend to think about progress as refinement. In many mature markets, the underlying systems already function smoothly, with cards clearing reliably and banks staying connected, which allows most consumers to move through checkout without ever thinking about the infrastructure beneath it, and pushes innovation toward refining the edges rather than rethinking the fundamentals.

It was from that framing that led Katherine McClure to return to the same contrast. In markets like the United States, payments innovation often polishes behavior that already fits the system. 

In those markets, paying by card feels routine and dependable, the underlying rails rarely call attention to themselves, and the experience recedes into the background, which leaves little incentive to rethink how it works because there is little visible friction demanding a different approach.

That way of thinking, she argued, starts to wobble in places where banking access depends on your neighborhood, infrastructure changes as you cross a city line, and trust in financial institutions is something you earn, not something you inherit. In those markets, innovation is not about shaving a second off checkout. It is about making sure people can show up at all. Designing a platform that asks customers to change how they already handle money is a bit like building a doorway and then being surprised when people walk around it instead of through it.

Cristina Nicoara brought that point down to street level. Cash, she explained, isn’t some relic sitting in a museum case placed there by “top men.” It’s an active participant in how commerce runs.

Vouchers like Boleto in Brazil or OXXO in Mexico don’t sit on the sidelines of online shopping like Neymar in the 2014 Word Cup semifinal. They organize it. Customers start a purchase on a screen and finish it at a counter. Merchants build their operations around pending payments and delayed confirmation as part of the perfectly rhythmic strumming of the day, like Antônio Jardim quietly keeping the beat. 

Those patterns often get labeled as temporary friction, something to put up with until the market “catches up” to a more familiar digital script. The panel had a different take. 

If a business can’t live comfortably with prepaid flows, delayed settlement, or cash-adjacent methods, it’s not because the market is behind. It is because the system was never invited to the party in the first place.

Ever gone to a party you weren’t invited to? Awkward, right? Just… awkward. 

The limits of assuming cards are enough

Another thread running through the discussion was the misplaced confidence many companies placed in card acceptance. International card networks provide the appearance of universality. Their actual coverage varies considerably.

Cristina pointed out that in many Latin American countries, a large share of cards are issued for domestic use only. In markets such as Colombia or Argentina, merchants relying exclusively on Visa and Mastercard often reached only a portion of potential customers. Engagement was visible. Intent was present. Transactions never materialized.

What made this dynamic particularly difficult to diagnose was its silence. Payments did not fail at checkout. They simply never happened. From the merchant’s perspective, demand appeared lower than it actually was.

That issue became more pronounced in the years following the panel. As digital commerce expanded across Latin America, card-centric strategies increasingly revealed their limits. Domestic debit networks, voucher-based methods, and account-to-account transfers offered broader reach, lower costs, or both. Cards remained relevant, but they no longer functioned as the default answer to scale.

Payment strategy shifted accordingly. Decisions about acceptance became decisions about coverage rather than standardization.

When governments shape rails instead of products

Steve Klebe widened the conversation by pointing to India, not as a story about clever product launches, but as an example of what happens when a country treats payments like public infrastructure instead of a market to be won, building a system where banks and platforms share the same interfaces, identity standards, and rails so participation becomes the default rather than something each company has to recreate on its own. 

The goal wasn’t to make checkout more delightful. It was to change how the whole system behaved.

The result wasn’t a breakout company. It was a breakout baseline. Digital payments became normal across a wide population because participation was baked into the rails from day one, and innovation followed the way food trucks follow a good lunch crowd.

At the time, the comparison mostly highlighted how fragmented the U.S. ecosystem had become. Looking back, it also reads like a preview of what Latin America was about to do in its own way, like a “very special episode” of your favorite TV show. 

Brazil’s Pix, launched nationally in late 2020, followed a similar script. It didn’t show up as a brand asking for attention. It showed up as plumbing. Banks, fintechs, merchants, and consumers were all expected to run water through the same pipes, under the same rules, with incentives lined up instead of pulling in opposite directions. That alignment is what pushed Pix from something you could use into something you just did. 

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According to the Central Bank of Brazil, by 2023 more than 70% of the country’s adult population was using Pix, and transaction volumes had passed both credit and debit cards.

The speed of adoption didn’t come from novelty. It came from taking something people already did every day and giving it a national backbone, like turning a well-worn footpath into a six-lane highway.

Mexico took a different route, but landed in a similar place. OXXO Pay grew from a paper voucher into a near-real-time digital method that still speaks the language of cash. SPEI moved from a behind-the-scenes bank transfer system into a consumer-facing rail that now supports eCommerce at scale [Banco de México, SPEI statistics]. Neither system tried to kick cash out the door. Oh no, friends. They built it a seat at the table. This is a guest who is invited to every party, even if you’re not.

Accessibility as a systems constraint

Fen Slattery shifted the discussion toward accessibility, an area often treated as peripheral in payments conversations. Accessibility, they argued, was not a feature or a compliance checkbox. It was a systems constraint that varied by jurisdiction and could reshape entire user interfaces.

Companies expanding internationally often encountered accessibility requirements late in the process. Regulations differed widely. Enforcement patterns were inconsistent. Discovering those constraints after launch could require significant rework, including redesigning mobile applications and checkout flows.

Cash entered this discussion from another angle. In several jurisdictions, cashless-only models began attracting regulatory scrutiny, not as symbols of progress but as barriers to participation. Excluding cash did not simply streamline operations. It excluded consumers whose financial lives did not align with digital-only assumptions.

The panel didn't argue that every payment method should persist indefinitely. It argued that payment systems encode assumptions about who gets to participate. Ignoring that reality does not remove exclusion. It obscures it.

Fragmentation as an operating condition

What stood out was that the panel didn’t treat fragmentation as a bug to be fixed. They treated it like the weather. You don’t argue with it. You check the forecast and dress accordingly (it’s -20C today: weather is on my mind).

Germany’s comfort with bank transfers, Mexico’s dependence on OXXO, Brazil’s long relationship with vouchers and now Pix, India’s embrace of UPI, and the United States’ ongoing love affair with cards all came up as facts of life, not design failures. 

Each one grew out of local history, regulatory choices, and what people actually trust when it’s time to hand over their hard-earned money for goods or services.

If anything, Latin America since 2019 has leaned into complexity rather than trying to clean it up, layering real-time rails on top of modernized voucher systems, keeping domestic networks firmly in place, and letting cards settle into more of a supporting role instead of pushing any one method off the stage the way that actual actors might wish to push a method actor off the stage.

For merchants, the takeaway was simple and slightly uncomfortable. Global expansion doesn’t get solved by making everything look the same. It gets solved by building systems that can handle difference without tying themselves in knots every time a new rail, rule, or customer habit shows up.

Just to reiterate to make sure you heard that one: Global expansion doesn’t get solved by making everything look the same. 

Just making sure that one sinks in, because it’s important. 

What the panel captured

What sticks about this conversation isn’t that it predicted some grand, unified theory of payments. It’s that it kept pointing back to the same unglamorous truth: money behaves like the place it lives in. 

You can’t drop a checkout flow into a country the way you drop a new app onto your phone and expect it to just work. Economies, regulations, and habits all get a vote, and they tend to vote loudly.

Since that panel, and very much in line with what the speakers anticipated, Latin America hasn’t marched toward a single, elegant model. It’s done what it usually does. It’s added options, extended rails, and kept the old ones running alongside the new, which means systems that can’t handle delayed confirmation, cash-adjacent flows, or non-card paths now don’t just underperform. They stand out.

The panel’s point wasn’t that complexity would go away. It was that it wouldn’t. The job for merchants was never to wait for things to simplify. It was to build stacks that could live comfortably in the mess.

That mindset doesn’t hand you a universal answer. It gives you something better. Systems that actually work in the real world, where customers, regulators, and payment methods all show up to the same party and nobody agrees on the playlist.

Here's that panel discussion from 2019 for your viewing pleasure.

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