I’ve watched this play out more times than I can count. A global company enters Latin America, plugs in the same payment stack they use in Europe or the US, and then can’t figure out why their conversion rates are half of what they expected. They blame the product. They blame the marketing. Sometimes they blame the market itself. Almost every time, the problem traces back to the same place: a payment infrastructure that doesn’t match how people in LATAM actually pay.
The opportunity here is massive and getting bigger. Cross-border e-commerce in the region hit $51.8 billion in 2023, up $8.7 billion from the previous year. More than half of Mexican and Brazilian consumers shopped cross-border in 2022. In Chile and Peru, that number was above 70%. People in Latin America want to buy from international merchants. The demand side of this equation is strong and growing. The supply side, meaning the infrastructure that makes those transactions work smoothly, is where most companies fall short.
Here’s what they get wrong. They assume a Visa or Mastercard integration covers the market. It doesn’t. In Brazil, Pix already accounts for 16% of e-commerce transactions and is growing at a 26% compound annual rate between 2023 and 2026. Across the region, digital wallets are expanding 20% year-over-year. Cash vouchers like boleto bancário in Brazil or OXXO in Mexico still hold 9% of e-commerce market share regionally. Nearly half of all online retail in LATAM, 47%, happens on mobile. A payment stack built around international credit cards alone is leaving real revenue on the table.
Each country operates on its own logic. Brazil has Pix and boleto. Mexico runs on SPEI and cash-based vouchers. Argentina has a deep installment culture and the highest digital wallet adoption in the region. Colombia, Chile, Peru, all have their own preferred methods, their own regulatory requirements, their own settlement timelines. There is no single integration that covers all of this. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you a shortcut that will cost you later.
Currency handling is another layer of complexity that global operators tend to underestimate. Multi-currency settlement, FX exposure, local tax obligations on cross-border transactions. In LATAM, these are everyday realities for any business processing payments across borders. And they require infrastructure that understands local rules, not a global gateway trying to translate them from the outside.
What I mean by local infrastructure is specific. Licensed entities that operate under the supervision of local central banks. Settlement that happens through domestic banking rails. Native support for the payment methods consumers actually use. Regulatory alignment that doesn’t depend on a third-party intermediary interpreting the rules on your behalf. At LaFinteca, we build exactly this kind of infrastructure because we saw, firsthand, how many international businesses were losing conversions to payment friction they didn’t even know existed.
The companies that win in LATAM payments are the ones that understood how each market works at the infrastructure level and built accordingly. That’s the approach we take at LaFinteca, and it’s the reason our merchants convert where others don’t.
By Dmytro Rukin, CEO at LaFinteca
