Latin America’s payments landscape presents a paradox: some of the world’s most advanced payment systems are emerging in a region where moving money across borders can still be remarkably complicated. From Brazil’s Pix to Argentina’s Transferencias 3.0 and Mexico’s CoDi, consumers are embracing faster, digital payment methods. Yet for merchants, the region remains a patchwork of national payment rails, currencies, regulations, and providers.
That complexity is becoming harder to ignore. Latin America’s remittance market handles more than $160 billion a year, while the region’s broader economy is poised for significant growth. For businesses looking to capture that opportunity, the challenge is no longer simply entering the market—it’s finding a way to navigate all of its markets at once.
Credit cards are still the most popular payment method in Latin America, with $269 billion (U.S.) in transactions recorded in 2024, according to The Next Payment Infrastructure in LATAM, a research paper from PhotonPay. But account-based transfers, or A2A payments, are gaining acceptance. Brazil’s Pix payment system has been a driving force and an exemplar for other nations in this area. Digital wallets accounted for $68 billion, while cash remains stubbornly popular. Although it’s not growing as quickly as the other payment methods, cash still accounted for $36 billion in transaction value.
That mix of payment methods reflects a broader reality—there’s no single payments model across Latin America. Each country has developed its own combination of rails, providers and consumer preferences, creating a market that is both technologically advanced and difficult to approach as a whole.
The region’s economic outlook makes that challenge even more consequential. In a bullish scenario, Morgan Stanley predicts that the region’s capital markets could almost triple in size over the coming decade, from $2.4 trillion in 2024 to $6.3 trillion by 2035. That potential is enticing for businesses around the world, but capturing it requires the ability to work across multiple payment rails, currencies, and regulatory schemes.
Distinctly Different
The differences are particularly apparent in the development of domestic payment rails. Rather than relying on a single regional system, countries across Latina America have built their own sophisticated infrastructure. After just five years in operation, Pix has become a model for other A2A payment systems and is now processing more than 7 billion transactions per month.
Other countries are developing their own fast-growing alternatives, including Argentina with Transferencias 3.0 and Mexico with CoDi. According to data from J.P. Morgan, 95% of payments in Mexico now reach their recipients in less than 10 minutes.
“From a payments perspective, it’s important to recognize the region as a group of adjacent but distinctly different countries,” said Don Apgar, Director of Merchant Payments at Javelin Strategy & Research. “For example, the Pix account-to-account payment platform has become hugely popular with Brazilian consumers, but being operated by the Central Bank of Brazil, it’s not available in other countries outside of Brazil. Most of the larger countries in Latin America have their own domestic payments schemes or digital wallets that are popular with consumers but operate separately from card payment rails.”
Moving Money Across Borders
Latin America once relied on central bank clearing arrangements—a slow, expensive, and now thoroughly outdated model. That was followed by local currency settlement, which streamlined transactions for buyers and sellers alike. Now, the movement is toward faster payment rails and digital infrastructure that allows cross-border transactions to settle in minutes.
The infrastructure is improving, but the regulatory landscape remains complicated. While many local regulators are working to facilitate easier trade, financial institutions still must contend with regulations spanning multiple legal frameworks. Countries like Brazil and Argentina also enforce strict currency controls, adding another layer of complexity.
Against this backdrop, stablecoins have emerged as a complementary infrastructure layer. The Latin American crypto exchange Bitso even launched a Mexican peso-backed stablecoin to serve as a cross-border solution throughout the region.
“Stablecoins have become more embedded in the region’s payments because they solve practical problems that traditional rails don’t solve,” said Joel Hugentobler, Cryptocurrency Analyst at Javelin Strategy & Research. “In markets where consumers and business face volatility, limited access to dollars or expensive cross border payments, dollar-backed stablecoins can function as a store of value, a settlement asset, and a payment rail at the same time. This gives consumers and business access to digital dollars while also having faster rails, which is an advantage over traditional rails for cross-border, B2B, remittances, and even treasury management.”
While stablecoins can address some of the friction involved in moving value across borders, they don’t eliminate the underlying challenge: businesses still need to connect with the payment systems operating on either side of a transaction. The lack of interoperability between banking systems persists, while regulatory differences make it challenging to align protocols for faster payments. Even within individual countries, merchants can encounter friction from having to work with multiple payment ecosystems and providers.
That’s where the question shifts from how to move money faste4r to how to manage all of the infrastructure required to move it.
The Value of Orchestration
Latin America is a collection of fast-growing economies with, in some respects, some of the most modern payment systems in the world. The opportunity is clear, but so is the operational challenge: businesses need a way to connect these disparate systems without having to manage each one independently.
One emerging solution is payment orchestration, which unifies a merchant’s payment operation while providing a comprehensive view of activity across the entire ecosystem. For businesses that need to connect with multiple payment rails, providers, and fund flows, payment orchestration provides a unified infrastructure for connecting, routing, and managing those transactions.
“For merchants, connecting to each of these payments schemes is an important part of appealing to consumers in the region,” said Apgar. “Developing and maintaining these connections at scale can significantly impact both initial time to market and ongoing operating expenses. In most cases, it makes sense for merchants to leverage an orchestration platform that already has local payment connectivity in place, enabling them to support the broadest number of payment types in counties across the region with a single orchestration connection.”
Combined with stablecoins, orchestration can further streamline cross-border transactions. Stablecoins can help address currency and settlement challenges, while orchestration coordinates the various payment rails that merchants and processors must navigate.
Key Takeaways
Latin America’s payments evolution isn’t following a single path—and that’s unlikely to change. Pix, Transferencias 3.0, CoDi, digital wallets, cards, and emerging digital assets will continue to co-exist, shaped by the needs and regulations of individual markets.
For merchants, the implication is certainly clear. Flexibility will be more valuable than standardization. The ability to add new payment methods, move between rails and currencies, and adapt to changing regulations without rebuilding the underlying payments infrastructure can determine how quickly a business responds to opportunity.
As Latin America’s economies grow and cross-border commerce expands, payment orchestration can provide the foundation for that flexibility. Combined with stablecoins and other digital assets, it has the potential to turn a collection of independent payment ecosystems into an infrastructure that merchants can actually navigate at scale.
