EBANX Director Argues Latin America Is Not a Single Payment Market

Local Rails, Not Monoliths: EBANX Makes the Case Against Treating Latin America as One Market

A PYMNTS interview published on 17 September 2026 placed market fragmentation at the centre of the cross-border payments conversation, with Sebastian Fantini, director of product at EBANX, arguing that global merchants risk costly missteps by treating emerging-market regions as uniform payment landscapes.

The 12-minute, 52-second segment — titled Cross-Border Payments Bundle Local Rails to Tackle Market Fragmentation — drew on EBANX's operational experience across Latin America, Africa and Asia to illustrate why a one-size-fits-all approach to payment infrastructure falls short in practice.

The Fragmentation Argument

Fantini's central point was direct: Latin America is not a single payment market, and assuming otherwise leads to structural problems for cross-border operators.

Each country in Latin America has its own payment ecosystem, players, preferred methods and level of market maturity — treating the region as a single block misrepresents the underlying reality, Fantini told PYMNTS.

The observation carries operational weight. A merchant routing payments through a single global gateway without accounting for local rail dominance risks lower authorisation rates, higher friction at checkout and missed conversion — editorial analysis that follows directly from the infrastructure picture Fantini described.

How EBANX Structures Its Response

According to EBANX's developer documentation, the company organises its payment-method coverage into two distinct categories: multi-country methods that can be deployed across several markets simultaneously, and country-specific methods that reflect the dominant local rails in individual markets.

That architecture, the documentation indicates, supports both cross-border and local operating models — allowing a merchant to consolidate payment management while still connecting to the rail that is native to each market.

Examples of dominant local rails named in the verified research include:

• Pix — Brazil's instant payment system
• UPI — India's Unified Payments Interface
• M-Pesa — Kenya's mobile money platform

Each of these represents a payment infrastructure with its own technical integration requirements, regulatory environment and consumer behaviour pattern. Bundling access to them under a single integration layer is, editorially, the core commercial proposition EBANX is articulating.

Geographic Scope

EBANX's documented market coverage spans Latin America, Africa and Asia. The PYMNTS interview and associated podcast episode — How Pix Automático Grows The Market Without Killing Cards, a separate production from the PYMNTS TV segment, available on Spotify — both reinforce the company's stated positioning as a specialist in high-growth, payment-complex markets where local rails outperform card networks for domestic transactions.

Readers should note that the Spotify podcast episode is a distinct production from the PYMNTS TV interview; claims appearing in only one of those sources are treated separately in this publication's sourcing.

Why It Matters

The fragmentation problem Fantini describes is structural, not cyclical. As more global digital merchants — software platforms, streaming services, e-commerce operators — expand into Latin America, Africa and South-East Asia, the diversity of mandated or dominant local payment rails grows in commercial significance. A payment stack built for card-first markets requires meaningful re-engineering to serve markets where instant account-to-account transfers or mobile money wallets drive the majority of consumer transactions.

EBANX's bundling approach, as documented in its developer materials, is one industry response to that challenge. Whether consolidating local-rail access through a single provider resolves fragmentation or simply relocates dependency is a question merchants and infrastructure buyers will weigh against their own risk appetites.

The PYMNTS conversation with Fantini did not surface new regulatory developments or product announcements; its significance lies in articulating — from an operator with documented presence across three emerging-market regions — why the "Latin America strategy" framing common in boardrooms may be operationally inadequate without country-level payment specificity underneath it.