Hola amig@s fintech,
This week's news shows that the infrastructure for digital payments is in place, but the last meter —the moment a customer stands at a counter and reaches for their phone instead of their wallet— remains contested. SPEI processes 7.3 billion transactions a year and is on track to beat every card network in Mexico combined. PayPal and Nubank both made moves to deepen Pix adoption in Brazil. The region's payments infrastructure has never been stronger. And yet cash still accounts for 58% of personal consumption spending across Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. This is not because better options don't exist, but because trust, habit, and merchant inertia are harder to engineer than any payments rail.
The rails are built. Changing behavior is a different problem altogether.
Enjoy the read.
~Vivi
The fintech conversation continues in our community chats.
Across WhatsApp and Telegram, thousands of founders, operators, investors, and builders connect daily to share insights, opportunities, and market intel.
| Stat of the Week
Cash still accounts for 58% of personal consumption spending by volume across Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean (the North subregion). The range is wide: Costa Rica is the clear outlier with only 16% cash use, while Jamaica (72%) and Guatemala (68%) remain heavily cash-dependent. Consumers are ready to go digital, but merchant acceptance infrastructure hasn't kept up.
Source: Mastercard
| Read of the Week
The World Bank’s latest Latin America and the Caribbean Economic Update projects the region will grow just 2.1% in 2026, down from 2.4% in 2025, weighed down by high borrowing costs, weak external demand, and persistent geopolitical uncertainty. Private investment remains sluggish as businesses hold back amid elevated global interest rates and slowing growth in advanced economies and China. The report argues the region has the raw material to do better — it holds roughly 50% of global lithium reserves and a third of global copper — but unlocking that potential requires closing skills gaps, expanding access to finance, deepening trade integration, and strengthening institutions.
| Post of the Week
Eugenio Bremer offers a simple framework for explaining how stablecoin-powered cross-border payments work: your company pays in its local currency, a stablecoin like USDC or USDT moves the value across borders in minutes, and the recipient gets paid in theirs. The crypto layer is invisible to both parties.
| Podcast of the Week
Startupeable sits down with Adeyemi Ajao, founding partner of Base10 Partners, a $1.8B Silicon Valley fund that backs automation in the real economy — and an early investor in Nubank, Figma, and Rappi. Ajao built his thesis around a simple question: what about the industries that move the physical world? Eight years later, the answer is arriving faster than he expected, as traditionally slow-moving sectors are now racing to adopt AI.
| Venture Financing
💵 Debt
🇲🇽 Kettera Financial Solutions, a specialized business finance platform, secured a $50M debt facility debt facility structured by KNG Securities and funded by a US private credit investor, to expand short-term lending to underserved small businesses in Mexico.
🇨🇴 CrediSmart is a Colombian startup that provides smartphone financing to people excluded from the formal credit system, secured a debt facility of up to $48M from Lendable to accelerate its expansion in Colombia.
💰 Equity
🇦🇷 Depay, the Argentinian regional payments infrastructure company that processes payments and transfers funds between countries, raised $4M in a seed round led by North Island Ventures and with participation from funds such as DCG, CMT Global, Verda Ventures, Onigiri Capital and Hash3.
Why does embedded credit unlock your platform’s growth?
It transforms your app by integrating the credit your customers already need. Tala’s Credit-as-a-Service (CaaS) provides the plug-and-play infrastructure to embed always-on credit directly into your platform—with no balance sheet, no credit risk, and no operational burden.
By integrating our lightweight APIs or SDK, you leverage our decisioning, risk, and collections to drive 40–45% ARPU growth, 30% lower CAC, and a potential 100%+ ROI.
Join the remittance companies, wallets, and gig platforms already turning credit into their most efficient revenue stream. Power your platform with embedded credit. Book a demo today→ https://tala.co/embedded-credit/?
| Product Launches & Partnerships
🇧🇷 PayPal added Pix the instant payment method used by more than 170 million Brazilians, to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), allowing merchants to offer it directly at checkout. Pix already account for around one-third of the value of Brazil’s online sales and is expected to reach about 40% of online payments in the country by 2026
🇧🇷 Nubank launched "Pay by Tap," consolidating Pix, debit, and credit into a single NFC contactless tap on Android, no physical card needed. The feature turns the phone into a universal payment terminal, with card data tokenized so merchants never see the actual number. It is rolling out gradually to Android users among its 100+ million Brazilian customers.
🌎 BPC launched BPC Payments, a new business line built on its SmartVista platform, offering a single API for real-time pay-ins, pay-outs, digital wallets, QR, and card processing across Latin America
🇧🇴 El Dorado, a Latin American digital wallet backed by Coinbase, launched in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, introducing QR payments interoperable with Pix (Brazil), Argentina, and Peru, plus international Visa cards for global digital services.
🇩🇴 Félix Pago launched operations in the Dominican Republic, enabling U.S.-based users to send remittances via WhatsApp through text or voice note. The DR received $11.9B in remittances in 2025, the vast majority from the U.S.
🇧🇷 belo, the Argentine digital wallet, formally entered the Brazilian market and launched the LUX a 100% digital card built on Visa’s network for cross-border payments across Latin America.
| Policy
🇨🇴 The Colombian government issued a decree establishing a mandatory Open Finance System requiring supervised financial institutions to enable data sharing via standardized APIs, with customer consent, so third parties can develop new financial products and services. The move aims to increase competition, expand financial inclusion, and give citizens greater control over their own financial data.
🇨🇴 Colombian buy-now-pay-later platform Addi received a license from the Superintendencia Financiera to operate as a regulated financing company, enabling the platform to accept public deposits under the same framework as traditional banks, including Fogafín deposit insurance coverage
🇲🇽 Mexico’s Supreme Court authorized the Unidad de Inteligencia Financiera (UIF) to freeze bank accounts without a prior judicial order, reinforcing its powers to act against suspected illicit financial activity. The ruling aligns with international anti-money laundering standards, but raises concerns around due process and oversight as authorities expand their reach.
Why subscribe to This Week in Fintech?
• Join other execs from Visa, Plaid, Stripe, Robinhood, Revolut, Chime, Rapyd, and more to get the latest insights and deep dives.
• Learn from and collaborate with the world's largest fintech community, with 225,000+ members. • Memberships start at $10 per month.
| Other News
🌎 The International Monetary Fund (IMF) warns that tokenization could transmit crypto-related risks into the broader financial system as real-world assets move on-chain. As traditional finance and digital markets become more connected, the IMF flags potential spillovers around volatility, liquidity, and regulation, urging closer oversight as adoption grows.
🇬🇹 Guatemala reached a record $2.44B in remittances in March 2026, a 21.9% increase year-over-year, pushing Q1 total remittances to $6.29B. The Bank of Guatemala projects full-year remittance inflows of roughly $26.8B for 2026.
🇧🇷 Nubank, the Latin American neobank, secured the naming rights for Palmeiras’ stadium and will let customers vote on its new name. The move continues its push to extend its brand well beyond financial services into one of Brazil's most visible cultural stages.
| Deeper Reads
Mexico's central bank-operated instant payments rail, the SPEI (Sistema de Pagos Electrónicos Interbancarios), now processes 7.3 billion transactions a year and is on track to surpass the combined volume of all card networks in Mexico by the end of 2026. So why does a handwritten sign reading "cash or transfer, send proof via WhatsApp" still summarize the reality at most small businesses? Mauricio Rodríguez Vázquez argues the rail has won, but the last meter between payment intent and actual transaction still belongs to habit, distrust, and fraud risk. Drawing on behavioral economics and Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm, he maps the real barriers: loss aversion, familiarity bias, and a mental prototype of SPEI as slow and error-prone that no marketing campaign will fix. The piece is essential reading for anyone building merchant-facing products in Mexico.
Cryptocurrencies are emerging as a key enabler of global e-commerce, allowing merchants to reduce transaction costs, eliminate intermediaries, and access international customers more easily, while also improving settlement times, positioning crypto as a competitive alternative to traditional payment methods in cross-border trade.
Made in LatAm with 🩵by
Elena, Head of New Technologies at Afirme Financial Group
Carlos, ESG Analyst at CFECapital
Vivi, Communication expert and Principal at Areté Consulting
Feedback? Reach out to us anytime! This week it’s Elena on read, post, and podcast of the week, funding, exists, other news and deeper reads, Carlos on policy, and product launches and partnerships, and Vivi on editing.
👍👎 Did you like this edition of TWIF LatAm? Take a 1-minute anonymous survey here.
Come meet us in person at www.thisweekinfintech.com/events. You can also join our global community on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
