PPRO’s LATAM payment performance guide: key takeaways

PPRO’s new guide to payment performance in Latin America finds that domestic processing and a market-specific payment mix carry more weight for conversion in the region than many merchants assume. The report closes with a five-step framework merchants can use to find where revenue is being lost.

Local payments platform PPRO has published The LATAM payment performance guide, a 19-page report on why approval and conversion rates vary so widely across Latin America and what enterprise merchants can do about it. The guide covers Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico, and it provides data based on insights obtained from a leading regional acquirer and issuing bank in 2026, along with third-party market research.

The size of the opportunity explains the focus. Payments and Commerce Market Intelligence (PCMI) expects Latin American ecommerce volume to pass USD 1 trillion by 2027, roughly double its 2023 level. PPRO’s central argument is that merchants who extend a global card setup into the region will capture only part of that growth. In each country, performance depends on how transactions are routed, which payment methods are offered, what data reaches the issuer, and how much redundancy sits in the payments stack.

Cross-border processing costs merchants approvals

The report’s headline finding concerns local processing. A transaction processed through an international acquirer reaches the customer’s local issuer as a cross-border payment. Many cards issued locally in the region are blocked for international use or face tighter controls when used abroad, and a Visa or Mastercard logo on a card is no guarantee that it is enabled for international transactions.

According to the data sourced by PPRO, merchants relying on international acceptance alone can reach about 40% of cards in LATAM, while local processing could extend that coverage to all locally issued cards. The same source puts the conversion uplift from domestic processing at up to 30% compared with cross-border routes. Issuers’ fraud systems also tend to score international transactions as higher risk, so legitimate customers can still be declined.

Part of the friction appears before authorisation. Shoppers who see prices in a foreign currency expect foreign exchange mark-ups, or if they can’t find a familiar payment method they may abandon the checkout. PPRO acknowledges that some cross-border transactions do not always perform badly, and recommends that merchants benchmark their current setup against domestic processing and treat routing as a commercial decision as much as a technical one.

Merchant of Record as a route to domestic processing

Local processing carries its own overhead. Depending on the country, a merchant may need a local entity, tax registrations, and banking relationships, as well as in-house capability for fraud, compliance, FX, and settlement. Integration and reconciliation become harder as the number of markets and providers grows.

PPRO presents the Merchant of Record (MoR) model as a solution to this. Under an MoR arrangement, the partner acts as the local entity on the merchant’s behalf and can handle local collection, tax, FX, fund flow, and settlement, along with parts of regulatory compliance. The guide points to the administrative burden in the region’s two largest economies to make the case. Mexico and Brazil rank second and third in TMF Group’s 2026 Global Business Complexity Index, and the World Bank’s last Doing Business data recorded 1,501 hours a year for a medium-sized company to meet its tax obligations in Brazil, the highest of any economy measured.

Redundancy as an input to optimisation

The guide treats resilience as part of conversion performance. In PPRO’s description, a resilient setup includes multiple live providers and acquirers, healthy MID distribution, tested failover routes, and the ability to keep token, authentication, and transaction data intact when traffic is rerouted.

The benefit extends beyond outages. Merchants who can compare providers and acquiring routes in real time can also react when approval rates deteriorate or when fraud and chargeback levels shift, which makes redundancy part of day-to-day optimisation.

Payment mix differs by market

More than half (56%) of LATAM ecommerce card transactions run on local card schemes, according to the guide, and in many markets local methods are needed to reach the full customer base. PPRO advises building the checkout around each market’s behaviour instead of applying one regional approach.

Argentina

The guide projects that digital wallets, with Mercado Pago prominent, will account for 49% of ecommerce transactions and 39% of point-of-sale payments by 2030. Bank transfers are expected to reach 19% and 17% respectively. Domestic card scheme Cabal processes more than 90 million transactions a year.

Brazil

Bank transfers are projected to make up 58% of ecommerce transactions and 46% of point-of-sale payments by 2030, with Pix, the instant payment system introduced by the Central Bank of Brazil, at the centre of that shift. The guide also highlights NuPay, which is available to Nubank’s more than 115 million customers in Brazil, along with the domestic scheme Elo and instalment payments. PPRO, which added NuPay to its platform in May 2026, recommends that merchants in Brazil assess approval rates by issuer and processing route.

Chile

Debit and prepaid cards dominate, and local scheme Redcompra accounts for 44% of card payments. PPRO cautions that a single market-wide approval average can hide where friction occurs, since results vary by issuer and processing route.

Colombia

Digital wallets, such as Nequi and Mercado Pago, account for more than a quarter of online transactions. PSE, operated by ACH Colombia, handles 95% of online purchases paid by bank transfer. Bre-B, the instant payment system Banco de la Republica launched in October 2025, had more than 34 million registered users by April 2026, according to the central bank. 

Mexico

Digital wallets also account for more than a quarter of online payments in Mexico, led by Mercado Pago, with Apple Pay and Google Pay gaining ground and PayPal still popular for cross-border purchases. Cash remains relevant: OXXO Pay lets consumers settle online purchases in cash at more than 20,000 OXXO convenience stores, which give unbanked and cash-preferring shoppers access to ecommerce. Locally issued cards and SPEI bank transfers complete the mix.

A five-step framework for conversion rate optimisation

The guide closes with a framework that considers payment optimisation a continuous process.

1. Establish the performance baseline. Break the blended regional authorisation rate down by country, provider, issuer, and BIN, identify the largest sources of failed revenue, and compare domestic with cross-border results where both exist.
2. Localise the payment proposition. Accept relevant local cards and domestic schemes, offer instalments where customers expect them, show prices in local currency, and give preferred methods prominence at checkout. PPRO stresses choosing the right methods for each market over adding as many as possible.
3. Improve transaction quality. Review data completeness, tokenisation, authentication data, recurring payment indicators, and account updater services, and check that configurations built for US or European payments have been adapted correctly for LATAM.
4. Test local processing. Where domestic processing is available, benchmark it against the cross-border setup on approval rates, issuer-level performance, cost, customer experience, failed transaction rates, and fraud and chargeback metrics.
5. Build continuous optimisation and redundancy. Replace periodic reviews with ongoing monitoring by issuer and market, maintain feedback loops with processors, acquirers, and issuers, prepare for market-specific demand peaks, and reduce dependence on any single provider or route.

Across all five steps, the guide’s consistent advice is to read performance at a granular level. A setup that looks healthy across the region can still underperform in one country or issuing bank vs another, and PPRO argues that blended averages are where that lost revenue tends to stay hidden.

Download the full LATAM payment performance guide for more insights.

About the author

Vlad is a Senior Writer at The Paypers, working in the commercial team. He uses his research, content, and people skills for all editorial activities revolving around payments, banking, and fintech. Vlad has a degree in Biology and Molecular Genetics and an extensive background in creative writing. You can reach out to him on LinkedIn.