As the economies of emerging market countries continue to grow and people’s spending power increases, many global cross-border payment institutions have accelerated their efforts to tap into this blue ocean market.
Since last year, Brazil’s large cross-border payment platform – EBANX has been making frequent moves.
In 2025, EBANX obtained the Large Payment Institution (MPI) license from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and launched its Philippine business.
In early 2026, EBANX established its Asia-Pacific headquarters and regional CEO in Singapore.
João Del Valle, co-founder and global CEO of EBANX, said that in the next 10 years, compared with only 28 million new consumers in developed economies, emerging markets are expected to add more than 1 billion new consumers, driving a 32% increase in global consumer scale.
This indicates that cross-border payment institutions must seize growth opportunities in emerging markets to achieve sustained and rapid development of various businesses.
Not only EBANX, but also dLocal, PayerMax, and Antom have been making every effort to develop cross-border e-commerce and B2B cross-border trade in emerging markets in recent years.
The research report “Beyond Borders 2026” released by EBANX shows that in the next 10 years, the growth rate of consumer scale in India (62%), Philippines (55%), Kenya (52%), Indonesia (42%), Nigeria (40%), and Egypt (36%) is higher than the average growth rate of consumer scale in emerging markets (32%), and will become a key area for cross-border payment institutions to deploy in emerging markets.
However, if cross-border payment institutions want to gain a foothold in these emerging market countries and regions, they mainly face three major challenges: First, the fragmentation of the payment ecology of each country is different, and cross-border payment institutions need to use effective financial technology to integrate mainstream payment methods in various countries and regions to build comprehensive localized payment services; second, the financial regulatory policies of various countries
Differences in policies and complex compliance requirements require cross-border payment institutions to form specialized teams to ensure that payment services fully meet regulatory compliance requirements. Third, consumers’ payment preferences vary significantly across countries. Cross-border payment institutions need to have a deep understanding of local users’ payment habits, build a payment network that can satisfy users’ payment experience, efficiently link users and merchants, and drive the continued expansion of consumption scale.
“Whether cross-border payment institutions can successfully seize growth opportunities in emerging markets depends largely on whether they can create a good user payment service experience.” João Del Valle emphasized that the popularity of artificial intelligence technology (AI) is making the competition around payment service experience more intense.
At present, more and more cross-border payment institutions are integrating AI into the payment system. On the one hand, they use AI technology to find payment paths with the highest efficiency and lowest operating costs for consumers and merchants. On the other hand, they use AI technology to continue to improve the efficiency of bank reconciliation and other work, simplifying a large number of payment processes for consumers and merchants.
However, the widespread application of AI technology has also brought about a double-edged sword effect. Many cross-border payment institutions will also face increasingly severe risks such as “AI fraud”. This is also a new challenge that cross-border payment institutions need to solve urgently through AI technology to deeply explore emerging markets.
Overall, the rapid growth of consumers in emerging markets is mainly affected by three major factors: First, the economies of emerging markets have maintained rapid growth in recent years, which has led to an increase in local people’s wealth and rising spending power; second, the rapid popularity of smartphones has led to more emerging markets
People can purchase a large number of goods and services through online e-commerce. Third, the rapid rise of emerging payment methods such as mobile payments, e-wallets, and instant payments has made consumer payments very convenient for more people in emerging market countries, boosting their average daily consumption to exceed US$13, and has been included in the category of “consumers” by many research institutions.
“Beyond Borders 2026” shows that under the resonance of the above factors, consumption growth in emerging markets will continue to accelerate in the next 10 years. Among them, consumer spending in Southeast Asia and India, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America increased by 147%, 122%, and 66% respectively, which are higher than the 49% in Europe, the United States, and Canada.
“This is also one of the fundamental reasons why we upgraded Singapore to the Asia-Pacific headquarters based on the establishment of a global fund settlement center in Singapore.” João Del Valle said that in the future, the Asia-Pacific headquarters will serve as an important fulcrum for EBANX to strengthen its layout in the Asia-Pacific region, focusing on three tasks, namely promoting the growth of merchants in the Asia-Pacific region, accessing more localized payment methods to improve payment capabilities, and establishing deeper cooperative relationships with more financial technology ecological partners.
In his view, the rapid growth of consumers and consumer spending in emerging markets not only brings business growth opportunities, but also profound changes in payment methods and payment service experience.
Compared with the extremely high credit card usage penetration rate (91%) in developed economies, the proportion of ordinary people holding credit cards in emerging markets is significantly lower. For example, in Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Malaysia, South Africa, Egypt, India, and Indonesia, the proportion of adults holding credit cards is only 44%, 30%, 13%, 13%, 10%, 6%, 6%, and 6% respectively.
In this case, the payment habits of people in these emerging market countries directly skip credit cards and switch from cash to e-wallets, account-to-account (A2A) transfers, instant payments and mobile payments.
It should be noted that the online payment behavior of various emerging market countries is quite different, and the overall situation is obviously fragmented.
For example, in the Philippines, the usage penetration rate of digital wallets is the highest; in Kenya, mobile money dominates; in Brazil, Pix (national instant payment system) coexists with bank cards, cash coupons and local wallets; in India, the instant payment system UPI dominates the local digital payment ecosystem.
João Del Valle pointed out that in Brazil and India, Pix and UPI are fast, low-cost, and universally accessible. They have been widely used in personal transfers and e-commerce payments, and are reshaping the local digital payment landscape.
In his view, in the future, the development of the payment industry in emerging market countries will show a new trend of mobile first and increasingly localized payment ecology.
In Nigeria, local card organization Verve has promoted debit card penetration from 35% to 48% in the past three years; in Egypt, the local card payment system Meeza promoted by the government is continuing to expand the coverage of financial services; in Mexico, digital wallets (such as Mercado Pago) are increasingly occupying the B2C payment market, and B2B fund payments are also shifting to A2A transfers; in Brazil, driven by the increasingly widespread application of Pix, B2B and B2C payments are highly concentrated on A2A transfers.
“Under this new trend, if global e-commerce, mobile travel, electronic games, streaming media and other digital economy companies want to deeply explore these emerging market countries and regions, they must first build a localized payment service system that suits local people’s payment habits and preferences to achieve better business revenue growth.” João Del Valle said that in 2012, EBANX first cooperated with Chinese merchants to expand the Brazilian market, and set up an office in Shanghai in 2019.
So far, EBANX has helped many Chinese overseas e-commerce companies access localized payment systems in different emerging markets and build a good user payment service experience, helping them achieve performance growth in these emerging markets.
In the future, EBANX will cooperate with more SaaS (software as a service), mobile travel, streaming media, electronic games and other companies in China to help more Chinese companies successfully go global.
The current leading companies in China’s mobile travel industry already occupy a high market share in Latin America. Once they establish a more complete localized payment service system and further improve the user payment experience, João Del Valle predicts that related businesses will also “go to the next level.”
With the increasing popularity of AI technology in the field of e-commerce consumption and payment, João Del Valle also deeply feels that another new development trend in the payment industry in emerging markets in the future that cannot be ignored is AI-driven automated transactions.
“Currently, AI has begun to reshape the e-commerce shopping methods of consumers in emerging markets.” He said that driven by AI large-model technology and AI Agents, the e-commerce purchasing habits of people in emerging markets are shifting from “browsing shopping” to “conversational purchasing.” More and more AI agents are deeply assisting consumers in participating in and completing e-commerce purchase decisions and transaction execution.
Research by McKinsey, Deloitte and other institutions shows that 10% of consumers have started the online shopping process through AI, and 20% of consumers express their willingness to let AI complete the purchase. It is estimated that by 2030, about 30% of global e-commerce transactions will be affected by intelligent agents. The resulting AI automated operations are expected to promote a global transaction scale of US$17.5 trillion.
Under this trend, cross-border payment institutions also need to deeply embed the payment service system into the AI-driven e-commerce shopping operation process to further enhance users’ e-commerce payment experience.
João Del Valle revealed that the increasing popularity of AI-driven automated transactions is also reshaping the payment and settlement processes of cross-border payment institutions. For example, in terms of e-commerce payment transaction processing and fund settlement, cross-border payment institutions need to use AI technology to quickly find the most efficient and lowest-cost payment path for consumers and merchants to receive funds; in terms of bank reconciliation operations, the AI+ payment system of cross-border payment institutions needs to automatically and quickly generate e-commerce shopping payment documents so that banks can complete anti-money laundering and other aspects of audits.
He also noticed an interesting phenomenon. More and more emerging market companies hope to copy the fast and convenient experience of e-commerce B2C payment to B2B trade links. For example, in the procurement link, companies also hope to use AI and other technologies to complete rapid fund transfers and automated compliance audits.
“However, it also faces a series of challenges, such as AI system failures, which lead to errors in people’s e-commerce shopping or corporate purchases. Who will be responsible?” João Del Valle pointed out that what is even more serious is that more and more payment frauds based on AI technology are occurring, and cross-border payment institutions need to build stronger firewalls to resist the impact of AI fraud.
At the same time, the growth of digital currency in the payment field of emerging markets is particularly rapid, making many cross-border payment institutions pay close attention to this rapidly emerging new payment format.
“Beyond Borders 2026” shows that in emerging market countries and regions such as Brazil, Argentina, Thailand, and Vietnam, more than 15% of the people hold digital currencies. In Turkey, this proportion reaches about 20%.
João Del Valle believes that the transfer speed and global accessibility of digital currency have increasingly made it a new choice for e-commerce shopping payment for many people in emerging markets.
However, in the payment and settlement process of digital currency, anti-money laundering supervision still needs to establish a more complete system.
In addition, the rate cost of digital currency transfers will also affect its future development space.
In order to build strong business barriers in the future “AI+ payment” era, since last year, many cross-border payment institutions have sought a new round of financing and continued to increase investment in research and development of “AI+ payment”.
When talking about whether to “follow up and seek a new round of financing,” João Del Valle said that after completing US$430 million in equity financing in 2021, EBANX has sufficient capital reserves to support investment in research and development in “AI + payment”.
However, EBANX may also formulate an IPO plan in the next two years – by landing in the capital market, EBANX hopes to enhance its business influence in emerging markets and better tap into this blue ocean market.
