When ACI Worldwide and dLocal announced their partnership on 28 July, the offer to global merchants was a single integration into the ACI Payments Orchestration Platform, six local payment methods across Brazil and Mexico at launch, and Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Peru to follow. Behind it sits a claim both companies have been making for some time: that alternative payment methods now account for around half of online transactions across Latin America, and that a merchant arriving with a card-only checkout is leaving customers behind.
The Fintech Times put six written questions to the two companies. Horacio Raviolo, head of commercial partnerships at dLocal, and Vlademir Santos, head of Brazil at ACI Worldwide, split them between them, and both took the question on Pix. This article draws on their written answers.
Why card-first thinking has lasted
Raviolo puts the persistence of card-first thinking down to habit rather than analysis. “Card-first thinking has persisted because global merchants have historically designed their experiences for the markets they know best: card infrastructure is familiar, standardised and relatively straightforward to scale across borders,” he says. “But Latin America is not a single payments market.” Wallets, real-time transfers and bank transfers now make up around half of online transactions across the region, he says, and are already dominant in several countries.
The cost, in his words, is “lost customers at checkout”. A card-only experience, he says, “excludes shoppers who prefer, or depend on, local rails, limiting conversion in some of the region’s fastest-growing digital commerce markets”. Offering the methods consumers already know builds trust, “which translates directly into conversion and revenue”. He points to figures that also appear in the two companies’ announcement: 96 per cent of merchants using multiple acquirers report higher revenue, and nearly two-thirds identify payment
flexibility as a key growth driver.
The fragmentation that makes the region hard to serve is structural. “Fragmentation comes from the fact that consumer preferences, payment rails, regulation and operating requirements vary substantially from one market to another,” Raviolo says. Brazil’s instant-payments ecosystem is very different from Colombia’s bank-transfer-led e-commerce market, and a solution that works in one country cannot simply be copied into another. That is why he draws a line between having a connection and making it work. “Connectivity gets a
merchant to a method. Genuine local expertise makes that method perform: understanding which options consumers know and trust, how to present them at checkout, how to manage local compliance and settlement, and how to handle risk in each market.” Payments, he adds, “are the front door to Latin America’s digital economy; getting them right requires more than a technical connection”
One integration, six methods
Santos describes what the partnership means for a merchant in practice. “For merchants and payment providers, this partnership means one integration into the ACI Payments Orchestration Platform, rather than building separate connectivity market by market,” he says. At launch that covers six local payment methods: Pix, PicPay, Mercado Pago and NuPay in Brazil, and Mercado Pago, OXXO and SPEI in Mexico. Merchants can onboard and start processing transactions in both markets now.
Adding those methods, he says, does not mean handing over control. “dLocal brings the local payment connectivity and market expertise, while ACI’s orchestration layer still governs routing, fraud prevention and payments intelligence. Merchants decide which methods to offer, how transactions are routed, and how their overall payments strategy is executed.” The merchant gets the reach of local options consumers already trust, in his account, without giving up visibility or control over how those payments flow through the business, and the partnership removes most of the technical complexity normally associated with adding new payment methods in different markets.
What Pix has shown
Both spokespeople answered the question on Pix, Brazil’s instant payments system, which now has more than 170 million users. For Raviolo it “shows what can happen when instant payments are designed for mass, everyday use”, reaching around 95 per cent of the country’s adult population. “Its proposition is straightforward: immediate confirmation, 24/7 availability and a familiar experience through banking or wallet apps, using QR codes or a copy-and-paste option.” For other markets, he says, the lesson is that “interoperable, accessible rails can become mainstream infrastructure rather than a niche feature”. For
merchants, “the lesson is not to prioritise payment methods solely by global brand recognition”; ignoring the rails consumers trust locally can exclude a meaningful share of potential customers.
Santos reads the same story as a lesson in how fast behaviour can move. Pix’s growth, he says, “shows how quickly consumer behaviour can shift when a payment method removes friction and matches how people want to pay”. It is now central to how Brazilians transact online, and merchants who have not prioritised it are, in his phrase, “leaving conversion on the table”. The wider point is that card-first strategies do not automatically translate across the region: alternative methods already make up around half of online transactions, preferences vary widely by country, and what works in Brazil is not necessarily what wins in
Colombia or Mexico. That, he says, is why the partnership was built around orchestration rather than a one-size-fits-all approach.
Fraud, risk and the next four markets
Raviolo is careful not to present local methods as a free conversion gain. “Merchants should regard payment-method choice as both a conversion decision and a risk-management decision,” he says. Local methods can reduce checkout friction and expand reach, “but each must be supported by the right fraud controls, transaction intelligence and operational processes”. His practical approach is to diversify rather than depend on a single rail, use local intelligence to set the right mix in each market, and keep visibility of routing and performance so the strategy can be adjusted as data comes in. He also notes that account-to-
account payments, wallets and instant-payment systems “have dispute processes that differ from card chargebacks, potentially offering faster resolution and lower fraud rates”. The objective, he says, “is not simply to add methods, but to combine locally relevant payment acceptance with robust fraud prevention and control”
On the four markets planned for the next phase, Santos warns against assuming Brazil and Mexico are a template. “Each of these markets has its own payment culture,” he says. Account-to-account transfers, for example, already play a critical role in e-commerce in Colombia. “The common thread across the region is that alternative payment methods matter, but the specific instruments and consumer expectations differ market to market, so genuine local expertise remains essential alongside technical connectivity.”
Looking three years out, he expects alternative payment methods to keep gaining share as more of the region’s consumers come online. “Cards will remain part of the mix, but merchants that treat local methods as complementary, not secondary, will be the ones capturing the region’s digital commerce growth,” he says. “Orchestration will become less of a differentiator and more of a baseline expectation, as merchants demand the flexibility to add markets and methods without rebuilding their infrastructure each time.”
Launch coverage under the partnership is Brazil and Mexico. Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Peru are planned as the next phase of expansion, and neither company has yet given a date for them.
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