Carlos Menendez says merchants entering Brazil, India and Kenya ignore local payment rails at their own conversion risk

International merchants often treat payments as the last item on the launch checklist. Carlos Menendez, COO at dLocal, says that is exactly how they end up with delayed launches, failed setups and checkout flows built around payment methods their customers barely use.

1. Menendez argues that many merchants expanding into Brazil, India, Kenya or Southeast Asia arrive assuming a card acquirer will do the same job it does in the US, UK or Western Europe. In practice, he says, that assumption collides with markets built on instant payment schemes and mobile money, where payments are not a late-stage detail but part of market entry itself.
2. He gives Brazil as the clearest example. Three weeks before launch, a global merchant finds that its cross-border entity structure cannot accept Pix. Fixing that by establishing a local entity takes months, the launch slips, and by the time the business goes live its checkout is built around payment methods most target customers rarely use.
3. The source says this is not a rare failure mode. Research into emerging market entry shows that 64 per cent of merchants report operational and technical failures with their payment systems, and 57 per cent experience conversion problems as a direct result. Menendez’s point is that these are not edge cases; they are what happens when a merchant builds for a familiar market and then tries to copy-paste the model elsewhere.
4. He contrasts that legacy approach with the rails already in place in these markets. Pix processed 64 billion transactions in 2024, nearly twice the combined volume of all card transactions in Brazil. It settles in seconds, costs merchants a fraction of card interchange, and reached 93 per cent of Brazilian adults in under five years.
5. India’s UPI processed nearly half of all real-time digital payment transactions globally last year, with a transaction value twelve times the combined total of all card payments in India. In Kenya, M-Pesa processes around $800. The common thread, in Menendez’s telling, is that merchants who treat payments as an afterthought are not just delaying launch; they are choosing the wrong infrastructure for the market they want to enter.

For high-risk merchants and the PSPs that serve them, the practical takeaway is simple: market entry is not only about licensing, entity structure and distribution. If the local payment rail is Pix, UPI or mobile money, a card-first setup is not a neutral default. It is a conversion problem with a legal wrapper.