Why winning Latin America’s underbanked matters for betting operators

Latin America’s iGaming market is projected to reach nearly $10 billion by 2028, but the real bottleneck is not demand. It is payment friction: cash-heavy markets, large unbanked populations and missing local methods are still pushing bettors out at the cashier, right when operators have already spent to acquire them.

1. The region is drawing attention for a reason: newly regulated markets, greater connectivity, rapid mobile adoption and a huge population of sports fans are pulling domestic and international operators in. But if a customer reaches the payment screen and cannot pay the way they normally do, the funnel breaks at the most expensive possible point.
2. Cash still matters. According to the Worldpay global payments report, in 2025 cash accounted for 23% of point-of-sale spending in Latin America, which is 9% higher than the global average. The trend is not uniform, though: Brazil stands at 12% and Chile at 16%, while Colombia is at 32% and Mexico at 40%.
3. The unbanked issue is just as direct. A reported 26% of Latin Americans are unbanked, which means betting operators need payment options that match how people already manage money, not how a bank would prefer they did.
4. Brazil shows what that looks like in practice. Ari Célia, co-founder and director of Pay4Fun, says: “Digital bank accounts in Brazil are common and easy to open. You just download an app”. He adds that “even if you have a bad credit record, you can still get a bank account”.
5. Pix, the digital payment system managed by the Brazilian Central Bank, has become the clearest example of local rails doing the heavy lifting. According to data from Pay4Fun, Pix accounts for a reported 96% of gambling transactions in Brazil, giving bettors instant access to funds and giving operators a payment method that fits the market instead of fighting it.

For PSPs and acquirers serving high-risk merchants, the takeaway is simple: in Latin America, payment acceptance is not a back-office detail. It is part of the conversion stack. If the customer cannot fund quickly with a familiar method, the bet is gone, the acquisition spend is wasted, and the operator gets to explain to management why the cash register was placed behind a locked door.