ACI Worldwide and dLocal say card-only checkout is costing global merchants customers across Latin America

ACI Worldwide and dLocal announced a partnership on 28 July that gives global merchants a single integration into the ACI Payments Orchestration Platform and access to six local payment methods across Brazil and Mexico at launch, with Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Peru to follow. Their core argument is blunt: in Latin America, a card-first checkout is often a conversion problem, not just a payments preference.

1. Horacio Raviolo, head of commercial partnerships at dLocal, says card-first thinking has stuck because global merchants built for the markets they know best, where card infrastructure is familiar and easy to scale. But, as he puts it, “Latin America is not a single payments market.”
2. According to Raviolo, wallets, real-time transfers and bank transfers now make up around half of online transactions across the region, and they are already dominant in several countries. His point is that a card-only experience does not just narrow payment choice; it excludes shoppers who rely on local rails.
3. The companies frame the commercial cost in plain terms: “lost customers at checkout.” Raviolo says offering the methods consumers already know builds trust, which “translates directly into conversion and revenue.” In the announcement, they also cited two figures: 96 per cent of merchants using multiple acquirers report higher revenue, and nearly two-thirds identify payment flexibility as a key growth driver.
4. Raviolo says the region’s fragmentation is structural because consumer preferences, payment rails, regulation and operating requirements vary substantially by market. He contrasts Brazil’s instant-payments ecosystem with Colombia’s bank-transfer-led e-commerce market, and says a solution that works in one country cannot simply be copied into another.
5. His distinction is between connectivity and execution. “Connectivity gets a merchant to a method,” he says. “Genuine local expertise makes that method perform”: knowing which options consumers trust, how to present them at checkout, how to manage local compliance and settlement, and how to handle risk in each market. Vlademir Santos, head of Brazil at ACI Worldwide, took the same view in the written answers shared by both companies.

For PSPs, acquirers and banks working in high-risk verticals, the useful detail here is not the partnership logo; it is the operating model. Latin America is being described as a set of local payment markets with different rails, rules and customer habits, which means cross-border checkout logic that works on cards alone can leave revenue on the table.