Navigating the Payment Landscape of Latin America: Insights from Edward Chandler of OKTO
As Latin America solidifies its role as a crucial yet intricate payment landscape, businesses in Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Chile, and Mexico face increasing demands to provide swift, trustworthy, and compliant services. Edward Chandler, CEO of OKTO, possesses a unique understanding of this evolving environment. In conversation with iGB, Chandler reveals how OKTO is redefining its approach, what this means for merchants, and where future disruptions are likely to emerge in the region.
iGB: Latin America’s payment ecosystem is rapidly changing. What’s your vision for how merchants in Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Chile, and Mexico can thrive in the next five years?
Edward Chandler: Latin America has transformed from a frontier market into a testing ground for the future of payments. Operators, particularly in iGaming, contend with formidable challenges: varying regulations, distinct payment preferences, and consumers who prioritize speed, trust, and transparency.
In the coming years, success will belong to those who can seamlessly scale their operations, offering localized payment methods, streamlined onboarding, and rapid payouts, all while adapting to regulatory changes.
At OKTO, we aspire to be the payment partner that operators can trust most. This ambition drives us to innovate differently—utilizing AI throughout our infrastructure, enabling us to turn complexity into an advantage and focusing relentlessly on the outcomes for merchants.
By tackling the less glamorous aspects of the payment process, such as reconciliation and liquidity management, we empower merchants to pursue growth with greater speed and security.
The competitive landscape in LatAm is dense, particularly among payment providers. Can you explain OKTO’s ‘Precision Mode’ and how it sets you apart?
Chandler: Precision Mode encapsulates our commitment to meticulously addressing details often overlooked by others in the industry. We are designed for the toughest conditions, where compliance, uptime, and quick settlements aren’t optional—they are critical.
In the LatAm iGaming sector, this translates to immediate settlements, AI-informed risk assessment, and systems built for high demand and regulatory scrutiny.
Rather than trying to cater to every conceivable payment method, we focus our energies on those that yield the best results for our clients. Our strength lies in excelling at the essentials—offering instant, compliant pay-ins and payouts and simplifying liquidity management and reconciliation for even the most complex operators.
This foundational approach within Precision Mode gives our partners a significant advantage as they scale efficiently throughout the region.
OKTO positions itself as an AI-native player in payments. How does this benefit merchants in a complex and risky sector like iGaming?
Chandler: Our AI-native status is more than just a tagline; it reflects our operational framework. Over recent months, we have integrated AI across every layer of our platform, resulting in teams globally that are equipped with AI tools by default.
This integration fosters tangible advantages for our iGaming partners in LatAm, including predictive fraud detection that proactively prevents issues, accelerated merchant onboarding that reduces timelines dramatically, and real-time comprehension of regulatory shifts for swift adaptations. We’ve managed to cut onboarding durations by up to 60% while enhancing market entry speeds by nearly half compared to traditional methods.
Moreover, AI contributes to enhanced transaction routing, improved treasury management, and anticipatory merchant support. This is not about superficial upgrades; it is about embedding resilience into the core of our operations. AI empowers us to be quicker, smarter, and more focused on helping our partners succeed in demanding markets.
In LatAm, onboarding setbacks can lead to significant losses. How does OKTO facilitate expeditious onboarding and robust operational performance?
Chandler: Our onboarding process is designed with compliance at its heart from the outset: automated KYC/KYB processes, local regulatory verifications, and seamless integrations with merchant systems guarantee faster rollouts without sacrificing trust.
On the operational side, we maintain the same precision: round-the-clock monitoring, intelligent failover mechanisms, and infrastructure tailored for high-volume and low-latency environments. During peak sporting events, our partners can rely on our payment systems, knowing that even minor delays could translate to lost opportunities.
“Building differently means we not only remove friction; we preempt it.”
With the regulatory landscape in LatAm often in flux, how does OKTO’s design facilitate cross-border scaling for merchants?
Chandler: Expanding in LatAm resembles playing regulatory chess across multiple boards. Whereas many payment service providers view regulatory volatility as a challenge, we see it as an integral competency that differentiates us from the competition. Instead of reactive strategies regarding new regulations, we embed compliance into our architecture from the very beginning.
This compliance-by-design principle ensures that our transactions, payouts, and reporting processes not only meet but often surpass local standards. Consequently, when payment frameworks in countries like Brazil shift, our partners can adapt within hours rather than months.
This structural agility arises from our proactive approach. By embracing regulatory changes, we transform potential complications into opportunities, allowing our partners to concentrate on growth rather than regulatory hurdles.
How do you ensure that merchant feedback shapes your product development and innovation strategies?
Chandler: At OKTO, our innovation is deeply anchored in intentionally listening to our merchants. Each team that interacts with merchants collects feedback, which is subsequently directed to our Merchant Excellence Pods. These pods integrate engineers, product managers, compliance experts, and merchant representatives to convert insights into tangible solutions.
Our roadmap isn’t developed in isolation; it is a direct reflection of merchant performance indicators turned into engineering priorities. This process guarantees that every feature and function contributes to measurable outcomes for our merchants.
What impact have OKTO’s solutions had for operators in Latin America thus far?
Chandler: The initial part of the year was focused on more than mere innovation; it centered on equipping our merchant partners with solutions that enable them to operate quicker, smarter, and further than previously possible. Our platform has facilitated transactions exceeding €6 billion ($5.2 billion) in LatAm in just the first six months, establishing new standards for speed and reliability.
Our advanced routing engine empowers merchants to optimize transactions by various factors like country, bank, and payment methods, achieving a balance between cost and conversion. Across key markets like Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Argentina, and Chile, we’ve introduced ten essential local payment methods, supported by real-time monitoring to ensure uninterrupted service.
We’ve also ventured into funds management, both domestic and cross-border settlements, and foreign exchange conversion, all aimed at granting merchants precise control and extensive compliance.
The results are striking: in an arena where modest improvements in acceptance rates can equate to substantial financial gains, our capability to enhance performance is more than a minor increment—it’s a substantial competitive advantage. By collaborating closely with one of our iGaming partners in Brazil, we succeeded in elevating acceptance rates by nearly three percentage points within the first two quarters post-migration to OKTO, translating directly into millions of additional deposits and improved player retention.
“Achieving nearly three percentage points improvement in acceptance rates resulted in millions in additional deposits for one of our partners.”
These successes aren’t isolated; they demonstrate that our dedication to engineering with a merchant-first mindset consistently drives substantial outcomes—higher conversion rates, robust uptime, and reduced costs.
Looking ahead, what major disruption do you foresee in the LatAm eCommerce realm in the next three years, and how is OKTO preparing for it?
Chandler: The next significant shift will involve the merging of instant payments, integrated financial services, and AI-driven personalization. Consumers will increasingly seek payments that are instantaneous, context-aware, and effortless.
We’ve observed this transformation already in Brazil with PIX, which has rapidly altered market expectations for speed and reliability while diminishing reliance on traditional card options. This trend is proliferating across Latin America, with systems like SPEI in Mexico, frictionless CVU transactions in Argentina, and similar developments in Chile and Peru. The trajectory is clear: as local payment methods replace card reliance, a new infrastructure will underpin digital commerce across the continent.
This underscores why OKTO is adopting a distinctive strategy. Our infrastructure is primed for instant connections, API-driven, and adaptable to emerging local systems. More critically, we are intensifying our focus on the factors that genuinely enhance conversion rates in this region: local payment methods that ensure speed, trust, and extensive compliance.
The operators who leverage this transition away from outdated card systems towards a future centered on real-time solutions and local payment methods will lead the next chapter of player loyalty throughout Latin America. Our commitment is to equip them with the tools and resilience required to achieve this vision swiftly.