PPRO published the latest edition of its APAC to LATAM Corridor Series almanac this year, and its 2030 forecast pages draw a fissure across the region, causing it to split in two.
The forecast suggests that Brazil will head deeper into bank transfers, which the almanac expects to carry 58% of Brazilian eCommerce by the end of the decade, with Colombia on the same path. Meanwhile, Argentina, Chile and Mexico are anticipated to head in the other direction, towards digital wallets, at 49%, 37% and 38% of eCommerce, respectively. When taken at face value, that is a region diverging, and it invites merchants to build two distinct payment strategies that speak to two different Latin Americas.
I thought it would be interesting to read PPRO’s almanac in concert with Worldpay’s Global Payments Report 2026, because the GPR does something this year that the almanac doesn’t. For each market, the GPR estimates what actually funds the digital wallets. Dwayne Gefferie has already written an insightful piece on that new funding-mix data, using the examples of Japan and India to show the same wallet gesture playing out under entirely different economic parameters. I feel his examples deserve a LATAM sequel, because once the funding mix sits underneath the almanac’s forecasts, the divergence stops looking like just another fact about payment method variability. In my view, it becomes an important fact about who owns the checkout button, and that is a different question with a different answer in every market.
A forecast’s wallet metrics are built on a classification convention
Every payment-method forecast needs a rule for classifying each transaction. Payments and Commerce Market Intelligence (PCMI), whose market-sizing data underpins a significant share of the numbers circulating in the payments industry, has established a clear convention. Whenever a shopper pays with a card stored inside a wallet, “it’s the wallet that gets recorded” at the time of purchase, and not the card. Worldpay acknowledges the same idiosyncrasy from the other direction in its guide to Brazil within the GPR, noting that shoppers complete Pix purchases through banking and wallet apps alike, so Pix “contributes value” across multiple payment categories at once.
Put more simply, data attributed to the wallet measures which pane of glass the shopper tapped. It does not record the rail the money moved on, the cost of that rail to the merchant, or where the credit risk ended up for that transaction.
I would frame the distinction as button share against rail share. Button share is the share of checkout owned by a brand’s interface, and rail share is the share of value carried by the underlying payment system. Forecasts, such as the one from PPRO, publish the first, whilst a merchant’s costs, settlement and dispute exposure all follow the second through their acquirer. That recording convention is the statistical rationale for separating the data attributed to the wallet before taking it as gospel.
Brazil and Colombia run a public infrastructure rail underneath the checkout button
Let’s examine the two markets the almanac assigns to bank transfers, because they show what the wallet data looks like once a public rail sits beneath it. Colombia’s leading wallets, Nequi and DaviPlata, both grew out of banks, and the GPR’s survey found that a linked bank account was the leading payment option inside wallets in Colombia. Most bank-transfer checkouts in Colombia have run on PSE, a scheme operated by ACH Colombia, a private company owned by the banks, which charges the merchant a flat fee per transaction. Bre-B, the central bank’s instant payment system, came online in late 2025 with more than 12 million keys registered before launch, and Worldpay expects account-to-account (A2A) payments to reach 41% of Colombian eCommerce by 2030. Whether a purchase is attributed to the wallet or the bank-transfer payment method will increasingly depend on which app scanned the QR code to initiate the payment, and on nothing deeper than that.
In Brazil, Pix reached the checkout button directly through banking apps, and in the GPR’s 2025 analysis it carries 42% of eCommerce value, roughly as much as credit and debit cards combined, with wallets left at just 10%. Pix has not displaced cards so much as displaced the wallet as the way to pay from a bank account. What survives inside the wallets there, Mercado Pago and PicPay chief among them, is card spending. Worldpay finds that shoppers in Brazil most often select a stored card when paying through a wallet. The wallet is now mostly a home for card spending, because Pix does not need a wallet to reach the shopper.
The Central Bank of Brazil is also pushing Pix deeper into the wallets themselves. Contactless Pix launched in February 2025 inside Google Wallet, with Google licensed by the central bank as a payment initiator. In Brazil, the interesting contest is no longer between wallets and bank transfers, but whether Pix’s own brand ends up owning the checkout button too.
In Mexico and Chile, the wallet forecast is a card forecast disguised in fancier digital clothing
The wallet-first portion of the almanac’s map looks different when viewed from underneath. It becomes obvious when you read the headline Worldpay used in the Mexico guide of the GPR. “Digital wallets extend the reach of cards”. Credit cards remain the most popular way to pay online in Mexico and wallets are expected to reach parity with them by 2030. The funding mix inside those wallets runs on cards and instalments far more than on bank accounts. The reason sits in the rails. Mexico has SPEI (the Sistema de Pagos Electrónicos Interbancarios), a real-time payment system with enormous volume, but no public checkout layer built on top of it has ever reached shoppers at scale. CoDi (short for Cobro Digital), the central bank’s QR-payment attempt, was averaging around 12,000 operations a day at the end of 2023, according to Banxico’s reported numbers. Its successor, DiMo (short for Dinero Móvil), counted some 5.3 million registered users, in a country where PPRO puts everyday SPEI usage at 60% of Mexicans. The rail is well used, and the checkout products built on it are not.
Chile follows the same pattern with a debit accent instead of a credit one. The GPR describes the wallets Chileans favour, MACH, Mercado Pago, PayPal and Onepay, as featuring “mostly cards”, with debit the leading choice inside them, and projects debit cards to remain the country’s leading payment method through 2030. Only this August did the central bank publish a roadmap for interoperable QR payments at checkout, though it did not specify a launch date. That timing makes PPRO’s almanac’s forecast reconcilable with Worldpay’s. PPRO’s report has wallets set to lead Chilean eCommerce by 2030, while the GPR keeps debit cards in the lead. Both are correct because wallets in Chile are largely debit cards with a fancier digital interface.
For Mexico and Chile, the 2030 wallet forecast is mostly a card forecast, and a merchant should read it as one.
Argentina is where the funding underneath the button is genuinely contested
Argentina sits between the two halves, and it is the market where the GPR’s funding-mix estimate is most interesting since it shows a mix of cards, bank-account funding through Transferencias 3.0, instalment lending and crypto.
Transferencias 3.0 deserves more attention than it gets outside Argentina. The central bank mandated interoperability in 2020, so a QR code at the till can accept payment from any licensed bank or wallet app. By August 2025 the system was carrying 71 million transfer payments a month, up 46% on the year, nearly all of them QR-initiated, and funded at a roughly 55:45 split between accounts held with banks and accounts held with wallet providers. That funding split sits underneath every Argentine forecast, and it is why the wallet share there cannot be read at face value. Nor is the rail free for the merchant. Since February 2026 the BCRA has allowed acceptors to charge merchants between 0.6 and 0.8% on these transfer payments, with a regulated share of that fee passed to the shopper’s account provider as interchange. Those are a card scheme’s economics, set by a central bank at a regulated price.
The same QR-initiated payment can land in the statistics as either a bank transfer or a wallet payment, depending on whether the shopper draws the money from an account held with a bank or one held with a wallet provider.
The contest is real on the other side too. Card operations still carry more volume than transfer payments, credit instalments keep growing as shoppers use cuotas to manage inflation, and Mercado Pago has spent the last two years pursuing full banking licences in Mexico and Argentina. The wallet’s place at the Argentine checkout looks settled, but what funds it is being contested year by year.
Credit is what the wallet share does measure well
If I argue that the wallet share measures the button, it is only fair to say what it measures well. The answer is credit. A wallet share swollen by instalment lending in Argentina, or by credit cards in Mexico, describes different shopper behaviour from a bank-transfer share made up of paid-in-full Pix, and that difference is real information. If the wallet-versus-transfer axis is retired, the axis worth keeping is credit-attached against balance-attached checkout, and on that axis the almanac’s split across the region sits closer to the truth than my recording-convention argument alone would suggest.
Credit is also where I expect the next decade of wallet value to be built. Cards earned their place at the checkout by backing every payment with a pre-approved revolving credit line. Instant rails such as Pix and UPI (India’s Unified Payments Interface) move balances, and a shopper paying from a balance is effectively paying on debit. The wallet providers that matter on these rails will be the ones that put credit and real-time underwriting back on top. NuPay already shows what that looks like, one Nubank checkout button behind which the shopper picks a balance, a Pix transfer or an instalment on a credit line, and India’s central bank has allowed pre-sanctioned credit lines to be drawn through UPI since 2023. In Brazil, bank-built instalment products on Pix exist without a scheme standard, after the central bank stepped back from writing one in December 2025. Private credit layered onto public payment infrastructure is, in my view, the business model hidden within every one of these forecasts, and I will come back to it in a separate piece.
The line that divides LATAM by 2030 runs under the checkout
Coming back to the almanac’s forecast pages, the divergence they draw is real. I would just redraw the line. On one side sit the markets where a public instant rail reached the checkout, Brazil and Colombia today with Argentina part-way across, where the merchant pays their PSP rather than a card network and the money is made in the layers on top. On the other side sit Mexico and Chile, where checkout still runs end-to-end on card rails priced by the networks, and where the wallet growth every forecast agrees on is largely those rails gaining a better interface. Chile’s roadmap and Mexico’s DiMo may yet move them across, and that migration is the development worth watching, rather than the wallet percentages themselves.
Put in dollars, the line is easier to see. Multiplying Worldpay’s market sizes by its payment-method shares, both for 2025, gives roughly $48 billion of eCommerce value on account-to-account rails across the five markets, roughly $96 billion on credit and debit cards, and roughly $45 billion paid through digital wallets. The published data names the rail for the first two. For the third it names only the brand the shopper tapped, and that third is almost as large as everything the account-to-account rails carry.
Worldpay’s own 2030 forecast is worth reading against that line. On its numbers, and using the same construction, value on account-to-account rails grows from roughly $48 billion to $82 billion by 2030, while value on cards grows from roughly $96 billion to $126 billion. The split narrows from two-to-one to about three-to-two, and the account-to-account rails do the catching up. I had expected the forecast to widen it.
The question underneath all of this is what funds the button, and it has a specific audience. A shopper does not care which rail sits under Mercado Pago or Nequi, and a forecast written by button share serves a merchant choosing which logos to show at checkout perfectly well. Where it falls short is for anyone whose economic levers sit on the rail. For them, a wallet funded by Pix behaves like account-to-account volume, with account-to-account costs, settlement times and dispute exposure, and a wallet funded by cards behaves like card volume, with interchange, chargebacks and scheme rules attached. Reading the forecast by funding rail shows which rails are gaining value and will be moving more money by 2030, and that, rather than the wallet percentages, is the number a pricing, settlement or risk model stands to improve from.
Where a 2030 forecast shows a wallet share, the useful question is what funds the button, and I would not price, settle or underwrite a Latin American checkout before answering it.