One of the themes we come back to often at Glenbrook is there really is no such thing as a regional payment strategy for merchants.

Country-by-country differences in card penetration, instant payment adoption, wallets, regulation, consumer behavior, and checkout expectations all matter deeply, and they have real implications for conversion, authorization, and long-term growth.

In this episode, Drew Edmond is joined by João Del Valle, CEO and co-founder of EBANX, to talk about the origin story of EBANX, why Brazil has historically been such a difficult market for non-Brazilian merchants, and what João has learned as the company has expanded into new regions.

Listen in as they cover some of the biggest topics shaping the next phase of global payments, including Pix and Pix Automático in Brazil, payment optimization when looking at local payment methods, and perspectives on agentic commerce and stablecoins.

For more insights on Pix and Pix Automático, agentic commerce, and stablecoins, join us NEXT WEEK for the live virtual Advanced Payments workshop on May 19-20. Learn more and register here.

 

 

 

Episode Transcript

Drew Edmond: Hi, everybody. I’m Drew Edmond, a partner at Glenbrook and your host for this episode of Payments on Fire. Before we get into today’s episode, I wanted to remind everyone that we have an Advanced Payments workshop coming up next week on May 19th and 20th. This is a live virtual session focused on the most significant industry trends that are currently shaping the future of payments, including macro trends, important card network updates, of course, stablecoins and agentic commerce, and much more. You can sign up today at glenbrook.com.

Today, we’re taking a closer look at one of the most important stories in global payments, the rise of emerging markets as engines of digital commerce growth. One of the defining shifts in the global e-commerce market is the billions of consumers across Latin America, Africa, and Asia coming online with mobile-first behaviors, local payment preferences, and expectations shaped not just by cards, but by instant payments, wallets, installments, bank transfers, and other domestic rails.

To help us unpack that shift, I’m joined today by João Del Valle, CEO and co-founder of EBANX. EBANX started in Brazil in 2012 with a very practical mission, helping global merchants accept local payments in one of the most complex e-commerce markets in the world. Since then, the company has expanded well beyond Brazil and Latin America, building a footprint across more than twenty markets and giving the team a unique vantage point on how global commerce is evolving across emerging economies.

In this conversation, we’ll talk about the origin story of EBANX, why Brazil has historically been such a difficult market for non-Brazilian merchants, and what João has learned as the company has expanded into new regions. We’ll also dig into one of the themes we come back to often at Glenbrook: there really is no such thing as a regional payment strategy for merchants.

Country by country differences in card penetration, instant payment adoption, wallets, regulation, consumer behavior, and checkout expectations all matter deeply, and they have real implications for conversion, authorization, and long-term growth.

We’ll also get into some of the biggest questions shaping the next phase of payments. Pix and Pix Automático in Brazil, Colombia’s Bre-B, comparisons with UPI, payment optimization when looking at local payment methods, orchestration, agentic commerce, stablecoins, all the hot topics.

João and the EBANX team have a front row seat to many of these changes, so I’m excited to explore not just what’s happening today, but what they’re looking at in the future that we’ll be talking about over the next few years. João, welcome to Payments On Fire.

João Del Valle: Awesome. Hello, Drew. Thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure.

Drew Edmond: So We usually start with a little bit of background on getting to know you and your journey into payments. So I’d like to start with you. You’ve been a software developer, you’ve been a CTO, you’ve been a COO. There’s only a few C-level titles left. CEO now.

So tell us a little bit of your journey to becoming the CEO of EBANX.

João Del Valle: So yeah, I’m an engineer by training. So software engineer whole career, like mostly technical software architecture. Went a little to also kind of academia. But then I really like technology and applying it to problems of big scale. And when we co-founded EBANX, I think that was what probably attracted me.

I worked with payments before, especially in Brazil, like bank transfer, boleto, all those kinds of old stuff, credit cards. But really doing something at scale, it’s what attracts me. I used to work a lot with telecom, and it’s interesting because nowadays telecom is not such a sexy topic anymore.

But back in the 2000s, it was a big thing, a big transformation going on there. And it feels a bit similar because it’s incredible throughput of transactions, which is like calls and data and so on. So that stabilized a little bit. But then in payments we have a similar thing, because it’s massive amount of transactions, and it matters a lot, and it needs to work. Nobody wants their transaction to fail or to go wrong or especially to be lost.

So that’s probably what attracted me and I was passionate about it from the beginning. I remember the first days that we had big merchants transacting the platform and looking at the dashboard and see, Wow, this is real. This is growing stuff.

So that’s what excites me even until today when a merchant goes live and we see the volume there and, wow, this is working. And I think it was natural for me to kind of amplify my scope in operations in general, because it’s not only building, but you want to operate it, make sure that it works, that it’s kind of smooth.

And even until today, our COO at EBANX, it’s a little different than other companies. Our COO at EBANX- they’re responsible for payments. It’s kind of a COO for payment. It’s not a COO of the company, like a sub-CEO. It’s more a COO on payments, like payment performance, integrations, onboarding of merchant.

So it’s core business operations. That’s what I did, and kind of the company ends up inheriting a bit of the way we work. And then me and my co-founders, we decided that we wanted to reorganize the team. They’re with me very close, but in the board since 2021. And then leading the company since then.

Drew Edmond: The telco analogy is good, I think. It’s still wild that you can take a piece of plastic like a Visa card and basically go anywhere in the world and use it at a merchant that accepts cards and it works, right? I mean, that’s a pretty, pretty massive advancement in terms of payment scale. And same to being able to show up in basically any country and my, cellphone works, right? The amount of work that goes into building that over time for that type of ubiquity, is no small feat.

So you founded EBANX in Brazil in 2012 with your two co-founders to enable payments for buyers and sellers. Anyone that’s been in merchant payments long enough knows that, historically, Brazil in particular has been a pretty challenging country to accept payments in if you’re not a Brazilian company.

Maybe just a little bit more origin story on EBANX, but also if you could kind of weave in the background on why Brazil is considered so challenging for e-commerce merchants in particular.

João Del Valle: Yeah. It used to be more, especially when we were being founded. I think that was a pain. That was really the opportunity that we found. What was the issue there? People, like global merchants, wanted to accept payments from Brazilians, and that was very inefficient because Brazilian credit cards are still not greatly accepted online.

But like 14 years ago, it was much worse. So our sales pitch was like, if you’re connected to a global acquirer and you’re selling to Brazil, your approval rates are probably 20%. And nowadays, to be honest, it’s not 20%, but it’s not 70%, much lower.

And then what we did was, okay, so we’re gonna create a solution so that you’re gonna have great credit card performance. And more than that, in Brazil, from 30 to 40% of e-commerce is not cards. At that point, it was boleto, which is a payment slip, offline, very offline, and bank transfers, which were very specific to banks, so you have to integrate any specific banks.

This was our kind of value prop to the merchant. So you connect to us, you have great approval rates with cards, you have installments, you have debit cards, you have these weird bank transfers of Brazil, you have boleto. Just by connecting, sign a contract, integrate with us. And the greatest part of the value prop was, okay, and you don’t need an entity in Brazil ’cause that is really something absurdly complex.

So to accept payments in Brazil, you really had to come here, establish a company, find a local partner, establish your own tax ID, and then get the money, get the dividends out and then get paid. So complete nightmare. Unviable for even for large companies.

So when we were able to establish that model, it was an overnight success really because also, you advertised it online to the merchants and so the merchants would come and see, “Okay, so I just connect to you. You’re gonna accept payments, 100% market reach, and I don’t need an entity.” So yeah, well, that worked. Let’s try.

Drew Edmond: It sounds too easy.

João Del Valle: Let’s try it. And that’s the value prop. That’s what we do even until today. Of course, not, only in Brazil, but in other, more than 20 countries. But that’s kind of the value prop that we bring to the merchants since the beginning.

Drew Edmond: What is the background on why the cards just struggled to get approved at a decent rate? Is that the issuing banks themselves in Brazil are just much more conservative when they see foreign entities processing on those cards or the fraud models haven’t updated to reflect a cross-border world? Like what is the reasoning?

João Del Valle: It’s been improving but, those are typically the risks. So if you’re buying online… So it’s multi-layers, right? One is the issuer. They’re very conservative because like 95% of the transaction are domestic, they’re happy with that. So when this weird international transaction comes in, say, “Okay, let’s analyze this very deeply, and by default, let’s decline it. And that was even more conservative back in 2012 on the issuer side. But even on the website, on the kind of the merchant, right, the global merchant, their processor there, their gateway, even when you put your address to make that match.

Because, like, to our American audience, right? If you’re in America, everything is built for Americans. Fine, everything works. But if you put your Brazil address in a global website, well, then you really have to, okay, fasten your seatbelts because this is gonna be a complex experience. So even from there, and then when you put your credit card, they may match your address, billing address, and all of those layers, they will have trouble in the issuer.

But even across the gate or the processor or the acquirer, so multiple levels where your transaction may fail, anti-fraud in all the levels, that ends up really diminishing your approval rate greatly. And even when we do domestic acquiring like we do, we still have kind of an ongoing process at EBANX that’s core value of ours of, approval rate optimization. Just because the environment is not homogenic, so it’s really multiple parties involved. The banks are not used to international transactions. So when a global merchant connects to us, we really go to all the issuers and say, “Oh, this is that global merchant. This is their MID. This is their profile, their transaction,” so on.

So even until today, that’s how it happens. So and that’s one factor. The other is really, installments. I think that is a part, it’s not on your question on approval rates, but that’s another incredibly important part of Brazil. And if you’re doing cross-border, just regular cross-border, you don’t have that enabled.

Drew Edmond: Yeah.

João Del Valle: Another really important point.

Drew Edmond: I was in Brazil a few years ago, maybe four or five at this point, and sitting with some Brazilians at lunch after doing one of our boot camps for a company down there. And it was kind of when the Buy Now, Pay Later hype in America was really getting going.

And we’re sitting there and they’re like, “Buy now, pay later? We’ve been doing installments for 30 years.” You know? Like, this is not a new product.

João Del Valle: Absolutely.

Drew Edmond: Yeah, you were on the forefront decades ago.

João Del Valle: Yes, exactly. It’s ingrained, in domestic commerce, it’s ingrained. And it’s easy. You’re gonna pay a purchase of $10, you can split it in two installments, and it’s easy. The whole ecosystem is built for that, very fluid

Drew Edmond: You mentioned that you’re now in over 20 countries. When I think about the overall global landscape, of course, in the United States, the merchant acquiring space is quite saturated across all the different segments, whether it’s SMB to mid-market to enterprise.

Pretty similar in Europe and things like that. But you’ve really focused on kind of expanding, within Latin America, of course, moving outside of Brazil, but also going into places like Africa and Asia. I would imagine at this point you have a pretty unique perspective, based on your presence in these major continents.

What are you seeing from any trends or shifts in cross-border e-commerce based on the continents that you’re in today?

João Del Valle: There are huge similarities. And it’s super interesting because the expansion 15 years ago was one, and then five years ago other, and then now. Now it’s a moment in time where information is widely available online and businesses grow very fast. So when you talk about new merchants, so let’s say Chinese marketplaces that had a wave of expansion in the last three years globally, be it Temu, Shein, TikTok Shop, before, it was something that it took a decade for Amazon or eBay or others to come to other markets, and now these folks, they expand in two years to 50 markets, at once. So people get to know, so the expansion is fast. So that is to say that there’s a lot of interest from the merchants and from the consumers.

So when a large merchants go into a country like Nigeria, like South Africa, there is demand already. So there’s a problem to be solved, which is payments, and that’s clear to everyone. So the knowledge– the demand is there, the knowledge on the merchant side that they need a localized solution, that global card acquiring will not do it.

It’s inefficient, will make your business unviable. So it’s much more intense, much more speed. And the complexities are still there. So this is kind of the problem that we end up solving.

Drew Edmond: When you say that expansion of going into all these countries in a couple of years, as someone that has been at a marketplace, I was at Etsy before Glenbrook about a decade ago, and it takes time. It was taking time back then.

You think about, okay, I need to go into this country and what do I need to have set up from a regulatory perspective or which payment methods make the most sense in each country? When we typically talk to our merchant clients, the merchants that we speak with, you don’t go in and say, “Oh, I have an Asia strategy, I have a Europe strategy.” It’s like, you have a France strategy, you have a Germany strategy because the fundamental payment methods, the consumer behavior, the psychology of how they think about payments is different on a country-by-country basis.

I’m curious, you guys at EBANX have a really amazing report, the Beyond Borders report that I still kind of go back to and go through because there’s so much depth of content in there. When you look at this fragmentation for global merchants, how do you approach that from a product perspective, both from how to abstract the complexity of that for your merchant clients and also how do you even handle it just from a business?

There’s so much work that you have to do as a company to both build those connections, make those products available to the merchant clients and make it as simple as possible to kind of flip a switch, if you will. Which it’s never as easy as flipping a switch, but the closer you can get it to that, the better.

João Del Valle: Yeah, and the larger the merchant, the more demanding the integration is. They wanna have a true specific experience for any payment method. But yeah, just reiterate on that framing the problem, this is it. So the merchants want to go to this, like, 25 countries at once, and there’s cards which they are somewhat used to, domestic cards, it’s debit, it’s installments, and then there are local brands of cards which have, like, huge market share, like be it TROY, or Verve in Nigeria, Elo in Brazil.

Like, all these payment methods are hugely important. Hugely important. RuPay in India. So on cards. And then there’s APMs, like alternative payment methods, which are like Brazil, just this ’25, Pix was 42% of e-commerce. UPI, huge in India. So, going back, so if you wanna expand efficiently to these markets, you have to add all these payment methods. And then our mission is… That, that’s our core mission, right? To make this as smooth and efficient as possible for you to land in these countries all at once.

And it’s not like I can offer you one checkout page, and you’re going to have all the payment at… We have that. You can do it. That’s fine. But most of the merchants will not want that. They want a kind of native integration for any payment method, and that’s where the challenge really lies.

Like, when a global merchant, be it like Amazon or someone else, wants to integrate Pix, they will have to do a lot of modification in their checkout because Pix is specific. You’re gonna have the tax ID, okay, then collect a few different fields, and then show the QR code. The confirmation, is it online, is offline? How is the reverse, or how does it work? Every payment method super specific. So it’s not only getting the card information and sending it through. Then there are redirects, there are vouchers. So that’s our mission.

One thing we did last year was payment bundles, couple of years ago, to group the payment methods, grouping them by their functionality. So this is our card payment methods. These are subscription payment methods, which are APMs that are subscription. These are voucher payment methods. This is bank transfer payment method.

And that’s very, very useful because then we can kind of abstract, for example, a bank transfer or account to account. That may be Pix, or that might be Nequi in Colombia, or even Bre-B, and other account-to-account payment method. And for a merchant that wants to build a business case, that becomes much more interesting because then they can invest and know that they’re gonna integrate a few payment methods here and there.

And we’re constantly thinking about ways to speed that up. And I was just having that conversation last month, and I even gonna do a little video with my team because that’s so important that the merchants know that these shortcuts exist.

Drew Edmond: Absolutely. Going back to being an actual merchant, the amount of time that you spend thinking about payment methods. For a global business, global marketplaces, global merchants, it’s one of the main, like the top three topics that you think about on a regular basis, right?

Because you have to not only understand your consumers, how their behavior is changing over time, how the technology is changing, how each individual payment method might be evolving, right? The Pix of today is not the same as when it first launched. Now we have Pix Automático, we have these different components and you have to kind of stay on top of these decisions within this overall realm of not just, of course, you have the customer conversion at the point of sale, but you also have this notion of optimization and trying to ensure that whether it’s a recurring payment and, oh, this fails, what can I do if it fails?

And how do I just overall maximize my performance as a merchant? How does EBANX think about that concept of payment optimization? Because, especially in the US, it’s a very card-focused conversation a lot of the times. And that’s always going to exist where we have these strange things that, okay, we need to retry this and change the ZIP code and all these weird things that we can do to try to make a card go through.

But all those tactics don’t necessarily work for a Pix or for these different payment methods around the world.

João Del Valle: Yes. So yeah, we do payment optimization that’s specific for APMs. So of course, cards, yes, but talking about APMs here. And that, like it’s night and day. When a merchant first integrates alternative payment methods, the conversion will be very low because the experience is not there.

Let’s say, it’s a kind of an European merchant integrating Pix and they’re not really used to it culturally. So the obvious things. So there’s lots of initial improvements that bring like multiple percentage points, and then it goes diminishing. But even there, when the volume is large, it’s important.

So how do you position the QR code? What is the best practice of a call to action below the QR code? So silly things like that, but that matter. So you need to come in with a portfolio of actions and do that. WhatsApp reminders. You’re not used to that, eventually in your US market, but might be like also day and night conversion rates in some markets that around Latin America, India as well.

There’s a lot and we need to do it. It’s on our mission to make sure that the payment method is successful and smooth.

Drew Edmond: That’s a really interesting point, I think, because I do a lot of work in terms of kind of helping especially subscription merchants with payment optimization. And when I first started doing those types of engagements with these merchants, I was very focused on kind of the payments environment.

Are you using network tokens, account updater, all the kind of the classic payment stuff, right, that lives within that world. But then as you dig into it and you start to learn the data more and see kind of where the data takes you, you say, “Oh, actually what’s happening here is the information that is on the screen at the time of the transaction affects the transaction or affects the ongoing relationship that you have with the customer.”

So when you’re saying, you know, what’s the call to action or how are you communicating with the customer? It might be a WhatsApp outside of the US, it might be a text message in the US. What information are you communicating in emails, transaction receipts?

All these things influence your ability to make that initial sale, to maintain that customer over time, make sure that they’re aware of what they bought and they signed up for this thing, and they’re gonna get billed on this date. All this stuff matters

João Del Valle: They don’t wanna be afraid. They don’t wanna be afraid. Yeah, one other example is like payment vouchers that you generate a barcode or code online, and you need to go physically to a store and pay or a kiosk. And that’s typically going off. So for many years we use it to, in the checkout page, in the barcode page, display a map with the current location of the user and what were the closest OXXO kiosk where they could pay their barcode.

And that increased the approval rate. Not a silver bullet, so you need to do multiple actions to make sure that you have a great experience and adoption.

Drew Edmond: And I think because of that, you’re kind of ahead of the game. When I look at a lot of the other major global PSPs and things like that, a lot of them have some good articles or maybe their relationship managers will help them out with a lot of the payments-related things.

But I don’t hear a lot of them going to the level of outside the payment, outside of, you know, the adjacencies to the payment that you’re talking about. So I think that’s a really important thing to think about.

João Del Valle: Yeah. I think it’s a privilege also to working with large enterprise. We’re really focused on enterprise. That’s kind of our nature. And for these guys, every operation matter, right? Pix or a small operation in Chile, that’s big enough. So we need to have kind of a white glove approach to all of these to make sure that we have a fairly good operation in each of them. So it’s not only getting the product from the shelf and handling it out to the merchants.

Drew Edmond: It’s mutually beneficial, right? Like it’s good for the merchant to optimize those things, and you want them to have success on your platform. So kind of having that white glove approach is going to lead to success for both of you.

João Del Valle: Absolutely.

Drew Edmond: I think one thing, going back to the Beyond Borders report, that jumped out to me that was really interesting, when we look at where the online spending comes in the US, it says that over half of the spending comes from consumers over 45 years of age.

When we look at, call them emerging markets, that it’s really the buyers under 30 that are driving the, you know, most of the e-commerce volume. So, what is unique about emerging markets and about this particular kind of younger cohort, in terms of their obviously mobile first and expectations on, probably their expectations on just how payments should work for them, I would imagine is a major point.

As technology’s evolved, our expectations on speed and instant payments and things like that. So what have you learned about kind of comparing and contrasting the different groups around the world that are starting to have a great influence over shopping and the volume on e-commerce payments?

João Del Valle: Yeah, the population are young and they’re online, that’s for sure, right? People expect– They’re more open to digital experience,

And we were talking about Egypt some days ago. And then subscription merchants, because Fawry is an incredibly popular payment method down there, and you have to generate the code and buy it. And then the merchants were asking: “But do I need an action from the user every month to pay the subscription for a streaming service?”

And then our country manager was not even understanding. This was… Of course. Of course. You’re paying a bill. Nobody’s gonna get money out of your account. You need to do it. You’re gonna do it every month, and you’re gonna pay your… So culturally, that’s very natural for them. And it’s nice to navigate around these things. So it’s a very different perspective. And that’s changed a lot.

One other thing with habits is Pix Automático, which is the subscription version of Pix. And that was launched in another era, similar to UPI, an era where it was kind of standardized and promoted by the central banks. So it comes with the concept of power to the consumer, power to the user.

So the user will be notified of a recurring charge every month. The user will have the ability to cancel a subscription on their banking app or on their wallet. And something that cards folks are not very much used to, and I understand, of course, subscription business is about, okay-

Drew Edmond: Set it and forget it.

João Del Valle: Yes, it’s just enroll and forget.

So now with these other payment methods, merchants are having to get used to this. Okay, how do I work in a space where there’s a slightly different dynamic of powers here between the merchant, the consumer, the payment scheme? Who is liable for what, and then who cares about who? So– and this is very interesting. It depends a lot on the market, even UPI and Pix is different. And on the payment method. So that’s something that’s really interesting to observe.

Drew Edmond: On the subscription front, that’s something that I’ve been thinking about a lot. I didn’t realize that about Egypt, but I think the idea of, yeah, going to a consumer on, let’s say, a monthly basis and kind of getting their permission each time for a subscription, certainly still foreign to a lot of US-based merchants that aren’t going to love that concept.

Anytime I talk about it, I say, “Listen, the reality is that we’re in the stage right now where already even in Europe, in the US we have things like, okay, Mastercard went out and bought Minute Technologies. Now Visa’s working with Pinwheel. Consumers can now more and more go into their banking app and see what kind of recurring payments they have, subscription payments they have, pause them, cancel them, kind of have that more control over their finances,” right?

The number of subscriptions, obviously as consumers, has gone up remarkably in the past several years as the subscription economy has grown. And I think people realize that, like, a lot of my money and future potential payments are tied up in these recurring payments, and so I need a better way to say, Man, I haven’t opened my Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Netflix, whatever it is. If I haven’t opened it up in a certain amount of time, maybe I want to pause it for a little bit. Maybe I’ll come back to it in the future. Maybe I’ll want to cancel it, whatever it might be.

I think we’re moving to a world where that control is just going to be table stakes, and the expectations of consumers are gonna be, I need to have much more flexibility and transparency into what payments are going out in the near future, and the ability to make a decision on if I actually want that to happen or not.

It’s already there in these countries that you’re talking about. I think it’s going to be a global thing in the future. And then you layer on something just with the advancements in AI and agentic where, if you at some point have some agent on your device, on your computer, your phone, whatever, that has access into the applications that you have and can actually proactively say, “Hey, you haven’t opened this in a little while. Do you want me to go out and cancel this for you?”

An agentic cancellation. We got agentic commerce, we’re gonna have agentic cancellation as well. So I think the future of the subscription economy is going to look very different in the coming years.

João Del Valle: And there may be something related to AI because now with AI, there’s a real cost to tokens, right? So this is why, like, Stripe investing so much and Metronome and all these, like, metering things you need to do usage-based. So eventually subscriptions, I don’t know. We may see some models using for consumer subscriptions to use usage-based billing. That would interesting, right? You go to your New York Times, okay, one article, twenty cents, and then the article. that would be nice. If that payment mechanism is fluid, that can work.

Drew Edmond: 100%. The concept of micro payments has been around for a long time, but we haven’t really had the mechanism to do it in the past, right? I think that, prior to both stablecoins and agentic, the world didn’t really make sense for micro payments and kind of these more usage-based.

But I agree that it’s much more plausible in a world where you can have either a stablecoin that can do a really small payment at a very low cost versus using a card or something like that that has these fixed fees, and it doesn’t make sense economically for merchants to allow these types of things.

Where, yeah, I think micro payments might have its day in the future now that the infrastructure is actually being built to enable it in a way that makes sense for folks.

João Del Valle: Yeah. Let’s see. It’s gonna be interesting.

Drew Edmond: Absolutely. It’s fun to talk about the future a little bit. You never know what’s gonna come, though. From a maybe geopolitical standpoint, over the past year and a half or so, we’ve, of course, we’ve had things like tariffs and trade tensions.

Being in so many countries, you have a lot of regulatory fragmentation- if we’re talking about stablecoins, things like the GENIUS Act and MICA and all these… Every country and jurisdiction has their own ideas on how payments should work in their country.

What, if anything, has this geopolitical instability, how has that influenced EBANX? How do you see that represented in your merchant clients as they think about which countries they’re going into, how they expand into different corridors? curious your thoughts on that.

João Del Valle: Yeah, we try to be as neutral as we can because we end up being a hub of payments between very different regions. And this is the thing about EBANX. So typical merchants are in the northern hemisphere, so it’s US, Europe, China. So these are the merchants that really are global expanders, that they want to expand fast and they wanna add twenty markets, so they connect to EBANX, then we can light them up in Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia, India, so on.

So this is the typical use. And that happens, right? Be it Meta or Uber or Amazon, these folks, they’re all over the world. So we wanna make sure that we have a good relationship, with partners but also with central banks everywhere we work, so that we can kind of intermediate this dialogue of expansion.

The same thing with China. China and Latin America have great trade relations. China’s been the largest trade partner of Brazil since like 2008. We have a presence in China, so between Latin America. The multiculturality of being in a business like EBANX is great.

It’s even part of our employer value prop, our EVP. So come to work at EBANX. It’s nice. This is not advertised. This is really nice because one day you’re in Shanghai, the other day you’re in Cairo, and then you’re talking to people and developing software, and then you go to San Francisco. And we try to be friendly and establish genuine relationships, not only with clients and consumers, but also with, especially with regulators.

Where we go to a merchant, a US merchant sometimes doesn’t have the time or the ability or the investment capacity to go and understand the regulatory environment of Argentina, and they have thousands of clients there, if not millions, and they need to accept payments and disperse payments.

And then we have a team in Argentina to understand the complexity and to be up to date about the changes in the regulation in payments, in FX, in taxes, so that the merchants will be covered. And the merchants appreciate this because it’s a full-time job, and we have the scale to do it. Sometimes a merchant doesn’t have the scale, so they’re not gonna do Argentina, and that makes them less competitive globally.

That’s, that’s… it’s a big equation, but there’s definitely a place for someone to kind of centralize that complexity on behalf of the global merchants in emerging markets. That’s the role we play too. So it’s not only the payment methods themselves, the whole, ecosystem about money movement.

Drew Edmond: Absolutely. I remember, at this point it’s been a little while, but when I was back at Square in my early part of my career, Jack Dorsey always talking about make the complex simple. They don’t need to know all these things that we know.

We wanna make that easier for them and they wanna focus on running their business and making sales. And the more that we can abstract that complexity away from them, the better.

We’ve touched a little bit on Pix, but I wanna dive a little bit deeper into it, as it kind of continues its journey. Of course, it’s had an amazing trajectory, kind of payments pride and joy of Brazil, which as it should be. It’s really an amazing story, I think, in terms of how fast something can grow, in terms of the number of people using it and how successful it’s been, with the latest evolution being Pix Automático, as you’ve mentioned, which has really unlocked the recurring channel for merchants and for Pix users.

I’m curious where we stand today, in May of 2026, the reaction in the market, the usage that you’re seeing. If you can also maybe touch on just the relationship with the central bank. I think you’ve been instrumental, as a company, to help kind of shape and provide a feedback loop to them to help make the product work better for all the parties.

João Del Valle: Yeah, the response from the market has been good, it’s growing. It’s gaining traction, I think. It’s a point of no return. It’s already happened. Multiple merchants have already opened up a hundred percent of the checkout to, to Pix.

So it was kind of launched in June 2025. So after a few years of postponements because it– just the central bank had other priorities. The standard is difficult, but they had other priority, and then they committed to this date and launched it. We were very glad to join all the conversations and review the specs along with the merchants, because even small details are important there.

Because I said- A lot of the merchants were using just the cards. They had experience in India. So, okay, how do we do this? And then the central bank came up with a very nice standards, but there was still, like, need for refinements.

And even in the days, in the months leading to the launch, we still had changes that we went to the central bank and fought for on behalf of the merchants. Okay, can I bill on the last day of the year? And what about February? How does it work? You know, for the billing cycle of global companies, this is gonna be hugely difficult.

And it’s interesting because global companies end up being a very important part of the subscription world. So the global streaming businesses are important. So be it for, like, music streaming video streaming, super important. So the central bank was very open to listen, and they continue on.

Okay, but now we’re kind of frozen. We’re gonna launch this. And then the stabilization in the initial months went really well. Everybody was kind of testing it, the banks, because that depends a bit on the experience of the banks, of the wallets, right? So because you need to enroll– when you enroll into a new subscription, you need to go into your bank, and that every bank has a different experience.

But it was nice because in three months it was stabilized. The big issuers like, Nubank, Itaú that hold huge market share were stable, but also the small banks. And now from January ’26, the kind of utility bills started coming also to Pix Automático. That’s a cultural change. That is important.

Because the Brazilian was not used, like, the average Brazilian didn’t know about that, so they saw it in the news, like in the the night news. Oh, this thing called Pix Automático is coming up. So the cultural change is happening. We’re seeing good success.

One data point that I can share that in our research, so as of now, we’re really proud to say, this is a bit of bragging, but last month, in April, 30% of the Pix Automático transactions went through EBANX. So we have a lot of visibility of what’s on, behavior, and so on. And when we analyze some of the merchants, not all of them, but one important data point, 50% of the users that subscribe through Pix Automático are new users to that merchant

Drew Edmond: Wow.

João Del Valle: That’s really powerful. If you’re getting like 1,000 people subscribing to Pix Automático, 500 of those are gonna be new users. That’s really powerful because that is rich. That is rich. That’s new users. And even the other 50% are not that they’re cannibalizing cards, they’re really, like, coming from other payment methods that were not like wallets or some other things, boleto.

So this is super interesting, and that connects to the demography because when the central bank launched Pix Automático, there was a big ceremony back in June with the president of the central bank. So they came, they showed the market one important data point connected to financial inclusion, which is 60 million people, like roughly one-third of Brazil, Brazil, we’re, we’re 210 million people. 60 million people are financially active and don’t own a credit card. So these 60 million people were excluded from the subscription economy.

And these are the people that are the 50% new users that before didn’t have access to subscription businesses. So, yes, you need it. If you are real about Brazil, now you have a new payment method to add, which is Pix Automático, and you need to do it. And you say, “Ah, but the user can cancel it.” Yes, sir. Yes, they can. But you need it. Do it.

So, and of course, we go refining and communicating. I have the impression as the cultural, kind of evolution happens, I think that’s gonna become more similar to a traditional card subscription

Drew Edmond: Great, and I think, provides some insights into what it takes to get to that level, with a payment method like Pix. Of course, with payments you think about, oh, it’s a two-sided marketplace. You’ve got the buyer and the merchant. It’s like, yeah, you have that, but you also have a central bank, you have all the issuing banks, you have the providers that need to offer it.

There’s a very complicated dance that has to happen, not only to improve the product to get to the point where it’s such a good experience that everyone’s happy to use it on both sides of the equation, but it’s complicated. From a marketing perspective, education, how do we reach all these different consumers, and how do we reach all these different merchants? So it’s very impressive to see this.

We do a lot of financial inclusion work in places like Africa at Glenbrook. You see these bits and pieces. You have all the countries and the regions over there, and they’re building out instant payment systems and things like that.

And we’re always thinking about, how do you get the entire market to move in that direction where we can get these net new consumers onto the system? How do you educate them? How do you reach the people in the more rural areas or the low-income areas? It just goes to show that, yeah, it’s possible, but it takes coordination and I think a thoughtfulness to one, to just have a kind of a goal to get to the point where, hey, we wanna continue to provide this almost utility to the entire population to be able to unlock commerce and help our businesses grow, help our consumers get access to the products and services they need.

So that was a great story ’cause I think it’s very interesting. And every country and region is kind of on their own journey of trying to reach that level of, I think, success that Pix has as kind of the leader in the space, along with things like UPI and the like, where we have these really great success stories for instant payment systems.

João Del Valle: Yes. That’s it. Yeah, and it’s multiple variables, as you said, multiple pillars. Even principles like a strong autonomous central bank that’s really well driven. Then they have their pillars of financial inclusion, reduction of cost, foster competition. So these are three very important factors.

If you think about that and you’re really real about it, that’s what ended up driving Pix. All the banks were kind of strongly incentivized to join. And once you kind of, after the no return point, then the others need to join. So yeah, I agree completely with you.

The coordination and the role of the different stakeholders is probably the most important thing, and we see it. Now Colombia’s launching it. It’s a different flavor. They’re launching Bre-B, which is their instant payment method. It’s a different flavor, different architecture of players.

They’re building it on top of something that they already had, but it seems to be working really well. But for different– some slightly different reasons, but working really well for them, too. And some countries launched it, were not very successful yet, like Mexico and some others. They’re refining the strategy and launching it again so that they may get through it and be successful.

Drew Edmond: Great. Okay, so as we come to a close here almost, I don’t think we could talk about payments without talking about two things, agentic and stablecoins, right? It’s like topic 1A and 1B, and I don’t know if that’s ever going to go away for the near term. But I do want to get your input because I feel like you have a unique perspective on both.

Let’s start with agentic. The conversation continues to evolve in the industry. I think we’re still very much in both kind of test mode in terms of trying to understand what this experience could and should look like for consumers, how merchants feel about what that experience is for them as well, and what it means for them from, in some cases, maybe getting that consumer experience abstracted away by the chatbot and how involved the chatbot is in discovery and what that means for the actual payment flow and security and trust.

And there’s so many questions, I think, related to this concept. From the EBANX perspective, from a LATAM, Africa, Asia perspective, what are you hearing today from your global clients? Are they thinking about it from, you know, how does this work with APMs?

Do we have different perspectives in different regions? Are some people just not– they don’t care about it at all? I’m just very curious what you’ve heard in your global conversations. I know you’re on the road a lot.

João Del Valle: Uh-huh. Yes. Yeah, I would love them to be a little more focused on emerging markets and alternative payment method. I don’t think the conversation is there, to be honest, because even with cards, US is not solved yet, so it’s not so– it’s not clear where it is going. I think that that’s where the conversation is.

To me, it seems that for out of the conversation that I have is that the global heads of payments, they have been mandated from by their bosses or someone like, “Figure this thing out, please. We need to have an opinion about agent or we need to have pilots.” And that’s fine. I think that’s fair. So everybody’s working on it. It’s re-prioritizing. But, the use cases may not be there yet as much.

So… and I think this is good. But people are experimenting. I’ve been in technology for probably 30 years, and I’ve been through all of these complex standards for everything. For communications, for object communication, for payments, but we need a use case, and I think that’s the main point.

This is a game of power dynamics again. Merchants, the marketplaces, the agents, the bots, OpenAI, Claude, and these guys or specific agents, and the payment providers. I think there are some folks here that have power, and they will be the ones that will move the industry. So in Latin America at the moment, like Mercado Libre, iFood, Rappi, these folks who are in the US, Amazon, DoorDash, or Uber. These are great use cases.

The moment that we have even a one-on-one big integration that works end to end between some of these companies and the big players, I think we may see something really interesting. Then, of course, there’s fulfillment, secondary use cases. But once we have it figured out, you can go to your ChatGPT, choose what you’re gonna order for food, and that really work, I think that’s gonna be hugely powerful.

Drew Edmond: One area I’ve been kind of diving into a little bit is thinking about the differences between, like, a China, just the ecosystem in China versus maybe a US or Europe or outside of that, where in China you’ve got kind of the Alipay ecosystem, right, of, you’ve got the wallet, it’s tied to the identity, the merchants are part of that.

To me, in that world, it’s probably a little bit easier maybe to get to a world where something like agentic commerce, the way that we’ve been kind of talking about it in sci-fi terms of all these cool things that an agent could do for me with me maybe out of the loop, a little bit easier when you have kind of control over that whole ecosystem.

Once you start getting into this very fragmented world of all these different providers and, is it gonna be Visa and Mastercard? Well, what about all the APMs, and what about the regional card networks, and what tokens are we using and what protocols are we using?

All these conversations, like, all this fragmentation to me just means it’s gonna take a lot more time outside of that closed ecosystem to get to a point where the use cases can really emerge in a way that works for everybody, because I think that fragmentation just slows things down.

João Del Valle: Absolutely. Yeah, inside Alipay you have a lot of stuff there that a lot of it belongs to Alibaba themselves, but also very strong partnerships. So who are you gonna trust to your partnership? That’s very interesting conversation. So like the bots inside the walled gardens are already working, right?

The bots inside Amazon, inside… So that’s already work. And that may be even kind of a starting point, another vector where it may come from, the adoption may come from. So, still to come. But I think payment’s gonna be easy. We’re gonna figure it out, guys. We always do at some point. The storefront

Drew Edmond: Maybe just to land on the stablecoin front, given kind of where the conversation is, also kind of a area where infrastructure has kind of been built over the last many years quietly in a lot of ways.

I think the purchase of Bridge by Stripe earlier kind of really kicked off the zeitgeist a little bit with the whole notion of stablecoin. It got a lot more popular because it’s, oh, if they’re buying a company like that, maybe it’s something that we really need to start paying attention to.

There were already a lot of businesses kind of being built in that space, and the infrastructure continues to grow. When we think about it from a pure payments perspective and we look at the numbers, and pull out the non-payments activity, you know, all that trading activity that kind of clouds the actual volume and our understanding of where it’s really being used, it’s still quite low.

I think we’re still in very early stages of how will stablecoins be used for payments both from you can look at it across the domains, maybe in certain corridors, B2B payments, it makes sense. When we think about it more for business to consumer e-commerce payments, I think it has to get to the point where there are these concentrations of folks that just are accumulating stablecoins for one, one reason or another.

Maybe they’re in the global gig economy and they’re getting paid out in stablecoins for part of their payouts, or more and more folks that are just accumulating them to maybe store their wealth to protect it from fluctuating currency valuations and things like that.

Are you seeing this? I think a lot of people use certain countries in Latin America as examples for, oh, you know, they, they want to move their wealth into these USD pegged stablecoins to protect their wealth. If we start to get a concentration of those, now that they’re gonna wanna use those, they have this money stored in this type of payment method, I want to be able to use it.

Are we gonna start to see that growth? And then you layer on, okay, now we see this emergence of stablecoin-funded cards that really mean you can kind of use your stablecoins wherever you want where cards are accepted. So do we actually even need merchants to turn on like direct stablecoin acceptance versus just get a card that’s issued on top of this balance and use it wherever cards are used?

I’m curious what you’ve seen and how the trends have gone for you in terms of are you hearing more about stablecoins? Do you see it more in certain use cases than others?

João Del Valle: Yeah. I think similarly. I still think it’s nascent. It’s growing very fast, but from a very small base, when you have the global payments in perspective. Why are people doing this? That’s the question. Why are people using stablecoins? Why do they have their money parked in stablecoins, and what they’re gonna use it for? And as you said, a lot of people that are in complicated geographies that have stablecoin wallets, they have like now cards pegged to it. So that’s one thing. But I think what we are seeing is that, some merchants move the needle.

Drew Edmond: Mm.

João Del Valle: Some merchants move the needle.

So we have conversations with few of our merchants, and some of them are considering it. So the moment one of these giant technology companies opens up their checkout to global stablecoins acceptance, that may change the game. Not that it’s gonna be like big everybody, my mother’s gonna use it. No.

But from a growth standpoint, it’s gonna grow a lot and fast. Let’s say that, creative economy starts going into stablecoins. So you get paid and you can pay. So I think that may create an interesting virtual cycle that will bring a lot of traction to the industry. Where that is going in 10 years, I don’t know.

That’s for the futurologists. But that’s gonna be a very practical traction to the stablecoins, like end user pay in, payout business. We are alert to that and entertaining this conversation. So I think it’s really like that. It’s not the product and the service driving the industry, but really the huge large clients. If they decide to do it because it’s interesting for them in one angle or another, that may move the industry towards that and foster the growth of that.

Drew Edmond: That’s great insight. This has been a great conversation. I really appreciate you joining me on this episode.

João Del Valle: Of course. It’s been a pleasure, Drew. Thanks for having me. And we’re here building for emerging markets and global merchants.

Drew Edmond: Love it. That’s great. All right. Well, to all of you listening, thank you for joining us, and until next time, keep up the good work. Goodbye for now.