Latin America is entering a period of accelerated payments transformation. Real-time rails, digital wallets, QR ecosystems, and domestic scheme modernisation are reshaping how consumers transact and how banks build their digital strategies.
As everyone is making their first steps in 2026, we provide our vision on what financial institutions and fintechs of Latin America should expect and prepare for in 2026 - five trends, grounded in credible industry research, and what they mean for banks planning their next phase of digital modernisation.
Market Insight
Latin America has emerged as a major real-time payment’s region, with Brazil’s Pix now the country’s most widely used transaction method. By the end of 2024, approximately 76 % of Brazil’s population used Pix, surpassing cash and card usage and handling around 68.7 billion transactions that year according to industry reporting on central bank data.
McKinsey & Company highlights that the rapid adoption of instant payments in markets such as Brazil has materially shifted consumer and merchant behaviour by offering a low-cost, always-available substitute for cards and cash. This shift has accelerated digital inclusion and formalised payment flows across the broader economy.
Across the region, similar developments are underway. Mexico continues to expand CoDi to improve merchant acceptance, while Colombia, Peru and Argentina are investing in enhancements to their instant-payment infrastructures. Central banks and industry analysts consistently frame these initiatives as part of broader national strategies to digitise payments, improve interoperability and reduce reliance on cash.
What this means for financial institutions
Real-time payments in Latin America are moving from an emerging capability to a foundational layer of financial infrastructure. As instant payments become the default rail for everyday transactions, banks must operate systems designed for continuous availability and immediate decisioning. According to the recent guide, transition and migration requires the ability to process payments 24/7, support ISO 20022 messaging, manage real-time settlement and liquidity, and handle high-volume, low-value transactions efficiently.
The growth of popularity of instant payments increases exposure to fraud. As payment execution becomes immediate, the window for manual intervention narrows significantly. Social-engineering scams and authorised push payment fraud are rising across the region, making real-time behavioural analysis, device intelligence and adaptive monitoring essential to prevent losses without introducing unnecessary friction.
In effect, the expansion of RTP is pushing banks toward real-time operating models in which execution, compliance and fraud controls must function seamlessly and instantaneously across all channels.
Where BPC Fits
SmartVista supports banks as they integrate into real-time payment ecosystems across Latin America. The platform provides real-time processing and ISO 20022 support to align with domestic RTP schemes and all regulatory requirements. It enables continuous liquidity monitoring and real-time fraud prevention, which are essential for national level scale projects.
Market Insight
Digital wallets are becoming an increasingly important part of Latin America’s broader digital payments landscape, supported by rapid adoption of mobile and alternative payment methods. Research forecasts that Latin America’s overall digital payments market, encompassing digital wallets, real-time transfers, card payments and other electronic methods, is projected to reach approximately USD 0.3 trillion in revenue by 2027, driven by financial inclusion, fintech innovation and e-commerce growth. This expansion highlights how wallets are broadening financial access across both mature and emerging markets in the region. Industry analysis also indicates significant growth in wallet usage, with millions of active digital wallet users in markets such as Colombia nearly doubling from 27 million in 2021 to around 55 million in 2023.
What This Means for Banks
Digital wallets turn into the main way customers access financial services, especially in mobile-first and underbanked segments. Banks need to ensure their products can work smoothly inside third-party wallets and super-apps, not just within their own channels. This means being able to embed cards, accounts and credit into external platforms, while supporting features such as virtual and tokenised cards, QR payments and loyalty balances in a consistent way. Security expectations are also changing. Wallets depend on the user’s device and biometric authentication, supported by real-time identity checks, to verify transactions. The challenge is providing strong security without slowing down the payment experience.
Wallet transactions tend to be frequent and low in value, which places new demands on systems originally built for traditional card or batch processing. To support this shift, banks must improve real-time performance and efficiency as volumes grow.
As wallets become the primary customer touchpoint, banks can no longer rely on being visible to stay relevant. Instead, they differentiate through the products and services embedded directly in the wallet experience, including instalments, credit and rewards.
Where BPC Fits
As wallet- and super-app ecosystems continue to expand, banks increasingly need ways to participate without overhauling their core platforms. An API-first approach allows payments, credit and rewards to be embedded into partner wallets and merchant environments in a controlled and scalable way. At the same time, real-time fraud monitoring across wallet channels helps banks manage high-frequency transaction flows while preserving a consistent user experience.
Platforms such as SmartVista are designed to support both closed- and open-loop wallet models, enabling banks to issue and manage instruments such as tokenised and virtual cards, prepaid balances, QR credentials and loyalty features within a single framework, as outlined in BPC’s guide on building wallet ecosystems.
3.Fraud and social-engineering scams surge across digital channels
Market Insight
As real-time payments and digital wallets scale across Latin America, fraud is shifting from purely technical attacks toward social engineering and impersonation, where customers are manipulated into authorising transfers themselves. The challenge is structural: fast payments are designed for speed and immediate funds availability, which leaves less time to detect scams and recover funds once they are sent.
Multilateral and industry research increasingly highlights authorised push payment (APP) scams as a key risk in fast-payment environments because many fast payments are rapid and effectively irreversible once settled, which moves mitigation upstream into prevention, behavioural signals, and transaction controls.
Central banks are also responding with scheme-level controls. In Brazil, the Central Bank introduced security rules for Pix when registering new devices, including transaction limits on unregistered devices (eg, per-transaction and daily caps) to reduce scam patterns often linked to credential compromise and social-engineering tactics.
What This Means for Banks
In an environment defined by always-on payments and instant execution, fraud prevention need to work in real time and across the wider customer journey, not only at the point of transaction authorisation. That typically means combining device intelligence, behavioural and session-level monitoring, real-time anomaly detection, and adaptive step-up authentication when risk increases.
Just as importantly, banks need strong investigation workflows and audit trails to support faster response, consistent handling of disputes, and clearer evidence of preventative controls as expectations around consumer protection evolve.
Where BPC Fits
One example from the region is Banco Finandina, which leverages BPC’s SmartVista 3DS 2.0 solution in the cloud, which includes a cloud-based Access Control Server (ACS) and advanced fraud management rules through SmartVista AI-powered Fraud Management, designed to protect card-not-present transactions without disrupting the user experience.
In practical terms, the takeaway is that financial institutions and fintechs are prioritising real-time detection and decisioning, using behavioural signals and configurable controls, because scam and impersonation risks move quickly and do not fit well with delayed, after-the-fact review.
4.Domestic schemes strengthen regional independence
Market Insight
Across Latin America, countries are continuing to invest in domestic payment schemes and local infrastructure to reduce reliance on external providers and maintain greater control over how payments are processed. These local schemes typically operate alongside international card networks, giving markets more flexibility and resilience.
In Brazil, Elo functions as a domestic card scheme while enabling international acceptance through partnerships such as the Discover Global Network. In Mexico, CARNET operates as a local acceptance brand connected to Prosa’s domestic network, supporting transactions across ATMs, point-of-sale terminals and e-commerce. The BIS Red Book lists CARNET as Mexico’s domestic card scheme. In Chile, domestic acquiring and switching have historically been centred around Transbank, although regulatory and market reforms have gradually opened the acquiring landscape to additional participants.
Policy discussions referenced by the Bank for International Settlements consistently highlight why countries prioritise local payment infrastructure. Greater control over payment rails can improve resilience, manage costs and reduce strategic dependence on external networks, particularly as digital transaction volumes continue to grow.
What This Means for Banks
As domestic schemes expand, banks must support multiple sets of rules, certifications and settlement models, while still maintaining interoperability with international card networks, wallets and account-to-account payments. This adds operational complexity across physical retail, e-commerce and emerging acceptance models.
When domestic schemes overlap with instant payments and QR-based frameworks, banks also face increased demands around reconciliation, dispute handling and risk management across different rails. To manage this efficiently, banks need processing environments that can handle multi-rail routing, settlement and reporting without duplicating systems.
Where BPC Fits
To operate effectively in mixed payment environments, banks increasingly rely on platforms that can process both domestic and international schemes within a single setup. SmartVista supports multi-scheme routing, local settlement logic and digital acceptance models, while allowing banks to configure domestic scheme requirements gradually rather than through large system changes.
5.Financial inclusion drives ecosystem-led innovation
Market Insight
Moving towards 2026, Latin America has made steady progress in financial inclusion over the past decade. Data from the World Bank Global Findex, referenced by IDB Invest, shows that account ownership across Latin America and the Caribbean increased from 55% in 2017 to 73% in 2021, marking a significant expansion in access to formal financial services.
Despite this progress, cash remains widely used, particularly for everyday spending and informal transactions. McKinsey & Company research indicates that a large share of consumers in the region still use cash regularly, even as digital payments continue to grow. IDB analysis also notes that informality, uneven access and varying levels of trust mean that digital and cash-based payments often coexist.
More recently, inclusion has increasingly been driven through digital ecosystems rather than traditional branch banking. IDB research points to growing use of payment apps and digital wallets between 2021 and 2024, including for receiving wages, government transfers and making everyday purchases. This shift reflects how fintech platforms, wallets and real-time payments are helping bring more people and small businesses into the financial system when supported by the right infrastructure and policy frameworks.
What This Means for Banks
Financial inclusion is no longer just about opening accounts. It is about enabling participation in digital ecosystems. To stay relevant, banks need to connect with government identity systems, social-payment and disbursement platforms, SME merchant networks and wallet providers.
This requires simpler onboarding, support for micro-merchants, instant payments and disbursements, and credit models that better reflect irregular or informal income. Low-cost, real-time payment rails become essential to reaching scale sustainably, while banks still need clear visibility and control over risk and operations across channels.
Where BPC Fits
As inclusion-led use cases expand, banks increasingly look for platforms that can support onboarding, payments, SOFTPOS, wallets within a single operating environment. SmartVista provides APIs for wallet, identity and payment integration, along with tools for instant disbursements, modern merchant acquiring tools such as SOFTPOS and agent banking to extend one’s network to the underbanked communities in the isolated areas through different familiar channels.
What to expect next?
By the end of 2026, payments in Latin America will be less about launching new rails and more about how well banks manage what already exists. Real-time payments, merchant payment tools, wallets and QR codes are settling in and the priority now is to make these channels work together smoothly. Wallets are expected to become the main customer touchpoint for everyday transactions, especially in mobile-first segments, pushing banks to focus on delivering useful services directly within wallet ecosystems rather than relying on traditional channels.
At the same time, banks will need to modernise legacy systems and strengthen fraud prevention mechanisms. Instant payments and high-frequency wallet activity require real-time processing, while the rise in social-engineering scams demands behaviour-based fraud controls that act before losses occur. Banks that invest in flexible infrastructure, wallet integration and real-time risk management will be better positioned as Latin America’s digital payment ecosystems continue to mature.