In markets built on instant payment schemes and mobile money, that assumption can delay launches and depress conversion before a single sale is made.

Carlos Menendez is chief operating officer at dLocal, the cross-border payments platform that connects global merchants with local payment methods in emerging markets. In this contributed piece, he argues that the payment infrastructure in many emerging markets has overtaken the West, and sets out three decisions merchants need to make early to enter those markets successfully. The views expressed are his own.

Three weeks before launch in Brazil, a global merchant discovers that their cross-border entity structure cannot accept Pix. The fix, establishing a local entity, takes months. The launch slips. When they finally go live, their checkout is built around payment methods that most of their target customers rarely use, and the conversion rate reflects it.

This story repeats more than it should. Research into emerging market entry specifically shows that 64 per cent of merchants report operational and technical failures with their payment systems, and 57 per cent experience conversion problems as a direct result.

The source of those failures is rarely a bad product or a poorly timed launch. It is a payments model built entirely for markets the merchant already knows. And these are not edge cases: the statistics show that this is the norm.

Western merchants sometimes arrive in these markets with the confidence of someone who has never considered that local ingenuity might have built something far more technologically advanced than anything they have at home.

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