In payments, geography used to be destiny. Rails were laid by American card networks, European banks, and Chinese super-apps. Emerging markets plugged in on other people’s terms. That era is receding. Indonesia’s Xendit, a Southeast Asian payments infrastructure company, is moving into Latin America — into Brazil’s Pix universe, Mexico’s bank-transfer economy, and Colombia’s fast-digitising consumer base. One firm does not make a system, but this move signals a deeper shift: the Global South is linking itself.

From Domestic Rails to Cross-Regional Infrastructure

Xendit cut its teeth on the hardest problem in Southeast Asia: making fragmented banking systems talk to each other in real time for small merchants as well as large platforms. That skillset travels well. Latin America presents a similar mosaic — a continent of instant-rail adoption, bank APIs of varying sophistication, and fast-growing online commerce. Brazil’s central-bank-led Pix has normalised account-to-account transfers at population scale; Mexico’s SPEI has done so for years; Colombia’s PSE is ubiquitous for online checkout. For a company fluent in stitching together idiosyncratic systems, the business case is obvious: build a single interface for many markets, then let merchants scale without re-architecting payments in every country.

South–South expansion is not a vanity play. It is a recognition that technology, regulation, and consumer habit in the South have converged toward a new equilibrium: mobile-first, instant by default, and card-optional. In this world, the competitive advantage is not an exclusive brand but an interoperable fabric — APIs that abstract complexity and shift bargaining power from rent-taking intermediaries to builders and merchants.

Why Latin America, Why Now

Timing is policy. Latin America’s digital-payment volume has climbed steadily, supported by central banks that embraced instant rails and mandated open banking. Public estimates put regional digital payments well above the US$500 billion mark, with year-on-year growth in the 20–25 percent range. Cross-border lanes remain a small share of that total but are expanding from a low base. Meanwhile, Southeast Asia’s real-time payments and QR interoperability have become the default in daily commerce. On both sides of the Pacific, regulators have moved from experimenting with rails to using them as levers of financial inclusion and SME digitisation.

For a Southeast Asian infrastructure player, the logic of entry is threefold. First, addressable demand is large and still under-served outside the platform giants. Second, regulatory alignment has improved: open APIs, instant rails, merchant-present QR standards, and clearer licensing. Third, merchant need is urgent: regional sellers want to enter new markets without re-coding payments, KYC, and reconciliation from scratch. A builder that offers cards, account-to-account, BNPL partnerships, and tokenised vaulting behind one interface solves a real problem — not for headlines, but for cash flow.

Rails, Rules, and the Geometry of Trust

Payments are not just technology; they are governance encoded. Latin America’s rails look public by design. Brazil’s Pix is a central-bank system that obliged incumbents to open pipes and drop fees. Mexico’s SPEI has operated for years with central-bank oversight and growing 24/7 reach. Colombia’s PSE evolved from bank consortia into a crucial online checkout layer. In Southeast Asia, central banks relied on QR standards and interbank arrangements to create instant-payment universes across Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. The principle is similar on both continents: make transfer the default, let private innovators compete at the edge.

For a cross-regional operator, trust is won at three gates: compliance (KYC/AML alignment), resilience (uptime, dispute management, fraud response), and settlement certainty (when funds are considered final). Xendit’s proposition is to reduce the merchant’s exposure to mismatched rules by offering harmonised risk controls and reporting. That may sound unglamorous. It is exactly the point. In payments, dull beats dazzling — the prize goes to what works every time, everywhere.

Beyond Checkout: Remittances, Marketplaces, Trade

South–South corridors are not only for e-commerce. They touch remittances (Indonesian and Filipino workers in Latin America are a small but persistent flow; Latin Americans in Asia are rising in specialist industries), marketplaces (Asian sellers entering Brazilian platforms and vice versa), and SME trade (components, textiles, agritech, SaaS). If onboarding, reconciliation, and FX management are abstracted into one interface, a mid-sized Indonesian merchant can sell into Mexico without becoming a payments engineer — and a Colombian SaaS startup can monetise in Southeast Asia without learning every domestic scheme from scratch.

This is also where policy meets design. Interoperability pilots for QR across ASEAN hint at a world where tourists do not notice borders at checkout. If similar standards emerge across the Pacific, cross-border retail becomes less a banking product and more a network effect. The role of development banks is consequential here: the IDB and ADB can convene standards and de-risk pilot infrastructure that the private sector later scales.

Risk: Currency, Regulation, Competition

Fintech makes payments look easy; economics reminds us why they are not. Currency risk is the first hazard: settlement windows and rolling FX may turn thin margins into losses if price moves are sharp. Regulation is the second: data-localisation rules and consumer-protection regimes differ; cross-border data transfer and dispute resolution must be engineered into the product. Competition is the third: Brazil’s market is fierce (Nubank, Mercado Pago, StoneCo, PagBank), Mexico is consolidating, Colombia is catching up fast. Xendit’s edge, if it holds, will be product completeness — cards + account-to-account + QR + payouts + reconciliation — and its willingness to integrate into national schemes rather than route around them.

Capital Flows and the Ownership of Rails

Who owns the rails, owns the rent. In the 2010s, this was an argument about card networks and super-apps. In the 2020s, it is about interfaces over public rails. Latin America’s central banks lowered the cost of moving money; someone still decides how merchants access those pipes, in which order, with what fraud tooling, and at what price. South–South entrants can push the cost curve down by importing hard-won lessons from similarly complex markets — but they also shape the competitive equilibrium. For policymakers, the metric of success is not how many logos enter the market; it is whether small firms get cheaper, safer, faster payments and clearer redress when things go wrong.

What Success Looks Like (and What It Does Not)

For Xendit, traction is not measured in press releases but in three operational signals. First, net revenue retention from merchants that add new geographies without changing provider. Second, declining dispute ratios and fraud losses as models localise. Third, payout speed and reconciliation accuracy across currencies. If those metrics move in the right direction, the corridor is real. If not, expansion becomes a costly detour.

For the region, success is broader. It means lower acceptance costs for SMEs, more choice for consumers at checkout, safer remittances with transparent fees, and portable identity that shortens onboarding without weakening KYC. The opposite scenario is also possible: fragmentation disguised as innovation, with every provider rebuilding the same stack and merchants paying in complexity what they save in fees.

The Politics Inside the Product

Payments embed politics: who can transact with whom, on what terms, and with what reversibility. Cross-regional providers navigate sanctions lists, fraud typologies, and elections that may change data rules overnight. They must also translate norms: what counts as adequate disclosure in Jakarta may not pass in São Paulo; what is acceptable latency in Bogotá might be intolerable in Bangkok. The firms that endure are those that treat compliance as product — configurable, tested, and continuously audited — not as a PDF attached to a launch deck.

A Quiet Rebalancing of Global Finance

Much of the world’s payment intelligence grew up serving either wealthy cardholders or state-linked super-apps. The South–South corridor points to a third model: public rails, private interfaces, pro-merchant defaults. It is less glamorous than a super-app, less extractive than a toll-based network, and better suited to regions where small businesses are the economy. The centre of gravity in payments may not move to Jakarta or São Paulo overnight, but the coordinates are changing.

Analytical Lens — When the Periphery Connects Itself

South–South fintech is not a story of catching up; it is a story of build-outs suited to different constraints. Latin America’s answer to card lock-in was Pix and SPEI; Southeast Asia’s answer to bank fragmentation was QR standardisation and real-time clearing. Xendit’s expansion is a bet that these answers can talk to each other — that a Jakarta-born interface can speak fluent Pix, that a Bogotá checkout can clear an Indonesian payout without drama.

The strategic consequence is larger than one firm. As corridors thicken, trade becomes more about code than customs. The unit of integration is not a free-trade deal but an API. Sovereignty is exercised not only in tariffs but in standards and uptime. If this works, the cost of moving value across the South falls — and with it, the need to route ambition through the North’s platforms. The map of finance does not flip; it becomes multipolar at the layer that matters most: the layer where money actually moves.