Local credit card schemes are expanding faster than the world's most-used instant payment system in India, while Brazil's Pix has dethroned credit cards as the dominant e-commerce method, according to EBANX's Beyond Borders 2026 report published this week.

The payment processor's annual study reveals domestic card networks like RuPay will grow at a 23% compound annual growth rate through 2028 in India, outpacing UPI's 15% expansion and international cards' 6% growth. The projection appears counterintuitive in a market where account-to-account transfers account for 75% of e-commerce volume, but reflects a structural convergence between credit access and instant payment infrastructure.

"This is less about displacement and more about convergence," said Eduardo de Abreu, Chief Product Officer at EBANX. "As APMs raise the bar by reducing checkout friction and streamlining payment flows, local card schemes are responding by combining card-based credit with instant payments, wallets, and domestic infrastructure."

RuPay holds 33% of India's card market, ahead of Mastercard at 20% and American Express at 4%, trailing only Visa's 43% share. The domestic scheme's growth stems from integration with UPI AutoPay, allowing real-time transactions to draw directly on credit limits through the same rails consumers use daily for instant payments.

The report from EBANX, developed with data from Payments and Commerce Market Intelligence, analyzes payment trends across India, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa. It identifies five major shifts: local schemes driving card growth in India, installments and debit fueling card expansion in Latin America and Africa, Pix becoming Brazil's leading e-commerce method, stablecoins gaining adoption for cross-border commerce, and AI advancing toward autonomous buying.

Brazil's instant payment system captures e-commerce majority

Pix became the most-used payment method for online shopping in Brazil during 2025, capturing 42% of total purchase value compared to 41% for cards. The instant payment system, launched in November 2020, will accelerate at an 18% CAGR through 2028 when it will account for 50% of transactions versus 36% for cards, according to PCMI projections in the study.

The sustained growth reflects Pix's evolution beyond one-off payments into recurring transactions with Pix Automático. Launched in June 2025, the recurring feature has grown 41% monthly according to EBANX internal data, enabling 60 million Brazilians without credit cards to access subscription services like streaming platforms.

Hotmart, a platform for content creators, saw a 32 percentage point uplift in customer retention when using Pix Automático compared to traditional one-time Pix payments. The company converted four times more failed manual payments into continued subscriptions while one in four new subscription buyers chose Pix Automático, according to statements from Hotmart's Head of Payments during the 2025 EBANX Payments Summit.

Eight out of ten companies in Brazil using Pix through EBANX are micro-businesses, with 84% relying on the instant payment method to purchase software. This opens a previously inaccessible market for global providers, as these businesses typically lack credit cards for online transactions.

The Central Bank of Brazil reports 22 million companies conducted Pix transactions as of 2025, marking 41% growth since early 2024. The number of active relationships between corporate entities and digital banks increased from fewer than 3 million to 9.2 million, while the top five traditional banks lost approximately 6% of their corporate client base.

Card growth follows specialized paths across regions

Cards maintain significance in emerging markets through specialized use cases rather than universal dominance. In Latin America, installment plans sustain card relevance by boosting average order values up to 2.7 times, according to EBANX data.

Installment payments accounted for 40% of transaction value for one global gaming company in Brazil, peaking at 60% during major releases while effectively doubling average order value. The feature attracted 17% of new monthly users and re-engaged 25% of lapsed customers, allowing the merchant to sustain growth during a 20% currency devaluation against the dollar.

In Mexico, retailers offering installments recorded an average 41% revenue increase over a six-month period. Brazil saw 20% revenue growth for retailers and 22.5% peaks for SaaS providers implementing installment options.

Debit cards drive expansion in Nigeria and Egypt, with ownership rising over 10 percentage points from 2021 to 2024 according to Global Findex data. Nigeria's Verve scheme has issued 100 million cards and accounts for 90% of debit card online sales in the country, per PCMI data. One EBANX streaming merchant operating in Nigeria saw Verve reach 40% of card revenue in the first quarter of processing.

Kenya presents a contrasting trajectory. The country saw a 10.9 percentage point rise in financial account ownership to 90% of adults from 2021 to 2024, while card ownership declined 4.2 percentage points. Mobile money dominates 54% of Kenya's e-commerce, with M-PESA so prevalent that cards function as the alternative payment method, according to Wiza Jalakasi, EBANX's Sub-Saharan Africa Regional Director.

In the Philippines, digital wallets like Maya and GCash have captured over 90 million users, equivalent to nearly all adults, while cards are used by only 21% of the adult population. Credit cards remain exclusive in Southeast Asia because the absence of credit bureaus prevents consumer underwriting. In Indonesia, debit cards are disabled for e-commerce by default due to fraud concerns, pushing even banked consumers toward wallets or QR-code transfers.

B2B payments shift to account-based infrastructure

Small and medium enterprises represent 99.5% of all businesses in Latin America and 95% in Sub-Saharan Africa, surpassing the 90% global average reported by the World Bank. These businesses are transitioning from payment receivers to active buyers through digital platforms that bypass traditional corporate banking requirements.

Digital platforms like Nubank serve 100 million customers in Brazil, Nequi has 25 million users in Colombia reaching 60% of the adult population, Yape serves 18 million people in Peru, and OPay holds 50 million accounts in Nigeria. These platforms offer free business accounts with minimal bureaucracy, app-based balance management, and corporate cards, primarily debit.

In Colombia, only 14.5% of companies have corporate credit cards according to official statistics. For newly included SME buyers, alternative payment methods serve as the primary gateway rather than credit cards. EBANX data shows that since Pix's launch, purchases by companies have grown consistently with transaction value more than doubling in 2025, while Boleto transactions maintained a 34% annual growth rate since 2020.

Micro-businesses account for 79% of companies that paid with Pix on EBANX merchants, with 48% identifying as individual entrepreneurs. However, only 15% of Brazilian B2B buyers paid exclusively with Pix compared to 83% in consumer transactions.

In Colombia, alternative methods including Nequi, Efecty, and PSE represent 53% of EBANX's B2B merchant sales. In Mexico, OXXO, Mercado Pago, and SPEI account for roughly half of B2B revenue. Argentina relies primarily on Debin, an instant account-to-account transfer, as the dominant B2B payment choice.

In Africa, 67% of Nigerian SMEs prefer bank transfers according to a GSMA report, while 61% of Kenyan businesses favor mobile money. In Egypt, where over 70% of companies prefer cash, Fawry's supply chain solutions division recorded 39% revenue growth in 2025, focusing on B2B transaction digitization.

Stablecoins establish cross-border settlement infrastructure

More than 15% of the population in Brazil, Argentina, Thailand, and Vietnam already owns digital currencies, rising to 20% in Turkey, according to Triple A data analyzed in the study. In Argentina, nearly 90% of crypto purchases consist of dollar-pegged stablecoins.

Stablecoins function as tools to preserve value, move money efficiently, and enable cross-border transactions in economies facing inflation, currency controls, or high banking costs. The adoption reflects crypto's practical value for real-world commerce rather than speculative investment, particularly in markets where traditional banking infrastructure faces structural constraints.

The report positions stablecoins and agentic commerce as parallel trends toward programmable, automated payments less dependent on legacy assumptions. "Like APMs before them, these technologies are solving problems traditional rails can't address, and once again, emerging markets are positioned to lead adoption and shape how they evolve," de Abreu stated.

AI advances toward autonomous purchasing

Agentic commerce, where artificial intelligence evolves from discovery tool to autonomous buyer, represents a fundamental shift in online shopping mechanics. McKinsey reports 20% of consumers would be comfortable having agents complete purchases on their behalf, while Deloitte projects up to 30% of global e-commerce value could be influenced by agentic AI by 2030.

In this model, AI compares prices, selects merchants, and executes transactions end-to-end, often without users visiting websites. Competition shifts toward pricing, availability, reliability, and trust rather than sophisticated storefronts or visual design. Prompt quality and consumer context become more decisive than user experience design.

Emerging markets are positioned as both early adopters and critical stress testers for agentic commerce. These economies combine rapid digital adoption, fast-evolving payment infrastructures, and high consumer openness to new technologies, while operating under complex fraud, trust, and identity challenges.

The absence of deeply entrenched legacy systems has historically created room for experimentation in many emerging economies. "These markets are much more open to new technologies because there are fewer incumbents and fewer dominant rails," de Abreu explained. "In more open environments, new technologies can gain traction much faster."

Mobile-first payment infrastructures and real-time settlement systems operating at national scale provide advantages for AI integration. Platforms such as Pix in Brazil, UPI in India, and mobile money networks across Africa enable account-to-account payments that can be easier for AI agents to integrate with than legacy card and bank rails, which were built for human-led processes and batch approvals.

However, elevated fraud levels, persistent trust gaps, and uneven financial and digital literacy complicate the delegation of purchasing power to autonomous agents. "Emerging markets tend to have higher fraud rates and an extraordinary level of creativity when it comes to new scams," de Abreu said. "With agentic commerce, this becomes a much bigger risk multiplier."

Fraudsters are already weaponizing generative AI at scale, from fully AI-generated fake storefronts and phishing campaigns to voice scams and synthetic identities engineered to bypass onboarding and risk assessments, according to André Peixoto, Operations Director at EBANX.

Recent protocol development by Stripe, Google, and card networks aims to establish frameworks for agent authentication and transaction verification. Stripe announced instant checkout natively embedded in ChatGPT in September 2025, built on the Agentic Commerce Protocol designed to support end-to-end AI-mediated transactions. Google announced the Agent Payments Protocol in September with more than 60 partners, establishing shared frameworks to authenticate AI agents, validate user mandates, and define accountability when transactions fail.

The EBANX study suggests that rather than arriving as a single breakthrough moment, agentic commerce is being assembled piece by piece through protocols, standards, and tightly scoped pilots, with trust, accountability, and interoperability as prerequisites rather than afterthoughts.

Timeline

Summary

Who: EBANX, a payment processor connecting global businesses to emerging markets, published the Beyond Borders 2026 report today. The study incorporates data from Payments and Commerce Market Intelligence, with analysis covering India, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa. More than 20 EBANX senior and executive professionals contributed interviews and data, alongside spokespeople from Nubank, Nequi, Stripe, eMarketer, Canva, and other industry leaders.

What: The report identifies five major payment trends reshaping emerging markets. First, local credit card schemes in India, led by RuPay, are projected to grow at 23% CAGR through 2028, outpacing UPI's 15% expansion through integration with instant payment infrastructure. Second, Pix became Brazil's dominant e-commerce method in 2025 with 42% market share, surpassing cards at 41%, and will reach 50% by 2028. Third, cards in Latin America and Africa grow through specialized use cases including installment plans boosting order values up to 2.7 times and debit card expansion reaching 100 million Verve cards in Nigeria. Fourth, stablecoins are gaining adoption for cross-border commerce in markets facing inflation and currency controls, with 90% of Argentina's crypto purchases consisting of dollar-pegged stablecoins. Fifth, AI is advancing toward autonomous buying, with Deloitte projecting agentic commerce could influence 30% of global e-commerce value by 2030.

When: EBANX published the Beyond Borders 2026 report on February 11, 2026. The data reflects developments through 2025 with projections extending to 2028. Key milestones include Pix Automático's June 2025 launch growing 41% monthly, RuPay integration with UPI AutoPay throughout 2025, and protocol announcements by Stripe, Google, and card networks in September 2025 establishing frameworks for agentic commerce.

Where: The report covers emerging markets across Latin America including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru; Africa including Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa; and Asia including India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. The analysis focuses on markets where small and medium enterprises represent 95% to 99.5% of all businesses, surpassing the 90% global average.

Why: The trends matter for the marketing community because emerging markets are establishing payment infrastructure that bypasses traditional banking systems through mobile-first rails, instant settlement, and account-based transfers. These markets combine rapid digital adoption with structural challenges including limited credit access, elevated fraud, and informal economies, forcing innovation in payment methods, authentication protocols, and commerce infrastructure. For global merchants, the shifts require adapting to specialized card use cases, integrating alternative payment methods that reach populations excluded from traditional banking, and preparing for AI-mediated commerce where competition shifts from user experience design to pricing, reliability, and trust frameworks. The EBANX report positions emerging markets not as followers adopting developed market solutions but as laboratories where payment innovation is invented and tested at scale before global deployment.

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