Latin America’s digital habits are no longer confined to retail shopping or person-to-person transfers. They are directly influencing how smaller firms invoice, get paid, stock shelves and bridge payroll gaps.
PYMNTS Intelligence, in collaboration with Visa Acceptance Solutions, has tracked how the region leapfrogged to mobile: smartphones became the primary doorway to the internet in many markets, including Brazil, where mobile devices can be more ubiquitous than bank accounts.
That matters for small businesses because “consumer” and “business owner” overlap in the real economy. A restaurant owner who pays rent, buys supplies and manages family expenses from a phone ends up wanting the same frictionless digital experience when collecting payments from customers or paying suppliers. In Brazil, our data shows mobile-first behavior spans generations, with Gen Z at about 70% and millennials about 67% using mobile devices for shopping. Even older cohorts show high mobile engagement.
The implication for SMBs is that mobile-first commerce expectations are turning into mobile-first back-office expectations.
And elsewhere, as detailed in KPMG’s 2H 2025 FinTech funding report, the small-business segment “continues to attract a lot of attention from FinTech investors, including in Latin America.” The combination of fewer but larger deals across the funding environment, paired with persistent focus on SMB-oriented models, suggests that investors are increasingly prioritizing platforms capable of embedding payments, liquidity tools and operational services into everyday business workflows.
The SMB Base Is Vast and Underserved
The addressable market is not niche. The Inter-American Development Bank has cited MSMEs (micro, small and medium sized enterprises) as roughly 99.5% of businesses in Latin America and the Caribbean, accounting for around 60% of employment.
Advertisement: Scroll to Continue
We’d love to be your preferred source for news.
Please add us to your preferred sources list so our news, data and interviews show up in your feed. Thanks!
PYMNTS’ own Latin America reporting, in collaboration with Payoneer, on the digitization of firms also underscores why digitization is not uniform: even after gains, the region still has a meaningful unbanked population, and among unbanked consumers, cost and trust barriers remain prominent. For SMB owners operating near the margin, those same constraints show up as patchwork payment acceptance, limited credit history and manual reconciliation.
What has changed recently is not just adoption, but product direction. Pix “Automático,” a recurring-payments capability, was set to launch with the explicit promise of simplifying recurring collections without the old bank-by-bank contracting burden, a shift that can be material for small merchants and subscription-style microbusinesses.
For SMBs, Pix’s practical effect is to compress payment settlement times and reduce “I got paid, but I can’t use it yet” lag. External analysis tracking BCB-reported data shows B2B Pix volumes are growing from a smaller base, even as P2B and P2P still dominate overall mix.
FinTechs Follow the Money
That is where sustained investment interest comes in. Investors are not backing another wallet as much as they are backing the operating layer: acceptance, reconciliation, invoicing, payouts and credit flow together.
Earnings season is not yet fully over, and so fourth quarter results are still in the offing, but the direction of modernization has been up and to the right. In its Q3’25 results presentation, Nubank highlighted that unsecured loan originations include both individuals and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and it showed total originations of $4.2 billion for Q3’25, up 40% year on year.
MercadoLibre’s shareholder letter described its FinTech ambition as building the “largest digital bank in Latin America,” with FinTech Services monthly active users up 29% YoY to 72 million in Q3’25, and merchant loans were $1.9 billion, up 60.7% year on year, per company materials.
Across the region, that same “bundle” logic keeps appearing: integrated pay-ins and pay-outs plus working-capital tools that match how small firms actually run.
Add as Preferred Source
