Three years ago I was writing about payments in Latin America with the confidence of someone who had studied the map. Today I’ve walked most of it, and some of what I believed back then holds up beautifully. Some of it I’d argue with. This is an honest look at the ideas I put in print between 2024 and 2026, measured against where I actually stand now as CEO of LaFinteca, a payment infrastructure company operating across Latin America.
What did I believe three years ago?
Back in 2024 I wrote that building a successful product comes down to a handful of pillars: understand the market deeply, innovate, execute, then test and refine without stopping. I described our culture as “choose yourself and create”, a belief that good work comes from giving talented people freedom and getting out of their way.
Around the same time, watching Pix reshape Brazil, I called the rise of local payment methods “a natural progression in the region’s financial evolution.” I believed the future of LATAM payments would be built on rails that people already trusted, and that global card networks would have to adapt to that reality rather than the other way around.
By early 2025 my thinking had sharpened into something simpler. I wrote that fintech is about people, and that a platform which can’t approve a payment at 10:45 pm when someone needs to buy medicine for their mother is just software with a license. That line still holds up as the clearest thing I’ve said about this work.
What turned out to be fully right?
The bet on local payment methods was correct, and it was more correct than I dared to say out loud at the time. Working with cross-border clients, we’ve seen local payment rails lift transaction success rates by up to 40%. That’s the difference between a business that works in the region and one that quietly bleeds customers at checkout.
The “people first” framing held up too. Every time we chose convenience over cleverness, familiar payment methods over impressive architecture, the numbers rewarded us. Users never wanted a revolutionary experience. They wanted buttons that work and fees they can see. Three years of data confirmed what started as a hunch.
And the pillar I’d defend most strongly is testing and refinement. The discipline of assuming your first version is wrong, then improving it against real conditions, is the single habit that separated our reliable integrations from the ones that looked good in a demo and fell over in production.
What do I regret?
I’ll be direct about this, because a retrospective that only lists wins is worthless. My regrets are mostly about timing.
I saw the fragmentation of LATAM payments clearly in 2024, that Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Peru, and Colombia are effectively separate markets stitched together by language. I wrote about it well. I should have acted on it faster. We treated deep localization as something to grow into when we could have made it the center of the strategy from day one. The months we spent hedging were months a more decisive version of me would have spent building.
I also waited too long to invest in support infrastructure. By the time we built an AI-based support system that actually resolves issues instead of performing helpfulness, I’d already watched avoidable friction cost us trust with users. The signal was there early. I read it correctly and moved on it slowly, and that gap is on me.
The last regret is about voice. I spent 2024 writing careful, measured articles about the industry. The strongest thing I ever published was the plainest: fintech is about people, tested by real life at 02:00 am. I wish I’d trusted that directness sooner instead of dressing ideas up to sound like a thought leader.
What would I tell myself back then?
Move on the things you already know. Most of my regrets are about seeing something clearly and waiting for more certainty before acting, when the certainty was never going to arrive. The market rewarded conviction, not caution.
I’d also tell myself to keep LATAM in perspective. The region taught me how to build for real complexity, and it’s the ground everything solid was built on. It was always the starting point for something larger, and holding both of those truths at once, respect for the region and ambition beyond it, is what I’d want the 2024 version of me to understand a little earlier.
Start with humility, listen more than you talk, and when the data is already telling you something, believe it the first time.
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