The world is going through an accelerated convergence of payment rails that, for decades, operated in silos. Cash and cards, already well established, now coexist with real-time payment systems in the style of Pix, and with blockchain, whose most concrete expression in payments is stablecoins. What used to be an ecosystem of parallel rails is now beginning to function as a single, orchestrated infrastructure.
According to McKinsey, the global payments industry generated USD 2.5 trillion in revenue in 2024, backed by 3.6 trillion transactions worldwide. Behind those numbers lies a reality that every product and technology team should keep in mind: how money moves is as critical as how much of it does. And the infrastructure decisions made today will shape how this convergence keeps evolving.
Historically, cash was the dominant rail. And although its relative weight keeps declining steadily, it would be a mistake to underestimate it: it's still the most widely used payment method in informal segments and rural areas. That points to a financial inclusion gap that still exists, and to the opportunities digital payments find there.
According to a Mastercard study, among people who already have access to digital alternatives, 87% wish more stores and people accepted digital payments, and 59% admit that at least once a month, they have to pay in cash even though they'd rather not. For them, the problem isn't preference. The other side of the counter simply doesn't accept anything else.
When digital acceptance shows up, migration happens fast. In Brazil, cash went from being the main payment method for 42% of the population to just 22% between the Central Bank's 2021 and 2024 surveys. There was no need to convince users: it was enough to give them an alternative that worked everywhere, all the time, at no cost.
Cash is the baseline against which the progress of every other rail gets measured: every percentage point it loses is a user who enters the digital system.
Cards were the first great revolution in digital payments. Before Pix, before wallets, before blockchain, cards solved the central problem of modern payments: they let people transact straight from their bank accounts and removed the dependence on cash for everyday spending, both in physical stores and e-commerce. Decades later, they remain the go-to rail for consumption.
Beyond the classic debit and prepaid cards, which run on the balance available in an account, the standout is the credit card: it holds the largest e-commerce market share in Latin America, at 42% of volume. Its staying power makes sense: it's the card that earns the issuer the most, through the interchange fee on every transaction, interest on financed balances, and fees, among others. For the user, the benefits are the concrete reason to use it: installments, discounts, and loyalty and cashback programs. A model that works for both sides.
Behind every transaction, there's an infrastructure connecting the user, the issuer, the merchant, and the processing networks — Visa and Mastercard — which act as the global bridge that authorizes and settles every operation. What's changed isn't that architecture, but who gets to participate in it: today any bank, fintech, or company can launch a card program in weeks, through modern infrastructure, without building from scratch.
And issuing is going even further. It's now possible to issue cards in dollars or stablecoins to users anywhere in the world, without needing to open local operations in every market. Local and global issuing are converging under a single infrastructure.
On the other side is acquiring, the process by which merchants access the rail to accept payments, and it too is undergoing a major transformation. Payment gateways now unify multiple methods under a single integration: virtual or physical cards, transfers, and QR. On top of that, the point-of-sale terminal is no longer an exclusive physical device: any phone can now replace it, drastically lowering the barrier for small and informal merchants — the exact segment where cash still dominates.
What makes cards the rail that most enables convergence is something more structural: they can be backed by any currency or digital asset, and the user uses them the exact same way in any store in the world. That versatility is what turns them into the ecosystem's natural point of convergence: they don't compete with the newer rails, they're the interface through which users access them.
If we had to pick the most disruptive phenomenon in payments over the last five years, it would be the arrival and mass adoption of instant payment systems. Not because they replaced cards, but because they solved money transfers with no friction and at zero or minimal cost, 365 days a year.
The clearest case is Pix. Launched by Brazil's Central Bank in November 2020, it's now the global reference for how to build an instant payment system at scale:
USD 6.7 trillion in transaction volume in 2025, 34% more than the year before (EBANX)93% of Brazil's adult population actively uses it (EBANX)No instant system has scaled this fast. India's UPI, which inspired Pix, took six years and eight months to approach the ~8-billion-monthly-transactions mark that Pix is reaching in five (EBANX)EBANX merchants that added it saw revenue rise 16% and their customer base grow 25% within six months (EBANX)The model was so compelling that before turning five, it had already inspired equivalent systems across the region and beyond. Bre-B in Colombia took Pix directly as a reference, and in Peru the central bank forced Yape and Plin to interoperate with each other, replicating the universal interoperability principle that made Pix work. In Europe, SEPA Instant already operates in more than 30 countries.
In the United States, instant rails arrived through the private sector's RTP network in 2017 and the Fed's FedNow in 2023, as the country worked to close a gap that the emerging markets had opened.
What's more, real-time payments aren't just a better experience — they're a shift in B2B economics. A traditional rail with three days of float carries an opportunity cost that few companies actually calculate. An instant rail eliminates it. Reconciliation gets automated, liquidity frees up, and treasury management becomes more precise. For companies operating across multiple markets, that edge shows up directly in working capital.
What this rail brought that's new comes down to one idea: moving value across borders stopped depending on the banking calendar. A stablecoin is a digital currency pegged to a traditional one, almost always the dollar. A transfer settles in minutes, any day of the year, at any hour.
The comparison explains its adoption. A traditional cross-border payment typically passes through several entities, each with its own spread and operating hours, and can take days to complete. A stablecoin transfer, by contrast, passes through a single network — which is why global stablecoin transaction volume reached USD 33 trillion in 2025, a 72% year-over-year increase, led by USDC.
Where that advantage becomes most concrete is in B2B, because that's where the cost and delay of every international operation hits working capital directly. In the first half of 2026, Bitso Business logged an 81% year-over-year increase in stablecoin payment volume among its B2B clients. And the profile of who's adopting has shifted: 60% of new clients that half came from the financial sector — commercial banks and payment aggregators — rather than crypto-native companies.
Another report on wallet behavior in the region shows that stablecoins don't sit still; they circulate. About 89% function as transit wallets, moving at least 90% of funds within 30 days. That volume also explains the global regulatory movement of the last two years. When a rail moves trillions of dollars a year, it stops being a gray zone and becomes a legislative matter. The frameworks being written today in the United States, Europe, and Latin America are an acknowledgment that this is already financial infrastructure.
Latin America, for its part, adopted stablecoins earlier and faster than the rest of the world, for structural reasons. In economies with persistent inflation, devaluation, and currency controls, a dollar-pegged stablecoin functions as a store of value and a payment rail at the same time:
Stablecoins are the region's most-purchased digital asset, accounting for 40% of all acquisitions, overtaking Bitcoin for the first time.In Argentina, they account for more than 60% of total crypto volume and have become an everyday mechanism for accessing dollars.In Brazil, they concentrate close to 90% of total crypto transaction volume.In Colombia, 99% of peso purchases on centralized exchanges go directly into stablecoins.That last figure is the most telling: most users aren't chasing crypto exposure. They're chasing dollar access.
The four rails aren't a menu of mutually exclusive options. Each one solved a different problem, and that specialization is precisely what makes them complementary. Cards solved acceptance: a global network that lets a single instrument work in any store in the world. Real-time payments solved the speed and cost of moving money between accounts, though still within each market's borders. Stablecoins solved something neither of the other two could: moving money in a stable currency across borders, without a chain of intermediaries behind it. Cash, meanwhile, keeps marking how much ground is left to cover.
One of the clearest examples of convergence is the stablecoin-backed card. Holding digital dollars solves the savings problem, but it isn't much use if you have to go back to the traditional system every time you want to spend. Today a card can be backed by a stablecoin balance and work exactly like any other card at any store in the world: the user keeps their money in digital dollars and pays for coffee in local currency, without thinking about the conversion. Neither rail could do that alone: one had the asset but not the acceptance, the other the acceptance but not the asset.
And that's not the only crossover. Remittances that used to travel through the correspondent bank network now cross borders as stablecoins and get spent through cards or transfers, combining different rails in a single operation. Modern point-of-sale terminals no longer distinguish whether what they're receiving is a card, a QR code, or an instant transfer. Digital wallets bundle multiple rails behind a single interface, considerably improving the user experience.
Adding one more rail is the easy part. The hard part is keeping that addition from fragmenting the operation: every extra system can mean a new vendor, duplicated controls, and mounting technical debt. That's why the paradigm taking hold is orchestration: a layer that automatically picks the most efficient rail for each transaction based on speed, cost, jurisdiction, and counterparty type, without having to rebuild the integration every time.
The question is no longer which rail to use, but how to build the capability to offer all of them, depending on what each operation calls for. As Pomelo CEO Gastón Irigoyen put it when announcing the company's global expansion: "Latin America runs on multiple payment rails: cards, transfers, and now stablecoins too. It's a multi-rail ecosystem in a complex region, shaped by regulatory asymmetries between markets. The opportunity isn't in choosing a single rail — it's in combining them intelligently."
Convergence is already here. The open question now is who's ready to run on it.
A journalist and Communications graduate born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, she joined Pomelo’s marketing team after writing for media outlets, agencies, and IT companies—experiences that honed her ability to decipher technical information regarding software and blockchain. She is a cinephile who loves music and exploring new places, and—above all—she is a cat lover.
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