Dmytro Rukin on Building Cross-Border Payment Infrastructure in Latin America

Dmytro Rukin built his career across business development, commercial strategy, and executive leadership in fintech. He holds a Master's degree in Enterprise Economics and spent his early years in business development and contract negotiation before moving into payments in 2018. From there he rose through commercial and C-level roles in the fintech sector in Eastern Europe, gaining hands-on experience in partner acquisition, payment solution development, and cross-functional team leadership. In 2023 he took the helm at LaFinteca. Today, Dmytro Rukin is the CEO of LaFinteca, a payment infrastructure company operating across Latin America (Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Peru, Colombia) and Europe. He has spent close to a decade in payments, starting in Eastern Europe, before turning his attention to the region he now considers the most interesting payments market on the planet. We sat down with him to understand how he reads Latin America, why Brazil sits at the center of his thinking, and where he believes the money is moving next. Why did Dmytro Rukin focus on Latin America? "People look at Latin America and see complexity. I look at the same map and see one of the fastest-growing digital economies in the world, with room to build the rails that aren't there yet. That's the part that gets me out of bed." The short answer is scale meeting opportunity. Latin America has roughly 300 million digital buyers, and regional e-commerce is set to reach 700 billion USD in value by 2027, according to Statista data compiled in the Guide to Accessing Latin America . That is a market growing fast enough to reward anyone willing to do the hard infrastructure work early. What pulled me in specifically was the gap between demand and plumbing. Consumers here are mobile-first and ready to buy. Mobile commerce already accounts for around 47% of online retail sales in the region. The connective tissue that lets a merchant actually collect that money, cleanly, across borders, is still being built. I would rather build the road than wait for someone else to pave it. And I want to be clear about the framing. Latin America is where LaFinteca starts. It is the proving ground. The ambition runs wider, and the company already operates in Europe alongside its Latin American markets. What makes Brazil so central to the region? Brazil is the gravitational center of payments in Latin America, and the numbers back that up. It holds the largest e-commerce market in the region, valued at 36.8 billion USD in 2023, ahead of Mexico, according to Statista. When you size the opportunity in Latin America, you start in Brazil because that is where the volume lives. "Brazil is where you earn your credibility in this region. If your infrastructure holds up under Brazilian volume and Brazilian expectations, the rest of the continent takes you seriously." The fintech density tells the same story. Brazil leads Latin America with 24% of the region's fintech platforms, out of a record 3,069 across the region, according to the Inter-American Development Bank's IV Fintech Report. That concentration of builders, capital, and regulatory ambition makes Brazil the place where new payment behavior gets invented first and exported later. Then there is Pix, the instant payment system that reshaped how Brazilians move money. Pix holds a 16% share of e-commerce transactions and is projected to grow at a 26% compound annual rate between 2023 and 2026, per Statista figures in the Guide to Accessing Latin America . A method moving at that speed changes the checkout assumptions for everyone selling into the country. Is there really no single "LATAM payment method"? Correct, and treating Latin America as one homogeneous market is the most common mistake I see foreign companies make. Each country runs on its own dominant methods, its own regulator, and its own consumer habits. A strategy that works in São Paulo can fall flat in Bogotá or Lima. "There is no such thing as a Latin American payment method. There are Brazilian methods, Mexican methods, Chilean methods. The merchants who win here respect that and the ones who flatten it into a single integration learn an expensive lesson." The data shows how uneven the ground is. In Colombia and Brazil, alternative digital payment methods such as wallets make up roughly half of e-commerce, while card-dominant markets sit much higher on plastic, according to Statista's 2023 country breakdown. Argentina pushes around 30% of its e-commerce spending through digital wallets, far ahead of Brazil, Peru, Mexico, and Chile, which cluster between 9 and 12%. So when someone asks for our "LATAM solution," I gently correct them. What we offer is access to the right local methods, country by country, behind one connection. The work is in-depth. We do not pretend that the depth doesn't exist. How do you build a team across Europe and Latin America? You build it the slow way, on trust, and you think in years rather than quarters. We run with people in Europe and across Latin America, with offices anchored in São Paulo and Barcelona. That spread only works if everyone is solving the same problem with the same standards, regardless of time zone. For me, it comes down to hiring people who care about the craft and then giving them real ownership. Payments are unforgiving. A settlement error or a compliance gap is not a cosmetic bug, it touches real money and real merchants. So I would rather move deliberately and bring in people who treat that responsibility seriously than scale headcount for the sake of a slide in a deck. The cultural distance between Barcelona and São Paulo is real, and I have stopped pretending it can be engineered away. What bridges it is shared respect for the work and a habit of actually knowing the human on the other end of the message. You make that leadership choice every week. It never becomes a policy you write once and forget. Where is the region's payment landscape heading? Account-to-account is the direction of travel, and the growth curves make that hard to argue with. Bank transfers are the fastest-growing payment method in Latin American e-commerce, projected at a 38% compound annual growth rate between 2023 and 2026, according to Statista data in the Guide to Accessing Latin America . Nothing else in the mix is moving that fast. Digital wallets are the other engine. Wallet usage in the region is set to rise by roughly 20% year over year, building on the mobile-first behavior that already defines how people shop here. Put those two trends together, and you get a picture of money moving instantly, directly between accounts, with cards and cash slowly ceding ground. "The future of payments in Latin America is instant, account-to-account, and local by default. The companies that internalize that now will own the next decade. The ones still optimizing for cards are optimizing for the past." My read is simple. The infrastructure that wins will treat instant local rails as the baseline rather than the add-on. That is what we are building toward, starting in Latin America and designed to travel. Disclaimer: This article is published under the HackerNoon Business Blogging Program.