Aron Schwarzkopf, CEO & Co-Founder of Kushki on building modern payments infrastructure in Latin America

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As recently as six or seven years ago modern payments infrastructure in Latin America didn’t really exist. Most countries had a monopoly when it came to payments processing and these monopolies sit on old technology that is difficult and expensive to maintain.

Aron Schwarzkopf, Co-Founder & CEO, Kushki
Aron Schwarzkopf, Co-Founder & CEO, Kushki

A lot has changed today. Digital payments infrastructure has been built and while those old monopoly companies still exist there is now digital payments infrastructure throughout the region.

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One podcast is Aron Schwarzkopf, the CEO and Co-Founder of Kushki. The mission of the company is “connecting Latin America through payments” and they are doing this by building new technology that others can build on to provide a comprehensive digital payments experience with a unified API.

In this podcast you will learn:

  • Why Aron decided to head back to Latin America after some time in the US.
  • The three big problems he encountered there.
  • How the payments landscape has evolved in Latin America.
  • What Kushki does exactly.
  • The two types of clients they serve.
  • How easy it is to accept international payments online.
  • The countries they operate in today.
  • Why the prevalence of cash means a green field opportunity for Kushki.
  • Why the growth of real-time payments is helping grow the market.
  • What it meant when the government of Ecuador named Kushki as the first payment aggregator.
  • Why they acquired BillPocket in Mexico.
  • The key takeaways from the recent report they published with Statista.
  • Why Kushki experiences less fraud than others in Latin America.
  • Aron’s vision for the future of digital payments in the region.

Read a transcript of our conversation below.

Episode 451: Aron Schwarzkopf, CEO and Co-Founder of Kushki

Peter Renton  00:01

Welcome to the Fintech One-on-One podcast. This is Peter Renton, Chairman and co-founder of Fintech Nexus. I’ve been doing this show since 2013, which makes this the longest running one-on-one interview show in all of fintech. Thank you for joining me on this journey. If you like this podcast, you should check out our sister shows, The Fintech Blueprint with Lex Sokolin and Fintech Coffee Break with Isabelle Castro, or listen to everything we produce by subscribing to the Fintech Nexus podcast channel.

Peter Renton  00:31

Before we get started, I want to remind you about our comprehensive new service, Fintech Nexus News not only covers the biggest fintech news stories, our daily newsletter delivers the most important fintech stories into your inbox every morning, with special commentary on the top story of the day. Stay on top of fintech news by subscribing at news dot fintech nexus.com/subscribe.

Peter Renton  01:10

Today on the show, I’m delighted to welcome Aron Schwarzkopf, he is the CEO and co-founder of Kushki. Kushki is a really interesting company. They are building the payments infrastructure for Latin America. And they’ve been at this for a few years now. And wanted to get Aron on the show just to delve deeply into this infrastructure that they’re building. Then we do talk about, obviously, what Kushki does, and  how they work, the type of companies that are using their services. We also talk more broadly about the challenges of building a fintech company in Latin America, we talk about the prevalence of cash and how that is impeding (or not) the growth of fintech. We talk about instant payments. We talk about regulation, their acquisition they did last year in Mexico, we talk about the recent report they did with Statista, and also about data in general and why the data in Latin America can be misleading. It was a fascinating discussion. Hope you enjoy the show.

Peter Renton  02:18

Welcome to the podcast, Aron.

Aron Schwarzkopf  02:20

Hey, Peter, thank you for having me.

Peter Renton  02:22

My pleasure. So let’s get started by giving the listeners a little bit of background about yourself. I know you’ve been doing Kushki for a little while now. But what don’t you tell us some of the highlights of your career to date?

Aron Schwarzkopf  02:35

I’m 35 years old. I’m a parent of three beautiful girls and I, I was raised in Latin America, in Quito, Ecuador, then had the luck to do my studies, both in the United States and China. As I was finishing university in the United States, I accidentally encountered payments. And I started my first company there when I was 20 years old. That company ended up growing and sold to an acquiring bank in the United States. When that chapter ended, myself and the founder of that company who is also another Ecuadorian living in the United States called Sebastian, we both were very curious about back home, basically. How the the tech scene in general, or how can we get innovate in the region? And that’s kind of the underpinnings of how Kushki started.

Peter Renton  03:23

You know, back in Latin America, what was the sort of the drive to start Kushki as far as launching? What did you launch with?

Aron Schwarzkopf  03:33

Yeah, so before launch is probably first, you know, we were first very, very excited about the region as a whole, right? We started kind of like the Promised Land, right? You know, in our lifetime, it’s going to be a billion plus people, most of the population, you know, more than half are millennials and younger, quarter of the population are Gen Zs, the population that forgot about analog, right, and forgot about all these conceptions of the world of you know, being mobile or analog, or, you know, payments, or cash or whatever. There’s just people are early adopters and alpha consumers and anything they do, right? So we actually got there first investing. And as we were going around investing in technology startups, we saw this gigantic hole, right, which was payment infrastructure. For some odd reason, right, in Latin America, it’s kind of the last corner on Earth, where we haven’t commoditized this, right. Like everywhere else, right. And there’s, there were three big problems there.

Aron Schwarzkopf  04:32

The first one was fragmentation, regardless if it’s cards, or some sort of, you know, account or town based payment, right? It’s incredibly fragmented right within the region, within countries sometimes as well, right? The second one is the actual technology. Most of the stuff that carries all over the volume of transactions in Latin America, was built by people in languages that don’t exist anymore, right? They’ve either retired or dead. And those languages are not used anymore. We’re just holding on to this, like old infrastructure that won’t last. Here come us, and we’re like we actually know about payments. We actually know about Latin America, what are the odds, and as we continue to, you know, thinking about Kushki, that’s how we said, you know, kind of have this big ambition to turn Kushki into one of the pillars required to the new economy, right? So like if Latin America is going to prosper, it’s going to need really good infrastructure to move money from one point to the other. And that was the whole premises of Kushi. And it’s incredibly broad to be quite frank, and ambitious, but that’s how we started more or less, and kind of the idea was, we would like to be one of the pillars in which the new economies depend on in Latin America, right when it comes to being able to accept payments and transact.

Peter Renton  05:53

Okay, great. So before we get right into Kushki, I want to sort of step back, and let’s look at the payments landscape over the last five, six years since you launched Kushki. There has been a lot of things happen in the payments space, in Latin America. And it’s a very different space to where it was when you started, But maybe you can talk about, just describe how has it changed overall, in Latin America, how’s the payment landscapes changed?

Aron Schwarzkopf  06:21

The thing I like the most is that there’s now optimism around the payment evolution in Latin America. Where we started was all monopolies, regulation didn’t exist. Pretty much cash will be King forever, and nothing else works, right? And today, even though there’s still monopolies, and there’s still some, you know, regulation that can improve. Everybody’s an optimist, and the numbers are starting to show, right? Latin America is one of the fastest growing digital payment place in the world. In some countries, right? Cash usage has dwindled so much that in comparison to places like the United States and some places in Europe, you know, there’s less cash usage in some of the countries in Latin America. Right, so you can actually start seeing the evolution right. In terms of the payments landscape to what we do, I do think that there’s some things that remain unchanged quite a bit, right. It’s still incredibly hard right, for businesses to navigate payments in Latin America today. I think it’s just the beginning. And the reason is, the fragmentation continues to be there, there’s very few of us who have tried to consolidate the region, right, to kill the fragmentation. And there’s very few of us that are truly local, and helping the businesses, right, figure all the local nuances required to operate successfully, as well as to have a next generation pipeline, right, you know. Today most of the commerce goes through monopolies that still exist. And those monopolies sit on very bad technology, or incredibly closed minded. There’s some things that remain unchanged, right. But probably the biggest thing is, evolution is here to stay. There’s kind of like a consensus and optimism that this is changing quite fast, and everybody’s incredibly excited to do it. So that makes me really, really happy. Other than there’s been incredible success launches in things that reduce cash outside of credit cards and wire transfers. You know, we have a lot of real time payments rails launching, and wallets launching in Latin America that are gaining crazy amount of success as well, right.

Peter Renton  08:24

Yeah, for sure. And we’ll talk a little bit about that later. Let’s get into Kushki. What, how do you describe the company? What do you guys offer?

Aron Schwarzkopf  08:31

The company is very simple. Kushki was made to be the infrastructure to move money in Latin America. And the whole mission of the company, come to any of our offices or see our email signatures is “connecting Latin America through payments”. That’s essentially what we do, right. And we started bottoms up. So literally, we’ve gone to build our own processor acquirers you know, our own connections into all the local switches, and just figuring out all the local nuances. So creating all the underwriting and compliance, a vertically integrated player that sits locally in every country where we operate. And as you zoom out, right, kind of kills the whole fragmentation of the region, right? What do we provide for clients? It’s usually API’s for them to be able to to do either a payin or a payout, right, to their customers and between businesses. And we do that in many payment methods. In terms of credit cards…Credit cards, even though you know, they’ve gotten overshadowed in the news by by things like Pix. It is the highest growth region in the world for credit cards, by far. You know, they’re actually probably the biggest contributor today of cash reduction, credit and debit. And we do real time payments, and we do other types of APMs [alternative payment methods] as well. And we provide that to clients in terms of pay-in. And we also do payouts where we allow people to disburse cash in a compliant, legal, technological way around the region.

Peter Renton  09:56

Right. Okay, so then, can you tell us who are some of the companies that you’re actually, that you’re working with, that is using Kushki? Maybe give us an example of what they’re actually doing.

Aron Schwarzkopf  10:05

We focus on two types of clients, right? The first one’s are local large enterprises, right? So we serve local to local payments for kind of the top enterprises regionally, or locally in the countries where we work. And the second one is we serve everybody else indirectly, more or less. So one of the big things that we’ve tried to correct in Latin America, other than that there was very little technology in terms of, you know, infrastructure for payments. It’s also been a very closed environment, controlled by monopolies. And we do the opposite. So we have a lot of clients, which are other payment players, which ISOs, ISVs. There’s a lot of platforms being built on top of Kushki, that attack, you know, SMBs, indirectly, that attack cross border payments, things as such. So those are the two key clients that we have. In terms of integrations, you know, even though we’re kind of invisible, if you go to Latin America, or when you went to Latin America, and you know, you were hailing a ride or buying something online, right, or making an appointment at somewhere, most probably you used Kushki in some of these countries already, right. So it’s mostly API based in what we do, and in terms of the rest of the, the indirect market is crazy amount of stories, right, because we’re kind of opening this very closed cocoon of distribution, that was payment, especially in acquiring and cards, for example. So we have a ridiculous amount of different types of platforms using us from like, a cross-border player that reaches kind of Latin America locally, right, and we’re their first or last mile, if you will, to, you know, a bottling company, right, that is trying to build a lending product for like little merchants, in Peru, or in Mexico, to inventory systems, to healthcare appointment systems that are building a payment scheme on top of them, right. And we are the underlying acquirer or provider of infrastructure, right? So we are super excited about that second portion of our indirect business because we’re the first ones to open for business, right and allowing people to literally build an ecosystem.

Aron Schwarzkopf  10:10

Let’s just dig into it a little bit. So you, there’s a small business in Colombia, for example, they’ve been selling locally for years, and they now have an online store. And they want to sell to Peru or Mexico, for example. How easy is it for them to accept payments from those countries, to their online store in Colombia?

Aron Schwarzkopf  12:45

For the majority, it’s been really, really hard, right. Because of the fragmentation, we today, unfortunately, we don’t do any small business directly. But we do have indirect channels. So website builders, cardmakers, that basically use us and now you know, it’s like a plug and play, right? As soon as they do that, right. They’re local in all these places. So it’s literally it seems like a simple effort that took years and years.

Peter Renton  13:11

No, I can appreciate.

Aron Schwarzkopf  13:12

Infrastructure and compliance and regulatory stuff at the end as well, right? You know, we are the first in many licenses in several countries in Latin America, basically to be able to stand alone by ourselves and be able to do this, right. So I think it’s just the beginning, though, Peter, right, in terms of regional payments, cross border payments. As to our scale, it’s kind of like Latin America grows, most payment volume is growing between 25 to 30% year-over-year, right, non-cash ones, right? So it’s already a crazy market that every three to four years, right, depending on the country, it doubles. But in there, right, you know, we’ve counted the billions of dollars, right, that we move yearly. And we’re always like a drop in the water, still. And there’s very few Kuskis today in Latin America, who are actually companies that are tech-forward and are trying to connect the whole ecosystem, right and make it very, very easy for people to navigate and, you know, very democratic access to the ecosystem, right? Most of them are legacy companies that are monopolies controlled by conglomerates that are in a single country, like, you know, and have a lot of limitations technologically as well. Right, so…

Peter Renton  14:30

So what countries are you operating in today?

Aron Schwarzkopf  14:33

We focus primarily in Spanish speaking Latin America. Some of our largest countries are Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador.

Peter Renton  14:43

Okay, so then, I want to just talk about, you mentioned cash. I was in Mexico not that long ago and still seeing people lining up at the ATM on a Friday afternoon. And cash is still everywhere it feels like in Mexico. Is this a major impediment to the growth of digital payments?

Aron Schwarzkopf  15:05

I actually think it’s the opposite. You know, it’s when you think about land of opportunity or greenfield opportunity, having a large amount of population using cash for mundane activities, right. So you know, for paying something in retail or paying their, you know, utility bill or whatnot. It’s like a dream come true for entrepreneurs like me, right? Because there’s everything wrong with it. And you know, it’s uncomfortable, it’s unsafe, it’s dirty, it’s everything. And all around the region it’s starting to change quite fast, right? So even though Mexico today is probably the one that needs the most improvement, right, in cash reduction, the amount of cash is being reduced year over year, and Mexico is really, really fast. They’re actually one of the fastest, right, and then you have examples of things that were crazy fast. That were like, you know, kind of this exponential effect. Like in Chile, for example, in Chile, they went into lockdown because of Covid. And after Covid, now the usage both on and offline of cash, in big box retailers is less than 6%. So actually, you know, people use less cash in Chile within, you know, a year of lockdown than in the US now. And then you have phenomenons of course it’s not in every fraction of the economy, but it’s mostly on p2p stuff, but you have phenomenon was like Yape in Peru or Pix in Brazil, which basically have made cash be, you know, completely eliminated from like, a whole portion of the economy, right, you know, in terms of usage, right. So a lot of payment flows where cash no longer exists, right. Like in Brazil, it’s funny in Brazil, you can buy a coconut at the beach and you know, nobody takes cash but takes Pix, is something that, you know, five years ago would have been unheard of.

Peter Renton  16:51

Right, it would have really considered impossible.

Aron Schwarzkopf  16:54

I don’t see it as an impediment. I actually see it, and it is completely correlated to the payment that the electronic or digital payments industry growing 25 to 30% year-over-year in Latin America.

Peter Renton  17:06

Does Pix I mean, obviously you’re not in Brazil, but you know, you mentioned Yape in Peru, which hasn’t quite got the traction of Pix, but still has pretty significant traction. Are those things helping? As far as you know, once you digitize payments, I imagine for a company like Kushki, then you’re you’re open to other digital methods, right?

Aron Schwarzkopf  17:24

Yeah, absolutely, right. So credit and debit card is our core today, right. But the whole infrastructure was created to be able to take any payment method in general. And today in terms of APM is via real time payments, wallets and whatnot. We have over 20 regionally, in the company, and we’re always adding more, right. So it’s actually part of our mission. The only thing we don’t do is cash, basically. So these things are actually very, very helpful, right. And we actually move a lot of volume outside, you know, with APMs. Things such as real time payments, and wallets, right. So in some countries is growing quite fast, right.

Peter Renton  18:04

Okay. So then you’re originally from Ecuador. And, you know, the government of Ecuador, has designated Kushki, as the first payment aggregator. Maybe explain what that means, and what is the significance of that?

Aron Schwarzkopf  18:19

You know we started the business in Ecuador. It was the first country we started operations in Latin America, and it was one of the countries that is probably the furthest behind in regulation for payments, right. So it’s not uncommon in Ecuador, to, you know, wait months to be able to accept payments on or offline, right having to go to different providers locally to be able to have all the payment methods you need, right, you know, or acceptance that you need. So, we’ve been trying to innovate there for a while. And we were able to open and democratize access for the ecosystem to have technology companies. Right. So now, a technology connection is not a bank connection, participate in the system. That’s what the payment aggregator means it’s similar to payment facilitator in general, but it was the first win that, again, brings the optimism, you know, we’ve been, we’ve been kind of doing the hard work in each of these countries, building the plumbing and trying to educate and, and, you know, create an evolution of the ecosystem. And what we did in Ecuador was fantastic, right? Because it’s now, open now. You know, we were the first ones, obviously, but I think there’s 20 now, right?

Aron Schwarzkopf  19:30

You know, within the year that we built everything, we started creating the ecosystem. And there’s a lot of examples like that where some of the fintechs get together, and the nice thing in Latin America is that, in most part, the the regulators are really really interested in evolving this. They just, you know, didn’t have the knowledge for it, right. So I think it was a match made in heaven, you know, of getting payment experts and technology experts to speak with regulators to make this happen, right. Good example, that’s Brazil. Brazil’s at the head of the curve of payment innovation in Latin America and democratizing access, right? So I’ll give an example: in credit cards, Brazil 12 years ago had a duopoly basically in payment acquirers, and today there’s more than 50, right? It’s a very, it’s a booming sector, right. In most of Latin America we’re still behind, right? Now there’s two players in some of these markets, right – the monopoly and us. And so we’re further behind, but I think it’s going to move much faster, right. And we’re really happy with what we did in Ecuador, and you know, there’s a couple of more coming, right that I think we’ve been working for years, you know, with, with the regulators. Actually the Central Bank of Brazil has helped quite a bit, right, because I think they’re probably one of the best examples globally, not only of Latin America, collaboration and knowledge, basically. The stuff they’re doing is fantastic.

Peter Renton  20:54

I know. They’re very well respected. In fact, I was at an event at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, and they had a guy from the Central Bank of Brazil speaking there. They’re very, very well respected internationally these days. So I want to talk about Mexico. Last year you acquired the payment terminal provider called Billpocket. Tell me about what was the thinking there and what they actually do?

Aron Schwarzkopf  21:17

Yeah, absolutely. So Billpocket was actually the first payment facilitator or payment aggregator of Mexico. It was about an 11 or 12 year old company, right? That did it in Mexico this fight right to be able to have technology companies or startups join the ecosystem about a decade before Kushki did that in Equador, and the company started as a small business and POS player right, within Mexico. But eventually it turned out to become the first company in Mexico to have the underpinnings of an ISO and ISV program, right. So by the time we came across them, right, and we were, as I was telling you, before, we really, we really tried to endorse this indirect channel for us to be able, now that we’re vertically integrated, control the infrastructure, control kind of, all the licenses, we’ve always wanted to open this up so other people could build on top of Kushki, right, and the Billpockets team, we’re doing that successfully in Mexico, right? They were kind of the first player that we have seen, in LatAm actually, that you know, had something similar to ISO and ISV, VAR ecosystem. And that’s the reason we bought them, basically. And it’s been great, because the team is super talented, right? And it’s helped us basically, to not only accelerate their plans right, but standardize it regionally, right. So we are bringing into Latin America, in the months and years to come, a lot of programs, right, for companies that before had no access to, you know, no easy access, right to be able to connect or embed payments into their offering, all the way to actually being able to build payment businesses, right, you know, payment distribution, or vertical, verticalized payments or whatnot, on top of us. Which was kind of, it’s still kind of unheard of, in Latin America, like, if you want to build a payments business, you have to know a lot about payments, have a lot of money, or a lot of connections, right? And a lot of patience to basically connect into like the legacy grids in different places, right? So we want to make it as easy as possible. If you want to build a payments business on top of Kushki, you should be able to do it in a month in the whole region.

Peter Renton  23:35

Right, right. Okay, want to switch gears and talk about a recent report that you released with Statista. It was on the growth of the digital payments ecosystem in Latin America,. We know you have the Kushki Talk series that you were kind enough to invite me along to one of those sessions recently. What are some of the takeaways from this particular report that you that you did with Statista?

Aron Schwarzkopf  23:58

Overall it kinda pinpointed more detail where the growth and trends are happening in Latin America, and the whole movement around us doing reports with third parties and starting the series like Kushki Talks, which by the way, thank you so much for being part of the last edition.

Peter Renton  24:15

My pleasure.

Aron Schwarzkopf  24:16

We find that in Latin America, there’s very little data and very little content when it comes to fintech and payments. As a matter of fact, when you compare some of the reports or data that are created by you know, very big brands, they contradict themselves, right? Because they use old datasets and you know, have this huge debate where you know all of a sudden, you know, the card brands think the fraud is gigantic in Latin America, there really isn’t, by the way, right? It’s kind of funny, because they’re all using different sets of data. The data is not very useful. In Latin America what we’re trying to do with Kushki Talks and reports like the one we did with Statista, is to be able to educate, right, and to actually be able to sponsor some real data in each of the countries, and specifically when it comes to Statista, we’re speaking about a lot about the growth in Mexico and the trends that are happening. So I was telling you about, you know, lower cash usage, among other things, in Mexico, if your listeners want to, you know, pull that report, the piece that they want to learn more detail than, you know, what you would read about Mexican payments. It’s a great way to start there. Yeah.

Peter Renton  25:23

Right. I’ll make sure to link to that in the show notes. Okay, so you mentioned fraud. I mean, how big of a problem is fraud in Latin America, and what is Kushki doing to help reduce it?

Aron Schwarzkopf  25:35

Yeah. So I have a good anecdote. I met with the president of this large card brand. And he was telling me, “yeah in Latin America, the fraud rates are insane.” And I was like, no, no they’re not. He was so shocked that we actually, you know, kinda went deep on it. And the issue is, it’s twofold, right. The first one is, historically, the fraud rates in Latin America have been above average, places like Europe and the United States. But it’s because data is unstandardized, right. And how you send data and the infrastructure, in many ways. And the second one is because no one did anything about it. When you have players that are actually managing fraud and standardizing data, right, in terms of messaging and infrastructure, there really isn’t that much fraud. And we’re a proof of that. I think there’s only a single country we’re in where we hit 10% of what the Visa, MasterCard average of fraud for the country are right, so we’re like 10 times or better, less than that in fraud, right. And it’s not like we’re geniuses, we literally have various, you know, just like modern technology. And we have local competencies. So things as simple as being able to control error codes, and being able to whitelist bins with insurers locally, that had a very old technology to be able to, to accept payments, right? So we do little things that are very analog actually, right, to boost acceptance rates and lower fraud. It’s just ecosystem building, and then it comes with a little bit of fraud technology at the end, right, you know, we, we spend a lot of time right in terms of compliance and fraud, making sure that our clients have the best they can get in Latin America. And it’s new to the region. So, yeah, there is still today, when I was telling this, Latin America is this weird place where it’s like year one, and then the rest of the region has been completely commoditized, right. So things as fraud rates and acceptance rates, we see these gigantic jumps, right, where, you know, someone will move from, from the old pipes to our new ones, right. And all of a sudden, they have a 50% improvement in something or, you know, couple 100% improvement, something like that, still exists in Latin America. That’s what I mean, like, you could still do that.

Peter Renton  27:52

In countries like the US, it’s hard to get double digit improvements on any any new technology these days. Anyway, last question. I’d love to kind of end with you peering into your crystal ball and talking about the future of digital payments in Latin America. I mean, you’ve talked about some of the downward trend of cash, but what’s the future going to look like? What are you trying to build when you think of that future?

Aron Schwarzkopf  27:52

In terms for us, the role that we have is an infrastructure one, right, and being a provider, for large players or other payment businesses, to be able to use us, our licenses, our infrastructure, regardless of the payment method to move money back and forth, right? So we don’t see Kushki as an active participant in doing user or small business stuff, right. So I don’t see us moving into anything that has to do in terms of attacking users and doing issuing, or wallets. In terms of the crystal ball, and what I think will happen in Latin America, I think the future is bright. I think it’s a bit messy, because you know, everybody’s trying stuff and trying to see what sticks on the wall. And you know, what, what, what gets a lot of traction, right? So Latin America will not be a place where you will have a homogenous payment devolution like you had in China and a couple of other places, right? I think you’ll have a little bit, there will be fragmentation, but it all points that cash will exponentially, right, start disappearing from payment flows in this decade, right? It’s already happening, right, some countries faster than others, but the data is there. As of today, what I can tell you is, you have these phenomenons like Pix and Yape in certain places, but consistently what is delivering you know, the the most cash reduction in transactionally, debit and credit cards, right? And they come in different forms. It’s sometimes not plastic anymore, but it’s the same pipelines, right, you know think Visa Direct or most neobanks and wallet systems that are gaining traction in Latin America are built on credit and debit rails today, the majority of them, right. So I do think that they will continue to be a relevant player in Latin America when it comes to payment methods that are trying to reduce cash usage. And I think real time payment is, I think Latin America is the place for real time payments basically.

Peter Renton  30:21

Okay, that’s a good place to end. Aron, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Best of luck to you. And let’s keep in touch.

Aron Schwarzkopf  30:28

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Peter Renton  30:31

I hope you enjoyed the show. Thank you so much for listening. Please go ahead and give the show a review on the podcast platform of your choice and go tell your friends and colleagues about it. Anyway, on that note, I will sign off I very much appreciate you listening, and I’ll catch you next time. Bye.

  • Peter Renton

    Peter Renton is the chairman and co-founder of Fintech Nexus, the world’s largest digital media company focused on fintech. Peter has been writing about fintech since 2010 and he is the author and creator of the Fintech One-on-One Podcast, the first and longest-running fintech interview series.