Sean Yu, Vice President of Commercial for APAC at EBANX: “Stop thinking about LATAM as a region you enter when your core markets are saturated”

Cross-border commerce is increasingly being shaped not by global payment networks, but by local payment systems that reflect how consumers actually move money in their daily lives. From Brazil’s Pix to India’s UPI, real-time payment rails are opening new opportunities for digital businesses to reach customers who have historically been excluded from subscription models built around credit cards.

For Sean Yu, Vice President of Commercial for APAC at EBANX, the rise of recurring payment solutions such as Pix Automático represents a fundamental shift in how global merchants should think about expansion in emerging markets. Based in Shanghai, Yu leads EBANX’s commercial strategy across the Asia-Pacific region, helping enterprises from China, South Korea and Southeast Asia connect with consumers in high-growth digital economies through localised payment experiences. Drawing on more than a decade of experience in cross-border payments, digital commerce and fintech, he argues that traditional measures such as credit card penetration are becoming increasingly poor indicators of market potential.

In this interview, Yu explains why Pix Automático is bringing millions of new consumers into the subscription economy, how local payment rails are changing the growth strategies of streaming, gaming and SaaS providers, and why businesses that localise their payment infrastructure – not just their products – will be best positioned to capture the next wave of digital commerce growth.

One year after launch, what has Pix Automático revealed about the future of recurring payments in markets where credit card penetration is relatively low?

What Pix Automático has shown us, one year in, is something that payment professionals in APAC have long suspected: the absence of a credit card is not the same as the absence of willingness to pay.

In Brazil, 60 million people — roughly the population of Italy — lack access to credit cards. For years, that segment was treated as a ceiling on the addressable market for subscription businesses. What Pix Automático has done is expose that assumption as fundamentally flawed. Our operational data at EBANX shows that 64% of consumers paying with Pix Automático through our platform are new users of the digital platforms they subscribe to via EBANX. Most of them would not have a viable path into the subscription economy if it weren’t for Pix Automático.

That distinction matters enormously for how merchants think about market sizing. If you are a SaaS company, a streaming platform, or an AI business evaluating Brazil — or frankly, any emerging market — and you are modeling your addressable market based on credit card penetration alone, you are looking at the wrong number.

The broader lesson for recurring payments is about infrastructure maturity. Pix Automático succeeded because it was built on top of Pix, which 95% of Brazil’s adult population already uses daily. That kind of trust and ubiquity is the prerequisite for any recurring payment system to work at scale. And what is striking, when I look across the markets EBANX operates in, is that several economies are building precisely that kind of infrastructure right now. We now offer recurring APM capabilities across 12 emerging markets, and the potential user base that unlocks for global merchants exceeds one billion people. Pix Automático is the proof of concept. The opportunity is much larger.

EBANX says that 64% of Pix Automático users are entirely new to digital services. Why is this payment model proving so effective at bringing new consumers into the subscription economy?

There are a few layers to this, and I think it is worth unpacking them separately because they point to different things merchants need to get right.

The first is psychological. A consumer who manages their entire financial life through instant transfers and digital wallets does not suddenly feel comfortable navigating a checkout flow that was designed with a different consumer in mind. Pix Automático works because it meets people inside a financial behaviour they already trust. When you authorize a recurring charge through Pix, you are doing it through the same app you use to split a dinner bill or pay your electricity. That familiarity removes a very real psychological friction that card-first models often struggle with.

The second layer is demographic, and this is where the data gets particularly interesting for merchants thinking about long-term value. Brazil’s Central Bank data, which we have analyzed at EBANX, shows that nearly four in five Pix Automático transactions are made by users aged 30 and above, with the 40-to-49 segment leading adoption at 24%. This is not a cohort of experimental early adopters. These are established consumers with stable incomes and, critically, longer subscription lifespans. The merchant acquiring a 42-year-old professional via Pix Automático is accessing someone with real purchasing power who simply operated outside the card ecosystem.

Do you see local payment rails like Pix fundamentally reshaping how global streaming, gaming, and SaaS companies think about expansion into emerging markets?

Absolutely, and I would go further — I think local payment rails are not just reshaping how these companies think about expansion, they are becoming one of the deciding factors in whether that expansion succeeds at all.

Let me put some numbers behind that. Pix now accounts for 44% of total e-commerce transaction value in Brazil, according to PCMI data, and that share is projected to reach 50% by 2028, compared to 36% for cards. For a streaming platform or a SaaS business entering Brazil today, ignoring Pix is a self-imposed market cap. 

Historically, subscription models in emerging markets defaulted to credit cards because there was no credible alternative for automated, recurring billing. That default excluded enormous portions of the population. What Pix Automático demonstrates — and what UPI AutoPay has already proven in India — is that regulators and payment ecosystems in emerging markets are actively building the infrastructure to close that gap.

What I hear from APAC merchants is that the conversation has genuinely shifted. A few years ago, the most common question was whether local payment rails were reliable enough to build a recurring revenue model on. Today, what I hear a lot is: ‘how quickly can I integrate them?’. That is a significant change in posture, and Pix Automático’s first year of results, including 177% average monthly growth in active enrollments through EBANX, has accelerated that shift considerably.

What lessons should APAC merchants learn from Brazil’s experience with Pix Automático when thinking about growth opportunities in Latin America?

The most important mindset shift I would encourage is to stop thinking about Latin America as a region you enter when your core markets are saturated, and start thinking about it as a region where the rules of digital commerce are being written in real time — and where getting in early carries a compounding advantage.

Pix Automático is a useful lens for this because it illustrates something that is easy to miss from the outside: in emerging markets, the consumers who will drive the next decade of digital spending are not the ones who already look like your existing customers. They are younger, they are middle-income, they are mobile-first, and they have built their financial habits entirely outside the card ecosystem. 

Our operational data shows that Pix Automático’s transaction total value grew by 53% per month and the number of transactions 161% since June 2025. What this tells us, and what I think is the most actionable insight for APAC merchants, is that the subscription economy in emerging markets will be won by companies that localize their billing logic, not just their product. Getting the pricing right, the content right, the language right — all of that matters. But if the payment method at checkout does not reflect how that consumer actually moves money in their daily life, the conversion simply will not happen. Pix Automático has made that lesson impossible to ignore. 

There is also a B2B dimension that tends to get overlooked in these conversations. Pix Automático’s first-year data shows that while B2B transactions represent less than 5% of total volume, they account for nearly 90% of all financial value processed through the system, with average ticket sizes around USD 3,200. For APAC companies selling SaaS, enterprise software, or digital services into Brazil, that is a significant signal. The infrastructure for high-value recurring commercial payments is maturing quickly, and it is being built on local rails.

Beyond convenience, what advantages do local recurring payment methods offer merchants in terms of conversion, retention, and customer reach?

According to our findings in Beyond Borders 2026, In Peru, Yape — the country’s dominant mobile wallet — reports recurring approval rates above 90%, outperforming traditional cards by up to 38 percentage points. In Argentina, Mercado Pago Recurring delivers approval rates that are 7.4 percentage points higher than credit cards, and a global SaaS provider that adopted it saw an 11% increase in paid subscriptions and a 13% boost in free trial sign-ups. The reason is fundamental: local APMs rely on native, biometric, and app-based authentication rather than card credentials that expire, get lost, or get blocked by fraud filters calibrated for different markets.

When it comes to retention, the Brazilian Central Bank designed the ecosystem with a user-centric approach that prioritizes consumer protection and trust. A stark example of this is how cancellations are handled: a consumer can call off an upcoming recurring charge directly inside their banking app at any point before the day of the debit. To an outside observer, this level of autonomy might look like a drawback for businesses. In reality, giving consumers that level of control drastically reduces checkout friction and builds confidence in the billing relationship. When everything is managed transparently inside a trusted banking app, it becomes a reason for customers to stay, not a reason to leave. 

Look at Hotmart, for example. By aligning their operations with the native behavior of Pix Automático users, they saw a 32-percentage-point increase in retention in a remarkably short period. In practice, Hotmart is now converting more than four times the number of recurring payments that previously failed under traditional Pix methods.

Taken together, what the data shows is that local recurring payment methods are, in many cases, the highest-performing tool available. The fact that EBANX today processes 38% of all Pix Automático transactions in Brazil is, for me, a reflection of how seriously global merchants are taking that reality. When our merchants like Amazon, Canva, Crunchyroll, and Hotmart are building their recurring payment strategy in Brazil around a local rail rather than defaulting to cards, it signals that this is no longer an experimental bet.