B2B Payments Make the Leap to Real Time in Latin America

Digital payments in Latin America are transforming commercial transactions, as faster payment rails originally designed to broaden consumer access increasingly support business-to-business payments and deepen engagement with bank accounts.

The region’s instant payments story has garnered the most digital and newspaper ink, with a focus on households. Central banks and policymakers promoted real-time transfers to reduce cash use, expand financial inclusion and lower the cost of everyday transactions. Brazil’s Pix and Mexico’s CoDi were launched with visible fanfare to address consumer and person-to-person needs.

That consumer-led adoption has now created the conditions for commercial use. As faster payments become ubiquitous, businesses are embracing the same rails to move money with greater speed, certainty and visibility.

Consumer Adoption Builds the On-Ramp

Fast payments have spread quickly in Latin America because they remove friction. Transfers clear in seconds, operate 24/7 and typically cost little or nothing for individuals. According to the World Bank, fast payment systems are now a central driver of digital payments growth across Latin America and the Caribbean, accounting for a sharply rising share of overall digital payment volume and surpassing card payments in several markets.

As these systems became embedded in daily financial behavior, they naturally extended into small business use. The landscape is largely untapped. As reported here, “When it comes to B2B payments in emerging markets, one very interesting thing is that currently more than 70% of all companies are buying online, but just 30% of the payments are done digitally,” Eduardo de Abreu, VP of product at EBANX, told PYMNTS.

In many Latin American economies, consumers are also micro-entrepreneurs or merchants. The same bank accounts and digital wallets used for personal transfers are often used to receive customer payments or pay suppliers.

Brazil provides the clearest view of how faster rails mature into economic infrastructure. As PYMNTS Intelligence has detailed, Brazil is at the forefront of the digital shift, with an embrace of digital wallets, for example, that spans demographics.

Pix, launched by the Central Bank of Brazil in late 2020, supports instant transfers among individuals, businesses and government entities on a single interoperable platform.

Year-over-year growth is evident when comparing December data. According Pix statistics sourced from the Banco Central do Brasil, there were more than 263 million B2B transactions in December 2025, where that tally had been 175 million in December 2024.  As measured in trillions of Brazilian reals, December marked 1.5 trillion reals, up from about 1 trillion reals last year. This December-to-December comparison matters because it smooths seasonal effects and highlights structural adoption across the economy.

What Faster B2B Payments Change

For businesses, real-time settlement addresses long-standing friction. Faster payments reduce receivables delays, improve liquidity management and eliminate uncertainty around when funds will be available.

Research from the Bank for International Settlements provides firm-level evidence of this shift. Studying Pix adoption across Brazilian municipalities, the BIS finds that Pix increased both the number of transactions and the value transacted among firms, while complementing — not replacing — other payment methods such as wires and payment slips. In other words, Pix added a faster option to the B2B toolkit rather than displacing existing rails.

One of the most important consequences of faster payments in Latin America is their effect on bank accounts. The World Bank reports that across Latin America and the Caribbean, digital payments per account holder increased sharply, with 61% of that growth attributable to fast payments systems. The finding points to deeper and more frequent account use rather than disintermediation.

The BIS paper on Pix quantifies this effect in Brazil. It finds that a 1% increase in active Pix users led to a 0.8% increase in people opening bank accounts for the first time, along with higher active use of existing accounts by both individuals and firms.

As B2B payments move onto real-time rails, businesses have stronger incentives to maintain active balances, optimize accounts and engage with banks for complementary services.

PYMNTS Intelligence data reinforce the operational shift. Merchants increasingly plan to use digital wallets and mobile payment tools to improve cash flow visibility, reduce payment delays and streamline operations.

Beyond the traditional banks, for example, Nubank participates in Pix as a regulated financial institution, enabling customers and businesses to send and receive real-time payments; overall deposits were about $38.8 billion at the end of the September quarter vs. $28.9 billion at the end of last year.

As far as business accounts, the company’s 20-F details that its PJ business accounts grew by 31% in 2024 vs. the prior year to 4.7 million small business customers. Faster payments in Latin America are moving beyond a consumer inclusion story into a commercial one as real-time rails are becoming core infrastructure for business payments.