JAKARTA, 24 October 2025 — Indonesian fintech unicorn Xendit, best known as one of Southeast Asia’s leading digital-payments players, is embarking on a bold expansion into Latin America, marking a significant strategic step as it seeks to replicate its regional success on a global stage.
The company has announced plans to launch operations in Mexico and Colombia by the end of 2025, with further roll-outs in Chile, Argentina and Brazil slated for 2026. Xendit’s Chief Executive Officer (Latin America) Raymundo Guerrero told Bloomberg the move is a deliberate test of whether its Southeast Asia-rooted “all-in-one payments infrastructure” model can gain traction in another major emerging-market region.
Xendit has built its reputation across Southeast Asia, serving merchants, digital platforms and exporters, with a suite of payment services including collections, disbursements, digital wallets and card-processing. It now hopes to leverage that experience to capture a slice of Latin America’s fast-growing digital-payments market.
The push comes at a time when LatAm remains underserved in payments infrastructure and is undergoing rapid digital-finance adoption, making it a fertile ground for fintech platforms with proven playbooks. Yet the region brings its own regulatory, currency-risk and competitive dynamics, meaning Xendit’s expansion is both an opportunity and a test of adaptability.
From an Asian-perspective, the development signals a number of wider themes:
- Regional champions becoming global players: Xendit’s move from Southeast Asia into Latin America highlights how Asian-based fintechs are scaling beyond their home markets and competing globally.
- Technology transfer and emerging-market parallels: The success factors Xendit honed in Southeast Asia (fragmented payments, digital-commerce growth, wallet adoption) have analogues in Latin America—suggesting a blueprint for cross-region expansion.
- Competitive pressures and strategic timing: As global fintech competition intensifies, early-mover successes in adjacent emerging markets may become a competitive differentiator. Xendit’s timed launch also points to leveraging current capital-markets conditions and payments-tech momentum.
- Implications for ASEAN fintech ecosystem: If Xendit succeeds, it may increase investor confidence in Southeast Asia’s fintech talent, infrastructure-platform companies and cross-border scale possibilities—possibly spurring new waves of regional-global expansion.
Of course, the path ahead is not without risks. Latin America’s regulatory environments differ widely, foreign-exchange and inflation risks are higher, and local incumbent players may hold entrenched advantages. How effectively Xendit can localise its offerings, adjusting to Latin-American consumer behaviours, regulation and payment-network dynamics, will determine the success of its experiment.
In sum, Xendit’s Latin-America push is a marker of both ambition and strategic confidence—a case where a Southeast-Asia fintech is making a bold bet that its infrastructure-first model can travel beyond its original market. If successful, it may open up a new growth chapter for the company and shine a spotlight on the global potential of Asian fintechs.
