Dmytro Rukin: Three Latin American markets analysts keep underestimating
Ask most fintech people to name the markets that matter in Latin America and you get two words before they finish their coffee. Brazil. Mexico. Everything else becomes a footnote, a “and also the Andean region” thrown in at the end of a slide. Dmytro Rukin, CEO of LaFinteca, has spent enough years actually operating in the region to find that lazy, and a little maddening. Three countries are doing things right now that should embarrass the analysts ignoring them. Here are his three, ranked, with the number that makes each one impossible to wave away.
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1. Colombia is quietly rewriting which payment method sits on top
Rukin gets animated on this one. Colombia is heading somewhere almost no other market in the region is going, where the wallet stops being the plucky challenger and simply takes over. The Guide to Accessing Latin America forecasts e-wallets climbing from 18% of e-commerce in 2023 to 31% by 2027, with credit cards sliding from 27% to 21% across the same stretch.
“I watch teams model Colombia as a card market with a bit of wallet growth on the side, and I want to grab them by the shoulders,” he says, laughing. “You’re building the checkout for a country that’s on its way out. In four years the person paying you reaches for the wallet first and treats the card like loose change in a drawer. If your integration doesn’t feel that shift coming, you’ll lose conversions and you won’t even know why.” The takeaway he keeps repeating to his own team: build for the Colombia arriving in 2027, because the one on today’s dashboard is already fading.
2. Peru is growing like a headline market and getting covered like a footnote
Here is the thing that genuinely bothers Rukin. Peru is expanding at a pace most of the region would kill for, and it can go months without a single serious profile. The Guide to Accessing Latin America has Peru’s e-commerce volume going from $25 billion in 2023 to a projected $63 billion by 2026, a compound clip near 35% a year. That is a monster of a growth curve attached to a country the industry keeps forgetting to invite to the conversation.
He is careful not to oversell it. In raw size Peru is still mid-table, and he says so plainly. What gets under his skin is how badly the industry’s attention tracks reality. “We rank markets by how big they already are, then look shocked when the fast ones blow past us,” he says. “Peru is the cleanest case I know of momentum and coverage pointing in different directions. The infrastructure calls you make there over the next two years will age far better than the ones you sweat over in a market that already had its moment.” For anyone building, Peru is a standing reminder to watch where the growth actually goes, not where the panels point.
3. Mexico keeps getting told as an inclusion story when it’s a habits story
Mexico never lacks for coverage. Rukin’s frustration is that the coverage almost always grabs the wrong handle. Everyone quotes the inclusion figure, and it is a real one. The Guide to Accessing Latin America tracks Mexico’s unbanked population dropping from 64.6% in 2017 to 52.8% in 2024, a genuine change in who actually holds an account.
Where Rukin leans in is what that means for the people building the rails. “Somebody opening their first bank account is somebody whose payment habits are still soft clay,” he says. “You get to help shape how a whole generation pays for the first time. That is a wildly different job than serving a Brazilian who has tapped Pix a thousand times and will punish you the second the flow feels off.” Every default you pick and every extra step you clear away helps shape behavior in Mexico that has not set yet. This is the exact reason a one-size “LATAM strategy” keeps blowing up on the companies that arrive holding one. Mexico runs on its own clock, forming its own habits, and it will not reward a playbook photocopied from São Paulo.
So what do you actually do with this?
The common thread is one LaFinteca, a payment infrastructure company operating across Latin America (Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Peru, Colombia) and Europe, runs into constantly on the ground. The markets that never make the headline are often the ones reshaping themselves the fastest. Colombia is swapping its hierarchy, Peru is compounding while the room looks elsewhere, and Mexico is setting habits in real time. Rukin’s whole argument comes down to a working method more than a slogan: you earn the region country by country, or you keep getting surprised by it.
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