3 days of sessions in Cartagena, and a fairly clear picture of where payments in Latin America and the Caribbean is heading. These are the numbers and the arguments that stayed with us.
Day 1, the direction of travel
73% of transactions across the region are already contactless. 50% of the population uses a digital wallet. Non-cash transactions are growing at 20% a year. And AI agents are already influencing purchasing decisions, which has started a race to be the preferred credential inside those ecosystems.
The message was that payments will be everywhere in this region. The open question is whether your infrastructure is ready for that.
Day 2, AI stops being a feature
Juan Jose Fernandez Munuzuri, Head of Merchant and Acquirer Solutions LAC at Visa, opened on agentic commerce and put it plainly. AI is no longer being added to payments. It is becoming the layer payments is built on.
Tania Oliveira, VP of Data Science at Visa, gave the numbers. Digital payment adoption in the region now sits at 60%, up from 45% in 2018. Transaction volumes have doubled since 2020. A USD 100 billion data monetization market is forming globally. And less than 20% of transaction data currently becomes actionable, which means most of the opportunity is sitting unused inside infrastructure the region already owns.
On risk, Bernie Porter and Saul Olivares of Visa were direct about the threats now in play: account takeover, AI deepfakes, enumeration, agents. Managing that across fragmented providers produces false declines as a byproduct, which is a cost rather than a solution.
The dispute economics were the starkest figure of the week. 91% of disputes in the region are determined to be fraudulent, and the average dispute is USD 50. Handling that manually does not scale, and blanket 3D Secure requirements add friction and suppress approval rates without fixing the underlying problem.
Day 3, what partnership actually means
The Visa Consulting and Analytics team, led by Patricia Caballero, made the case for genuine merchant partnership rather than transaction processing, supporting the full lifecycle from acquisition through relationship growth. The Lifemiles and Avianca case study with Diego Lipschitz showed what happens when data and consulting are used together to redesign a value proposition that works in market.
Yulliana Duarte's session on consumer understanding was the most grounded of the 3 days. Targeted, segment-specific communication improves payment activation by 20% to 30%. That is not a new idea, but executing it requires local knowledge, local presence and local relationships.
The MOVii panel showed what market transformation looks like once infrastructure opens up. Colombia moved from a closed, incumbent-dominated system to one built on public infrastructure, multi-rail models and real competition. That blueprint is adoptable. The Caribbean has the will. What it needs is local partners able to execute it.
Where that leaves us
The infrastructure exists and the tools are available. What matters now is who puts them where they are needed. That is our work.