Card acquiring numbers are easy to compare on a spreadsheet. Local payment methods are not — and that’s exactly why most high-risk merchants either ignore Latin America and CIS entirely, or price them the same way they’d price a Visa or Mastercard transaction in Europe. Both approaches lose money, just in different directions.
What “local payment methods” actually means
In most of Latin America, card penetration is lower than in the EU or US, and the cards that do exist often fail on cross-border, high-risk-flagged transactions before they even reach an issuing bank’s fraud engine. Local payment methods — bank transfers, cash vouchers, local wallets, installment schemes routed through domestic acquirers — solve a problem that a Mastercard BIN simply can’t: they let a customer pay the way they already pay for everything else, in rails their own bank recognizes.
The trade-off shows up immediately in the pricing. On Polydirection’s current fee schedule, local payment method rates across ten LATAM markets run from 10.0% to 12.0% of transaction value, plus a flat €0.65 and a €5 settlement fee. Compare that to the standard card acquiring rate for the same crypto-business merchant profile — 6.0% plus a small fixed fee per currency — and the local-method premium is close to double.
Why the premium exists, and why it’s usually still worth paying
The extra cost isn’t arbitrary. Local payment rails typically involve:
- A local acquiring partner in each country, each with their own compliance, settlement, and risk pricing — there’s no single “Latin America” processor, so costs stack per market.
- Higher approval rates for local shoppers. A Brazilian customer paying with a domestic method they use daily is far less likely to abandon checkout than one forced through a foreign card that their bank might decline on sight for a high-risk merchant category code.
- Lower dispute rates in many cases, because the payment method itself (bank transfer, voucher) doesn’t carry the same chargeback mechanics as a card network.
For a merchant only ever comparing the headline percentage, 10-12% looks worse than 6%. For a merchant comparing *approved revenue*, the picture flips: a payment method that converts an extra 15-20% of local traffic that would otherwise bounce off a declined card is not a cost — it’s incremental revenue that didn’t exist before.
The math merchants should actually run
Before deciding whether to add local payment methods for a specific country, the relevant comparison isn’t “10% vs 6%.” It’s:
“`
(Local method approval rate × 10-12% cost)
vs.
(Card approval rate for that geography × 6% cost) + (lost revenue from declined attempts)
“`
If card approval for a given LATAM market is genuinely weak — which is common for high-risk verticals like gambling, forex, or dating platforms operating there — the “expensive” local rail frequently produces more net revenue per hundred checkout attempts than the “cheap” one that keeps failing.
CIS markets: a smaller, different case
Alongside the ten LATAM markets, the same logic applies to Webmoney for CIS traffic — 9% plus €0.50, with separate payout (2.0%) and settlement (1.5%) rates. It’s a narrower use case than LATAM (fewer available local rails, more concentrated user base), but the underlying decision is identical: a higher headline rate, evaluated against actual conversion, not against a card rate that may not even be a realistic alternative for that customer segment.
Who should actually consider this
Local payment methods aren’t a default recommendation for every merchant — they make sense specifically when:
1. A meaningful share of traffic or applications already comes from LATAM or CIS markets.
2. Card decline rates for that geography are visibly higher than the merchant’s blended average.
3. The business can absorb the operational complexity of pre-approval, since Polydirection notes local methods may require case-by-case review depending on the business model.
For merchants without meaningful traffic from these regions, standard card acquiring and SEPA/SWIFT remain the simpler, cheaper default — local rails are a targeted tool, not a blanket upgrade.
The bottom line
A 10-12% rate looks expensive next to 6% until the comparison includes what actually gets approved. For high-risk merchants with real LATAM or CIS exposure, local payment methods are less a cost decision and more a conversion decision — one that’s worth running the numbers on before writing them off as “too expensive.”
Polydirection provides merchant accounts and multi-currency IBAN accounts for crypto, gambling, forex and dating businesses, including access to local payment methods across ten Latin American markets. See the full fee breakdown →