While your committee debates whether to build orchestration, fintechs are taking your enterprise merchants one by one.

The segment's pain

Your natural competition is no longer the bank down the street. It's fintechs with USD $150 million raised that didn't exist three years ago, operated by 30-person teams instead of 300, without a 1998 legacy switch, without dependency on a banking core with semester release cycles. Yuno raised USD $64M Series A in 2024 and operates in 40+ countries. Kushki processes billions annually with regulated presence in eight LATAM countries. dLocal trades on NASDAQ and systematically eats your cross-border share. Ebanx is already a utility for any global brand entering Brazil.

While your innovation area debates in its third meeting whether to buy or build, your merchants have already decided. And when an enterprise merchant switches acquirers, they don't come back.

The brutal economics of defection

A typical top-100 merchant in LATAM generates between USD $1.5 and USD $3.5 million in annual revenue for the acquirer, with gross margins of 30–45%. When that merchant leaves, replacement is not linear: the enterprise sales cycle is 9 to 18 months, and statistically you need to acquire 4 to 7 small-to-medium merchants to replace one lost top-100. Losing five top-100 merchants in a year implies -USD $8 to -USD $17 million in ARR with 3 to 5 years of recovery.

Four common beliefs, four brutal realities

"Our enterprise merchants would never leave." Annual churn of top-100 merchants at traditional LATAM bank acquirers sits between 8% and 14%. Over the last 24 months, some banks report internal churn approaching 18–22%.

"We have an in-house orchestration project on the roadmap." 73% of in-house orchestration projects led by LATAM banks have been either cancelled or shipped with more than 24 months of delay and less than 45% of the original scope. The average cost overrun is 180%.

"Our core banking can integrate all of this." The dominant legacy switches (Base24, BPC SmartVista, FIS Connex, ACI, Postilion) were designed for batch processing. Modernizing them is a USD $30–120M program with 36–60 month timelines.

"Fintechs can't match our regulated infrastructure." Yuno, Kushki, dLocal, and Ebanx operate with payment institution licenses in most LATAM countries, Service Provider Level 1 PCI DSS compliance, and SOC 2 Type II signed by the same auditors that audit banks.

The fourth option your committee is not considering

License a mature platform with deployment in your cloud, your brand, your control, your roadmap influence. It's the white-label model, and it's what Retrypay offers.

• Full sovereignty: your infrastructure, your data, your jurisdiction.
• Invisible brand: the merchant sees your bank, not Retrypay.
• Time to market: 7–9 months vs 30+ for internal build.
• Shared roadmap: two guaranteed seats on the Customer Advisory Board.

Illustrative case

Regional bank acquirer with 1,800 enterprise merchants, annual TPV of USD $12.5B, enterprise ARR of USD $48M. After 14 months post go-live with Retrypay:

Commercial guarantee

Time-to-Production Guarantee: 100% license refund of the delay period if you are not in production with 10 pilot merchants at 12 months from MSA. Innovation Velocity Guarantee: 15% annual license credit if we fail to ship 4+ major roadmap features. Regulatory Coverage Guarantee: up to USD $2M per regulatory event directly attributable to the Retrypay layer.