The market that punishes the impatient - by Dmytro Rukin

Latin America rewards the people willing to wait, and it quietly punishes almost everyone else. That is the first thing Dmytro Rukin, CEO of LaFinteca, tells companies eyeing the region. Plenty of well-funded players march in expecting a quick win, hit the first regulatory wall or the first settlement surprise, and march right back out within a year. The ones who stay and win are the ones who treated LATAM as a long game from day one. Rukin has watched both stories play out, and he talks about the difference with real conviction.

"This region can smell impatience," he says. "The moment a company treats LATAM as a box to check, the region checks them right back. You have to fall in love with the slow parts, because the slow parts are where the real advantage lives."

Where does patience actually pay off in LATAM?

It pays off in the parts of the business that never make a headline. Regulatory licensing is the clearest example. Getting authorized to operate as a payment institution in a country like Brazil is a process measured in seasons, not sprints, and there is no shortcut around a central bank's timeline. LaFinteca is a payment infrastructure company operating across Latin America (Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Peru, Colombia) and Europe, and every one of those markets carries its own licensing clock, its own regulator, its own definition of "ready."

Patience pays off again in banking relationships. A local bank or acquirer is not going to hand its trust to a newcomer on a first call. That trust gets built over months of showing up, meeting commitments, and proving that you understand the local rules better than the last foreign company that breezed through. Rukin sees this as an investment that compounds. Every quarter of reliability makes the next partnership easier to open.

And it pays off in people. Building teams across Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Europe means working across genuinely different cultures, work styles, and expectations. Hiring fast and hoping it works is how you end up rebuilding the same team twice. Rukin would rather hire slowly and keep people for years.

Why is there no single fast solution for the whole region?

Because the way people pay changes completely as you cross each border, and the data makes that impossible to ignore. In Brazil, according to the PPRO Almanac, the 2024 e-commerce mix runs about 42% credit card, 27% bank transfer, 11% debit, and 10% digital wallet, with Pix already representing roughly 45% of transaction volume. That is a country where account-to-account rails are rewriting the whole checkout.

Now look at Chile. The PPRO Almanac projects a very different balance there, with digital wallets heading toward 49% of e-commerce, bank transfers near 19%, and credit cards around 18%. Two neighboring markets, two almost unrecognizable payment profiles. A merchant who builds one card-first checkout and ships it to both countries will quietly lose a large slice of buyers in each, and never see exactly where the money leaked out.

This is why Rukin bristles at the phrase "LATAM solution," as though the region were a single switch to flip. Each country demands its own local answer, and assembling those answers takes the one resource impatient companies refuse to spend, which is time.

Patience as a strategic advantage

Here is where Rukin flips the usual thinking. In most of tech, speed is the whole religion. Move fast, ship, iterate, win the land grab. In LATAM payments, he argues, patience is the actual moat, and the companies that understand this have an edge that money alone cannot buy.

"When your competitor's strategy is to be first and yours is to be permanent, you're not even in the same race," Rukin says. "They're optimizing for a press release. We're optimizing for the tenth year of a partnership. I know which one I'd rather be holding when the market gets hard."

The advantage of patience is that it accumulates in places rivals cannot easily copy. The licenses are earned. The banking relationships are personal. The local teams carry knowledge no playbook contains. A competitor can raise a bigger round overnight, though a competitor cannot buy three years of trust with a Brazilian regulator or a Chilean acquirer. That kind of ground has to be walked.

LATAM is where LaFinteca started, and Rukin is clear that the same patient approach is what will carry the company well beyond it, into Europe and onward. His parting thought is almost affectionate, the tone of someone describing a place he genuinely respects. Treat the region as a quick opportunity and it will humble you. Treat it as a relationship worth years of your life, and it will pay you back for decades.

Read more:

• Dmytro Rukin: A Fintech’s Perspective on Building Resilience in LATAM