Emerging Markets
Emerging markets pressure-test payment products on every dimension: rails, regulation, partner depth, FX and operations. Essays here cover what that pressure teaches.
Case studies
A regulated, multi-rail payments platform processing $1B+ annual GTV and 25M+ monthly transactions across pay-in, payout, wallets (DCB/IBFT), card acquiring (MPGS/MDES), settlement, FX and cross-border corridors, PCI DSS and ISO/IEC 27001 certified.
Cross-border pay-in and payout corridors with FX, partner routing and corridor-level economics.
Ran payment operations for South Asia's largest marketplace across 5 markets during a COVID volume surge. Designed and shipped the COD-to-digital migration as an incentives + trust program — lifted digital share ~40% and cut dispute cycles ~50%.
Launched Simpaisa's BNPL product from scratch, full underwriting, repayment flows, collections, regulator briefings, to 100K users in 8 months through iterative agile discovery.
Wired SWIFT MT and MX (ISO 20022) messaging into the Simpaisa cross-border stack with gpi tracking, CSP attestation and dual-rail parsing — sustained 99.9%+ message-acceptance rate through the ISO 20022 migration window.
Essays · 6
The Role of SWIFT in Emerging-Markets Banking
For emerging-market banks, SWIFT is not optional. The fragility is in the correspondents on either end of the message.
Correspondent Banking and the Reality of Emerging-Market Corridors
De-risking did not reduce risk. It moved the risk to the corridors that need access most.
How Emerging Markets Pressure-Test Payment Product Strategy
Cards-first thinking, monthly settlement assumptions, and English-only UX do not survive contact with the markets that will define the next decade of payment volume.
Payment Cost Is a Product Variable: From 50% to 1% (Tapmad Migration Playbook)
Payment cost is not procurement. It is product architecture. Here is the rail-mix playbook that pulled a subscription business from 50% to 1% cost-of-revenue.
Product Management for Payments Platforms: What's Different, and What's Not
A payments PM is a SaaS PM with three extra constituencies and one extra reflex. Get the reflex wrong and the other constituencies stop trusting you.
Crypto Off-Ramps in Emerging Markets: The Real Plumbing
An off-ramp is only as good as the local payout rail underneath it. In emerging markets, that rail is the hardest, most fragile part of the entire crypto stack.