The 2026 World Cup should serve as a scaling test for international payments infrastructure. Although Brazil is not a host country, banks, fintechs, retailers, and technology companies in the region will be impacted by the increase in purchases, travel, reservations, tickets, and transactions in foreign currency. This movement highlights a challenge that has been gaining momentum: making cross-border payments simpler, more secure, transparent, and integrated into the consumer journey.
This issue didn't begin with the World Cup. The growth of international digital purchases, global e-commerce, and tourism had already been pressuring financial institutions to offer more seamless experiences in stages such as currency conversion, international settlement, payment authentication, and fraud prevention. The mega-event only accelerates this demand and makes the difference between those with prepared infrastructure and those still operating with fragmented processes more visible.
During major global events, consumers expect to pay with the same ease they find in their home markets. The financial experience becomes part of the perception of convenience, trust, and competitiveness of a country or company. When payment fails, is delayed, charges unclear fees, or requires excessive steps, the problem ceases to be merely operational and begins to directly affect the relationship with the customer.
In the Brazilian case, the impact begins even before the trip. The journey involves purchasing tickets, accommodations, tickets, insurance, currency exchange, using cards, digital wallets and, in some cases, solutions based on global accounts or interoperability initiatives between payment methods. To sustain this flow, financial institutions need to assess the capacity of their payment infrastructures, including Pix, SPB, Swift integrations, card networks, authorization engines, compliance and core banking.
The central issue is not simply absorbing a surge in demand. The challenge lies in connecting different systems, currencies, regulatory rules, and settlement models without transferring complexity to the end user. In international payments, the experience needs to appear simple, even when the underlying operation is highly complex.
Data from the World Bank, through the Global Findex 2025, based on 2024 data, indicates that approximately 75% of the global adult population already uses digital payments. This data helps to illustrate the shift in behavior: consumers who have already incorporated digital means into their routine expect to find the same convenience in travel, international shopping, and entertainment experiences abroad.
In Latin America, this movement also exposes known challenges, such as reliance on manual processes, high costs in international transactions, low interoperability between systems, and still fragmented experiences across different payment methods. At the same time, it opens up space to accelerate the adoption of technologies such as instant payments, interoperable digital wallets, QR codes, biometric authentication, and real-time settlement models.
Cross-border solutions are gaining prominence precisely because they allow financial institutions and retailers to connect different markets more efficiently. The evolution of this ecosystem involves the integration of the entire payment chain, from authorization to settlement, including compliance, fraud prevention, and foreign exchange management. Those who treat cross-border payment merely as a payment functionality will miss a strategic opportunity for customer relationship building.
The most important point is that the transformation will not be defined solely by the capacity to serve tourists during the event. The true impact will be in converting this advancement into permanent benefits for local consumers and businesses. Trust remains a decisive factor in expanding the adoption of digital payments, especially in international transactions, which still generate doubts about security, fees, exchange rate transparency, and the reliability of services.
Therefore, the evolution of the cross-border market demands more than just technology. It requires financial and digital education, user-centric experiences, and infrastructure capable of supporting global operations with security and scalability. For banks, fintechs, and retailers, there is a clear opportunity to reposition international payments as a strategic part of the customer experience, not just as an operational layer.
Small businesses can also benefit from this movement. As new forms of payment reduce barriers to entry and simplify international transactions, companies with a lower degree of digitization become better positioned to participate in the global economy. This is perhaps one of the most important legacies of events of this magnitude: not only boosting consumption in the short term, but also accelerating the inclusion of businesses and consumers in a more connected financial dynamic.
The 2026 World Cup will not create the demand for international payments. It should only make that demand more evident. The financial sector that manages to combine convenience, transparency, security, and integration will be better prepared to compete in a borderless digital economy.
Jorge Iglesias is the CEO of Topaz, one of the world's largest technology companies specializing in digital financial solutions and part of the Stefanini Group.
