How emerging markets built the infrastructure global trade now needs

When American sociologist Robert K. Merton wrote his seminal paper “The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action” in 1936, he brought order to a question that had occupied thinkers for centuries: why do deliberate actions so often produce outcomes no one foresaw? He identified several root causes, from ignorance, the simple absence of knowledge, to error, its misapplication.

There is one more pattern worth adding, call it “the imperative of exclusion”. When a group of people lacks access to the solutions available elsewhere, they tend to build their own tools rather than wait for external resources to become accessible. What no one anticipates is that these locally forged tools might one day prove valuable far beyond their original context. This is precisely what is unfolding in cross-border trade. Forged under unique constraints, payment solutions developed for emerging markets are becoming part of the answer for the very economies that never needed them in the first place.

While the World Economic Forum ranks geoeconomic confrontation as the most pressing threat to the global economy, market diversification is becoming even more strategic. Businesses need new customers in new geographies — and fast. The irony is that the infrastructure to unlock those markets was already taking shape, built over the past decade by emerging economies with the goal of bringing hundreds of millions of people into the formal financial system.

It was in this context that tools like India’s UPI and Brazil’s Pix, the two most widely used instant payment systems in the world,  were born, alongside mobile money in Africa, local digital wallets across Southeast Asia and Latin America, and an entire generation of neobanks that gave not only consumers, but also businesses their first digital account. Historically overlooked by legacy institutions, small, medium, and micro enterprises (SMEs) now have the means to participate in international e-commerce and, for the first time, to be reached by global companies in urgent need of new markets.

According to the Central Bank of Brazil, **digital banks are the exclusive financial provider for 40% of companies and the primary account for more than 40% of solo entrepreneurs **in the country. In Colombia, 67% of businesses bank with a fintech, more than with traditional institutions. In Mexico, 47% of companies used their phones to make payments in 2023, more than double the figure from three years prior, per Enafin data. Mastercard informs that 75% of SMEs across Latin America now pay suppliers through digital channels, and 72% source from abroad. In Kenya and Nigeria, 95% and 73% of SMEs, respectively, aim to accept digital payments across multiple channels.

The financial digitisation of businesses that account for between 95% and 99.5% of all companies in emerging markets is already having an impact on the international sellers that spotted the opportunity well before the current rush for diversification. Almost 80% of Brazilian companies that used Pix for cross-border purchases at EBANX are micro-businesses or individual entrepreneurs, and 84% of them use the instant payment method to buy software, opening an entirely new segment for SaaS providers. In practical terms, an SME in São Paulo can now subscribe to tools like Canva, monday.com, or a cloud hosting service with the same ease as a firm in London, paying through a method that did not exist five years ago, when an international credit card was the only way in.

And Brazil is far from an outlier. SaaS holds the largest share of B2B e-commerce in markets such as Nigeria (85%), the Philippines (80%), Egypt (75%), Mexico and Peru (65%), Colombia and Kenya (60%), Chile (55%), and South Africa (48%), among others. This is an entire customer base that was once overlooked and has suddenly come into view. Nor is the pattern confined to software. According to EBANX data on B2B merchant sales, almost 53% of estimated social media revenue across emerging markets comes from B2B customers, with the figure reaching as high as 80% in Argentina and 60% in India. In terms of market size, online retail and travel also carry significant B2B volumes across these regions.

None of this would be possible if international sellers were still relying exclusively on global card rails to reach emerging markets. Their growth is being driven, first and foremost, by the alternative payment methods they have integrated into their checkouts. In Colombia, local APMs already account for 53% of B2B sales at EBANX; in Mexico, methods like OXXO Pay, Mercado Pago, and SPEI make up roughly half; in Kenya, 61% of SMEs favour mobile money; in Nigeria, 67% prefer bank transfers. In India, UPI AutoPay has proved a powerful acquisition channel for recurring purchases, with one major SaaS provider gaining over 4,000 new subscribers per month in its first quarter after adoption.

Cards remain part of the equation, but increasingly through local schemes that blur the line with APMs: India’s RuPay cards now plug directly into UPI, Nigeria’s Verve has issued 100 million cards capturing 90% of online debit sales, and Brazil’s Elo, with 5 million users, is the only payment method used by 56% of its cardholders on EBANX. As the Beyond Borders report concludes, financial inclusion built on multiple payment rails is what makes cross-border e-commerce viable at scale in these markets.

Robert K. Merton spent sixty years working on a book about unanticipated consequences. He never finished it. Perhaps that is fitting: the list, by its very nature, is never complete. “The imperative of exclusion” may be one more entry worth considering. A decade ago, when Brazil launched Pix or India scaled UPI, no one framed these as tools for global trade diversification. They were answers to a domestic question: how do you bring people who have been left out into the financial system? The fact that this infrastructure is now helping international businesses navigate one of the most turbulent trade environments in a generation was not part of anyone’s intention. Merton, one suspects, would have appreciated the irony. The best solutions to tomorrow’s problems may already exist — built by those who were simply trying to solve their own.