How Merchants Can Turn the Payment Mix into Customer Acquisition

In the past year, Payments teams at multiple global merchants have come to us with the same question: how can I use payment method acceptance to drive new customer acquisition?  This is a KPI payments teams are measured on, and even the world’s most sophisticated merchants are not sure how to do it.

In our experience, merchants’ instinct is to find the fastest growing payment method in the market, add it to their checkout, and move on. This instinct is misguided and too superficial to truly make a difference.

Two Common Traps That Merchants Fall into

Under pressure to deliver, most payments teams reach for the method that is generating the most industry buzz.

That’s the first trap. For example, a popular bet is adding Buy Now, Pay Later.

While this may seem intuitive, it is also usually the wrong choice. In our annual E-commerce Datapack, we see that BNPL is the fastest-growing payment method in only two markets: Mexico (22%) and South Africa (37%). Everywhere else, it is not the leader.

Cash-based methods raise a similar false hope. They may still hold meaningful share, but that share declines year over year. Cash-based payment methods do not acquire new customers.

The actual data tells us that the fastest-growing methods are money movement solutions: account-to-account (A2A), digital wallets, or mobile money, depending on the market.

This surfaces the real tension merchants are facing:

In Brazil, A2A (Pix) is both the fastest-growing method and already accounts for 42% of the market. In Kenya, mobile money is growing 25% and already holds 52% share. Most merchants in these markets already have these methods enabled.

Source: 2025 PCMI E-commerce Data Library, base on real, verified data from 2024; 2025 and beyond are PCMI forecasts. Real, verified 2025 figures are pending publication in Q3 2026.

But if the method driving growth is one you deployed years ago, adding it cannot be your new customer acquisition strategy. This presents a serious conundrum.

The second trap is that adding new payment methods often cannibalizes existing ones instead of bringing net-new users.

We have watched merchants enable BNPL expecting incremental customers, only to see card users migrate to it because their card limit was maxed out. Or they add a new wallet, which just captures already existing customers who use and prefer that wallet. The investment in integration, partnership, and marketing delivered volume without delivering meaningful growth of the customer base.

Know which new users you want to attract

A new user acquisition strategy must be a notch more sophisticated. If a payment method is meant to win customers, the assumption underneath is that a missing method, or a poor payment experience, is what stops someone from buying.

So, the next step is to diagnose that gap.

How? The first step is to start with the base. In every market, merchants must first know the handful of methods that reach roughly 80% of buyers. It is usually cards, the local A2A scheme, and one or two leading wallets or mobile money options.

This matters most in more obscure markets like Peru, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, or Egypt. Onboarding a payment method is costly, so merchants must build their base on real data rather than instinct.

The next step is to get specific about who you are trying to win. Customers fall into three distinct groups, who all demands a different strategy:

Five years ago, roughly half of consumers in emerging markets shopped online, so simply enabling a local payment method pulled new users in organically.

But today, more than 80% already buy online and almost always with a digital payment method they already trust.

The easy acquisition is gone. Adding one more logo at checkout no longer moves the needle on its own.

The new-to-e-commerce group is shrinking, is the least profitable, lowest-ticket, and is the hardest to reach. Merchants must qualify it before they chase it. The question: what new digital payment method is bringing them online? In practice it is usually a wallet or, increasingly, an A2A or mobile money solution.

These are consumers who are new to the specific e-commerce vertical, such as recurring payments, a SaaS platform, streaming, online groceries, or buying travel online. While they may be used to e-commerce in certain categories, they are expanding their horizons into new, unfamiliar categories. The question becomes: what payment experience do these new-to-the vertical customers expect? Subscription-based merchants may need to develop an alternative, non-card payment option. Suddenly, offering Recurring Pix (Brazil) makes a new segment reachable. If traditional or luxury brands expand to offering Yape (Peru) or Gcash (Philippines), they may attract digital savvy young people already using these methods in other categories.

People are already shopping online, just not with you. The question you must ask therefore is: what added value or benefit do they get by paying with you? Merchants must audit whether their checkout is as smooth and successful as a rival’s and then give shoppers a concrete reason to switch. Imagine the leading delivery app in Colombia trying to maintain its aggressive growth trajectory despite increasing competition. Its checkout works, but it offers customers nothing extra for choosing it over new rivals. Enable Bre-B with an installment or cashback perk, and it hands new customers a reason to buy and stay.

Whichever segment merchants target, they must test the hypothesis against the KPI they actually want to deliver on. The honest answer is rarely “enable one more method.” More often it is to improve the experience around the methods you already offer, embed new value into them, or enable a new model on an existing rail. The needed evolution is from asking “Which method do I add ?” to “How do I invest in my payment experience to attract different types of users?”

Leveraging A2A payments: When the Rail Becomes a Commodity

We’ve seen that across emerging markets, A2A payments are driving volume growth. But for example, in Brazil, everyone already offers Pix. So how do merchants use A2A to acquire customers when the payment method itself is a commodity?

They must innovate on top of the rail.

When Pix launched, it acted as a massive customer acquisition tool, driving financial inclusion, reducing cash usage, and bringing millions into the digital economy. But Brazil has climbed that maturity curve rapidly: today, over 80% of Brazilians already use Pix, it’s used in over 40%+ of e-commerce transactions, and nearly every merchant treats it as table stakes. Save brand new users aging into the digital economy, enabling Pix itself will not bring a merchant net new customers.

The customer acquisition advantage now lives one layer up: in the products built on top of the rail. Recurring Pix extends it into subscriptions. Credit-based checkout solutions like NuPay and PicPay Pix with Credit sit on top of Pix and let shoppers pay in installments, something the raw rail does not do on its own. Early on, the innovation was as simple as providing a discount for paying with Pix. As an A2A system matures, the winners keep finding new models to build on top of it.

Colombia is the market to watch next. Enabling Bre-b may very well attract new users to e-commerce. But this window of opportunity is short, with 80%+ of Colombians registered for Bre-b within nine months of launch. Once Bre-b e-commerce integrations are built, merchants will have perhaps 12 months to leverage the payment method for new user acquisition. After that window closes, the innovations on top of Bre-b will be the true drivers.

The signal is clear: when an A2A scheme enabling P2M use cases launches in your market, expect it to drive major customer acquisition. Shortly after, though, differentiation becomes necessary. Knowing your market’s stage of A2A maturity tells you when to act.

What the Market Reveals to Us Right Now: A2A Advantages

A2A is opening new customer acquisition opportunities in emerging markets, but the right payment method still has to be evaluated market by market.

How PCMI Helps

For global merchants expanding into increasingly frontier markets, this stuff is hard: getting a solid read of payment method mix, understanding local dynamics and consumer behavior, and properly Reading market maturity are areas where we see merchants making mistakes, and it’s understandable. PCMI is the best possible global partner to do this correctly.

Contact us to quantify new customer acquisition by payment method and design a payment acceptance strategy, market by market. We can help you jump-start this in a few different ways:

• Our E-commerce Datapack, built annually since 2017 across 24 markets, gives an apples-to-apples view of which methods drive volume today in each market and which are projected to grow.

• Voice of the Customer research lets us survey the exact cohorts you are trying to win

• Market mapping isolates the net-new behavior worth chasing and what is driving it.

Any of these options can be set up quickly and give you the data to drive decisions within 90 days or less.

Book a quick call to see which of these approaches are the best fit to help you draw new customers and avoid the major traps we highlighted.

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Notes:

1. Yuno & PCMI. (June 2026). Bre-B and the Future of Multi-Rail in Payments in LATAM. PCMI Payments Coffee Chats [Presentation]. ↩︎