ALPS Payments Executive Roundtable: Matías Magallón, Marcelo Aravena and Julio Romero on Smarter Payment Infrastructure Across LATAM
ALPS Payments is strengthening its position across Latin America as payment infrastructure becomes increasingly central to how iGaming operators compete on conversion, withdrawals and player experience. With operations spanning multiple markets and an expanding network of local entities, payment providers and payout routes, the company is moving beyond payment connectivity toward a broader model built around orchestration, Smart Routing, regulatory readiness and real-time transaction performance.
In this exclusive CasinoRank roundtable, three ALPS Payments leaders: Matías Magallón, CEO; Marcelo Aravena, CRO & CMO; and Julio Romero, Co-Founder & CPO, share their perspectives on the latest developments across LATAM, the changing expectations of operators, and how the company is approaching its next stage of growth. They discuss Peru’s evolving payments landscape, approval rates and instant payments, dynamic routing and risk management, and why local infrastructure, redundancy and market-specific expertise are becoming increasingly important across the region.
Matías Magallón, CEO
ALPS has continued expanding its regional footprint and strengthening its position in markets such as Peru. What has changed in the opportunity you see across LATAM over the past year?
Matías Magallón: What changed has less to do with digital payments growing and more to do with how betting is being consumed. Online betting has become genuinely mass-market in Latin America, and with that a far larger number of operators are competing for the same user. Average ticket sizes have come down while frequency and speed have gone up — instead of a few large, occasional bets, we see many small deposits placed while an event is still running. That changes the payment requirement completely: when the average deposit falls, every fixed cost per transaction weighs more, and every second of latency in an authorization has a direct commercial effect. Competition among payment providers has intensified in parallel, and pricing is under real pressure. Regulation is moving too — Peru is the clearest example — but in our experience that is one of several changes, not the whole story.
The second shift is in what an operator asks a payment partner for. Two years ago the question was how many payment methods you had. Today price, conversion and checkout experience are what any serious provider brings to the table — they stopped being an advantage and became the baseline. The question now is whether you can keep a specific method working, in a specific market, at a specific hour, for a specific type of user.
And the part operators still underestimate is that connecting a payment method is the tip of the iceberg. Below it sits incorporating locally, clearing licensing and KYC/AML, qualifying providers one by one, working out which methods actually matter in that market, integrating them, maintaining those integrations, absorbing every new product the market launches, consolidating the data, and running support and commercial relationships with every counterparty. That is the work for one country. Our proposition is that a merchant solves it once, with us, instead of nine times on their own. That is what “opening paths, connecting LATAM” means in practice.
Peru has been a key focus for ALPS this year, including your presence at Peru Gaming Show 2026. What are you seeing in the Peruvian iGaming and payments market, and what has the experience taught ALPS about scaling across LATAM?
Matías Magallón: Peru is digitalizing quickly, and the local reality there is not card-first — bank transfer and mobile wallets carry a large share of deposits, and cash networks are still relevant. In iGaming, the regulated framework has accelerated the market’s professionalization, which raises the bar on compliance, traceability and payment performance at the same time.
Peru Gaming Show confirmed that operators want more than connectivity. What struck me is how much of the conversation was about withdrawals rather than deposits. Peru is also where we built our deepest pay-out network — we run five bank pay-out providers in that single market — because withdrawal speed has become a competitive weapon for operators, not a back-office concern.
Two lessons about scaling. The first is that there is no universal payment strategy for the region: technology gives you a common infrastructure, but success depends on adapting it to local behaviour, local rails and local regulation. Yape in Peru, PSE in Colombia, SPEI in Mexico — these are not features you add to a checkout, they are different financial ecosystems.
The second is why we invest as heavily as we do in regulatory standing. We are regulated wherever it is possible to be regulated: where a licensing framework exists, we hold what it requires — in Peru that is a mandatory local licence, which we obtained — and where a framework does not yet exist, we have built to be ready for the day it does. For an operator that distinction matters, because a payment partner that loses its ability to operate is not an inconvenience, it is an interruption of revenue. We process across nine Latin American markets, and in five of them — Chile, Peru, Colombia, Mexico and Ecuador — we do it through our own local entity, handling both deposits and withdrawals. Across Central America we currently serve deposits, and extending the withdrawal side there is part of what we are building now.
Marcelo Aravena, CRO & CMO
ALPS has recently been putting more emphasis on approval rates and Smart Routing. From the commercial side, how much revenue can operators still be leaving on the table through poorly performing payment flows?
Marcelo Aravena: By the time a user reaches checkout, the operator has already paid for everything that got them there — acquisition, bonus, retention. And with more operators competing and more money going into sponsorship and affiliates, that cost per player is higher than it was a year ago. A decline at that point is not a lost transaction. It is the whole investment written off, and often the user moving to another platform to place the same bet.
What matters commercially is that a meaningful share of those declines have nothing to do with the customer. Provider unavailability, processing conditions, a temporary issuer response, a method that is degraded in one market at one particular hour — those are recoverable. Smart Routing exists to evaluate the alternatives and take the route with the highest probability of that specific transaction going through. It only works if there are genuinely alternative routes to take, which is why we run multiple providers within the same payment method in our main markets rather than a single integration per country.
We do not publish our approval figures — every operator’s traffic mix is different and a headline number would be misleading. But any operator can measure this in their own data: separate the hard declines from the recoverable ones and the size of the opportunity becomes obvious very quickly.
One thing we have learned commercially is where price actually sits in this. Price closes a negotiation; it is rarely what keeps a merchant. Once an operator is live, what they care about day to day is performance, checkout experience and the quality of the support behind it — and most of them will take better conversion over a cheaper rate. Which is why technology alone does not capture the value. Every merchant has a dedicated account manager who reviews their indicators with them week by week, with 24/7 support behind it. Approval rate is not something you fix once at integration. It has to be managed continuously, with the merchant.
You recently highlighted how instant payments could improve liquidity and reconciliation for merchants, not just transaction speed. As real-time infrastructure develops across LATAM, which commercial processes do you expect to change most significantly?
Marcelo Aravena: Cash-flow management first. When payments and confirmations happen in real time, an operator has accurate visibility of its liquidity and can make operational decisions faster instead of waiting on a settlement cycle.
Reconciliation is second, and it is the one companies underestimate. Many still run fragmented processes, delayed reports and manual checks across different providers. Real-time infrastructure closes the gap between payment, confirmation and settlement information. It is less glamorous than instant deposits, but it is where finance teams get their week back.
The third is withdrawals, and this is where we have put real effort. We make funds available to our merchants instantly so they can execute player payouts without waiting for us to settle. A delay there is not a treasury detail — it is an operational delay in a business where withdrawal speed has become part of the marketing proposition. We can also settle in most parts of the world at competitive fees and within tight timeframes, with FX applied at the moment of settlement, which for an operator running several markets removes an entire layer of friction.
The real value of instant payments is not that money moves faster. It is that a business can operate on current, reliable, actionable financial information.
Julio Romero, Co-Founder
ALPS is moving beyond simply connecting payment methods and increasingly focusing on how transactions are routed. What market-specific signals should a payment orchestration layer be responding to that a conventional routing model would overlook?
Julio Romero: A conventional model routes mainly on cost, or on whether a provider is up. That is a static view of a market that is not static.
A serious orchestration layer has to weigh the issuing bank, the card network, the payment method, currency, transaction value, merchant category, customer location, historical approval performance by segment, and each provider’s response times — and then layer real-time operational conditions on top: a provider degrading, an unusual dip in approvals for one issuer, a method behaving differently at 2am than at midday. In Latin America the same transaction behaves very differently depending on the country and the local financial ecosystem, so the goal is not to define a permanent route. It is to keep identifying the route with the highest probability of success under the conditions of that specific transaction.
Two things make that possible, and both are structural rather than clever. The first is that we are a payment service provider, not an intermediary that passes the transaction to someone else and reports back what happened. We process end to end: we receive the funds from the end user and we deliver them to the merchant. That means the decision, the execution and the data all sit in the same place. The second is depth in the network — in our core markets we run several providers within the same payment method, and in one market five providers for bank pay-outs alone. Redundancy is not a resilience feature we added later; it is the raw material the routing layer runs on.
There is an inherent tension between stricter fraud controls and higher approval rates. From a product perspective, where is ALPS drawing that line today, and how has your approach changed as transaction volumes and market coverage have grown?
Julio Romero: We do not see security and conversion as opposing objectives. The real challenge is to apply the We have never treated security and conversion as opposing objectives. The real problem is applying the same level of control to every transaction as if they all carried the same risk. A rigid model rejects legitimate customers; a permissive one hands the operator fraud and chargebacks.
Our approach combines multiple signals to produce a more precise risk assessment, and we give merchants our AML and anti-fraud tooling directly. This way they can define and monitor rules according to their own business, market and risk appetite rather than depending on us to interpret their risk for them. In a regulated market the operator carries the reporting obligation, so the tooling has to be in their hands, not only in ours.
As volumes and coverage have grown, we have moved from static rules toward a more data-driven model, and that is where most of our roadmap sits. The stage we are building toward is a layer that will adjust risk thresholds by segment automatically as patterns shift, and that will feed routing and risk decisions from the same signal set instead of treating them as two separate systems. The direction is to protect the ecosystem without adding friction for legitimate users, with less manual tuning every time a market moves.
Final Thoughts
As ALPS enters its next phase of growth, what is one product, market or strategic development currently underway that you believe could materially change the company’s position in LATAM?
Matías Magallón
I ran finance at this company before I ran the company, so what I look at is whether we are buying real optionality or just buying revenue. Right now we are expanding into Argentina, testing new routes across Central America, beginning to operate in Bolivia, and exploring international credit card acceptance for both Latin American and European markets. What makes that more than a list of countries is the last one — carrying a different type of transaction, not the same transaction in one more place.
The same infrastructure already serves a very different profile outside gaming: multi-market software platforms that need to collect from end users in several countries and split those funds out to hundreds of affiliated businesses. Gaming is one vertical on that infrastructure, not the definition of it. That is the difference between a regional processor and regional payment infrastructure, and it is the whole idea behind opening paths and connecting LATAM.
Marcelo Aravena
From where I sit, running revenue, the biggest shift is a conversation I have to keep having: payments are still treated as an operational necessity and a cost line, when they are one of the few levers left that improves results without spending more on acquisition.
As our routing and data capabilities evolve, we can show an operator what a simpler, lower-friction payment journey does to their conversion — measured in their own numbers, not ours. When that lands, the discussion stops being about rates and starts being about revenue. That is the change I care about most.
Julio Romero
When we started building this, we assumed the hard part was integrating providers. It was not. The hard part is deciding, transaction by transaction, which one to use, and being right more often than a static rule would be. That is why the orchestration layer is where I would put our next phase: reading real-time signals, choosing dynamically, and learning from what actually happened.
Getting that right across markets as different as Chile, Peru and Central America is the most interesting engineering problem I have worked on, and it is the one that compounds.