Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the dLocal Investor Day. I'm Soledad Nager, Head of Investor Relations. Before we start sharing our story with you, there are some items I would like to draw your attention to. First, with the packet you received, there is a QR code that has access to the website for this event. In the website, you can find the bios for the speakers and the definition for some of the terms that will be used during the presentation. Second, I would like to remind you of our agenda. We will start the presentation soon. After all speakers present, we will do a 10-minute break. After the break, we will have a Q&A session with the management team. When the Q&A is over, we will offer you refreshment in the adjoining room, where you will have the opportunity to speak to management directly.
Now, give me 1 second that I give you a few minutes to read our safe harbor statement. Okay, with this, I would like to call to the stage Eduardo Azar, our Chairman, and Martín Escobari, Co-President of General Atlantic. Thank you.
Good morning, guys. We want to thank you everybody here to be here with us. Hopefully, we will be able to explain our company and give a nice picture, a nice color of what we are doing. We know how difficult it is to set aside one whole morning, we cannot appreciate more with your presence here. I am Eduardo Azar, Chairman of dLocal, early investor from 2015. I want to tell you a little bit how I got involved on this. I was in Punta del Este, in Uruguay, pretending to have some good holidays, all the sudden, one common friend introduced me to Andrés , Sergio, they start talking about the idea of creating a company to work in emerging market.
I was so impressed when I met Andrés, Sergio, Seba, Jaco, because they found a problem, and this is the way to start a business. They found a problem, and they found a solution. The problem was that people in emerging market want to buy, want to have access to buy online, and it's the worst thing that could happen. Someone want to sell, the other want to buy, and the transaction doesn't happen because of lack of infrastructure. When I saw that, and I saw the idea, and I saw fundamentally, the entrepreneurs, this is what immediately I jump into, because of them, because of they were terrific entrepreneur with great ideas and willing to work very hard. This is how, personally, I joined the company, investing and acting, and then become a chairman.
After eight years of working hard with a lot of passion, we are here. We made the company public. We started with one country, and this is also important to say. The company started in Uruguay, and Uruguay has 4 million people. If you want to make money out of 4 million people, I wish you luck. That is difficult. That is the adversity. When you have adversity, that you have that universe, you have to think out of the box, and you have to go global. This is exactly what dLocal did. Not relying on the Uruguay market and relying on global. We started with Brazil, and we follow with different countries: Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, and now we have 40 countries counting.
What we do here, what we do dLocal for merchants, is improving the conversion rate. We make the transaction happen, we improve the conversion rate, and this is what we understand, because we are from emerging market, and there is a lot of similitude with Nigeria, with Brazil, and because we understand, we managed to find a solution. I cannot be more proud of what we accomplished so far. Another thing that I want to point out is that we are processing $12 billion, $15 billion, it's nothing. We are scratching the surface. There is $1 trillion to process. You will see here that the potential of dLocal. When they talk about saturation, we are maybe 1% of what we can do here. Our view is 5-10 years.
We are not concerned about one quarter, two quarter. I would like also to take the opportunity to welcome Sergio Fogel, that is the founder, but also decided to come as an executive, will be extremely helpful for the company. He worked with Seba, with Sebastian for the last 10 years, and I think that will be a great addition to the executive people. Now I want to call Martín Escobari from GA. GA was an early investor, and we were so lucky to find a partner like GA. It's a dream of a partner. We work together. Now, Martín, take.
Thank you, Eduardo, and thank you everyone for joining us for dLocal's first Investor Day. It's a very special moment for the company, and I'm grateful for the invitation of Seba and Eduardo to invite me to say a few words. My life is in Latin America. I was born and raised in Latin America. I was an entrepreneur and have been an investor in Latin America. GA has been in Latin America for 20 years, and we've invested $7 billion-$8 billion in Latin America over that period. If you look at our returns in Latin America over those 20 years, they're among the strongest we've had globally. Where many other investors come to us is how do you do it? Because Latin America is not a fertile ground for successful investing in the private equity space.
There are very few funds that have actually made money in Latin America. As I reflect on 20 years of work, we've managed to do well because we tackle what Eduardo called big problems. Those of you that live in New York know that renting an apartment in New York is hard. It's 10 times harder in São Paulo because it's all fake listings, there's no MLS, and, you know, there's no price discovery, and there's no FICO scores, so you have to prepay 6 months of rent. If you create a platform that allows this to happen seamlessly, you create a lot of value for your customers, and you can capture a lot of value for you. Buying a used car, that's difficult in the U.S., it's impossible in Mexico.
You think you're buying a car, it's not actually a car. If you create a platform like Kavak that does this seamlessly and so forth, you can capture a lot of value and so forth. You know, if you're retail investing, if you rely just in four banks in Brazil, that's hard because they charge you a lot for limited assortment. If you create a platform that's, you know, open, and those of you that know XP, that's also been one of our great investments, and we've been investors in XP for 12 years now. We invested in XP when it had 200,000 customers. Now it has 4 million customers. It's changed the way Brazilians invest. I think dLocal is one such story. Cross-border payments into the emerging markets are horrendous.
If you're a merchant trying to sell to Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina, not to mention Nigeria, Muddy Waters' favorite country, it's impossible. It's very, very hard. Acceptance rates are you know, you have to deny 20%-30% of the people that are trying to buy from you. If you're a business that has 95% gross margin, that's a lot of profits that go away. If you create a solution that allows you to safely accept more customer demand, you create a lot of value for your merchants, you create a lot of value for the end customers who are able to buy something that otherwise is more difficult to buy without an international credit card, and you can capture a lot of value.
That, in a nutshell, is what dLocal is trying to do at scale across the globe. When we invest in an opportunity, we look at 3 driving criteria. This is across the globe, and it's also true in dLocal. First, we're trying to find opportunities of companies that are going after very large markets. Cross-border payments is a trillion-dollar opportunity, and it's growing. dLocal's market share, 1.5%. Amazing time. As large as time as we can think of. In the 4 years GA has been an investor at dLocal, the company has grown 10x. I hope it grows another 10x in the near future. I cannot say the date, but because it's a safe harbor statement, there is a lot of high ceiling to grow.
The market is as exciting as there is in terms of market size. The second criteria we look for is, does the company have a sustainable competitive advantage? The way I like to measure competitive advantage is, does it have a gross margin? Because if you're better than your competitors, you can charge a little more. We know dLocal has a relatively healthy take rate and relatively healthy gross margin, because it's addressing a problem, and the merchants are willing to pay for it. Is that gross margin sustainable? We know, every market gets more competitive over time, and if you dissect the gross margin of dLocal and the more competitive margins versus less competitive margins, obviously, it's higher in the less competitive markets than in the more competitive markets.
There is a trend of margin compression that if you take the 10-year view, is gonna happen in as more and more markets become more competitive. It's inevitable. Against that is dLocal's ability to add more value through new services and new countries. One of the fundamental thesis of the dLocal strategy that Seba and Jaco so well articulate, is having gone through lengthy customer acquisition processes. Now, when you're bringing on a new merchant, it takes 3-18 months. How long did Amazon take? Was it 2 years? 2 years. It takes 3 months to 2 years to be certified by one of these merchants, because rightly so, they're concerned about suitability, they're concerned about the data integrity, are we paying all the taxes? Do we have the right licenses?
It takes a really long time for a merchant to get comfortable with letting dLocal process their money. If they have to do that with different merchants in each of the 120 countries they sell to, if you're a global merchant, that's unmanageable complexity. The one dLocal solution is one pipe, same standard of care. We solve all your problems across multiple very complicated countries. We think we're only scratching the surface in our ability to cross-sell the one pipe to multiple countries. I can't remember the statistics. You know, average is 10 countries? Should be much higher, you know. There's, you know...
We'll go to many countries, we'll cross-sell more and more, that is a way to preserve your gross margin for longer, by being able to solve the same problem in different customers with the same pipe to the customer. The third angle, the third criteria we look at: Does the team have the right go-forward capabilities? Is this the right team for the mission ahead? It's undeniable that the team that dLocal has today has built an amazing business. We've grown 10x in four years and been very relatively capital efficient, and it's highly profitable. It's a team that's worked together for a long time. It's a team that's added outside talent to upgrade systems controls, which are needed and will it's a continuous need.
That job is never done. There's always more to do. It's a team that's been tested by hard times. I think Muddy Waters made for a very horrible Christmas. I mean, they're all Jews, but still, Christmas time was horrible for a lot of our, not all, but, you know, some of them are. It's been tested by some tough times, it's been tested by some tough geographies. Our entry into Africa is hard. You think Argentina is complicated? Get ready for Africa in the next three years. It's hard. It's regulation is tougher, FX controls are harder, the local is gonna have to adjust to that.
They've proven they have the stomach for Latin America, and I say, if you make it in Latin America, you can make it anywhere. Let's see if it applies to Africa. I've seen that young team grow. I've seen Seba and Jaco grow as managers, and I'm very proud to have them as partners. I'm very grateful for the sleepless nights and the hard work, and it's not easy. I'm committed to this story, and I think we're not even in the second inning, so I hope you stay with us for longer. Thank you very much.
Hello.
Hi, everyone. How are you? Good morning. It's great being here today.
Hello.
Before we go into the presentation itself, I wanna introduce Sergio officially. Sergio is, as of yesterday, our Co-President and Chief Strategy Officer. I've known Sergio for, at this point, 20 years, and I think it's worth to share a little bit more on where we've known each other.
20 years. How old are you?
I'm now 33 as of last week, so I know Sergio from school, so it's been a long, long ride there. Sergio, if you can introduce yourself.
Yeah, well, just to make it clear, we met in a completely different context, in a nonprofit that Seba was managing. I always like to say that if you manage to motivate people to go every day to work in a nonprofit, without the motivation of the salary and the ability to fire someone, you are a great leader, and that you have shown that. About myself, I was born and raised in Uruguay. I started my career in Israel, where I studied. I've been doing quite heavy R&D in the VLSI space in my previous life, so I'm, I, I like deep tech. Then I did my MBA at INSEAD in France.
Went to work for Oracle, so I have experience both on the technical side and in IBM and in the Oracle, which has the most amazing sales organization you can think of. Started my entrepreneurship career over 20 years ago. I've built and then afterwards invested in many different companies, so I have quite a lot of experience in starting up a company. We've started this company seven years ago with Seba, whom we met a long time ago, but in a different context, and then we met in a birthday party, of all things. You want to tell the story?
Of my mother-in-law. I guess the biggest conclusion is that one needs to go to your mother-in-law birthday. Sergio, it's great to have you on stage and joining us. I think Sergio's experience will be extremely important to us as we navigate this new stage on the company. We have a lot to cover. Before we get right into it, we wanna cover a little bit on the latest news in Argentina. We wanna get that out of the way. It's very important for us to be able to discuss our story and where we are heading. Let Sergio read a few opening statements, and I'll complement, and we'll get right into the presentation.
Yeah, well, that, as you know, we have filed a 6-K document, so there's. We cannot say much, anything actually beyond that. What we can do is explain how we operate in Argentina. We accept payments from end users or companies for the largest merchants in the world, names that you'll see in the presentation. For your reference, our average credit card transaction in the country is just six and a half dollars, so it's massive services. We expatriate the funds through various established and highly reputable banks, both local and international, following the central bank rules and also following different layers of compliance, both of the banks and of the regulators and their own compliance.
It's not easy to move money around in these countries. I have a bank account here at Chase Bank. I send a wire, and that's it. In these countries, setting up a wire is much more complicated. You need to provide a lot of supporting documentation. So just to make it clear, contrary to what was reported in the press, every wire that we send has customer transactions behind it, and it has supporting documentation that sometimes we are required to provide, and we do according to the law. We have always operated within the regulatory framework, which has changed many times during the last few years, and we will continue to collaborate with the authorities whenever required. Again, we wanted to get this out of the way.
This is not what we came here to discuss. We want to discuss about the huge opportunity that we have ahead of us. Let's get started.
The only thing, Sergio, sorry, that I'll add, is that our business in Argentina is fundamentally the same as in every other country where we operate. It's the same merchant base. It's the Facebooks and Netflix and Googles and Microsofts world. Argentina is complex. We believe in complexity, we add value. We're committed to the market in the long run. It might be a bumpy road, but we're really, really confident on the way we've done things and the way we've operated over the years, not only in Argentina, but across every market where we operate. The standards are exactly the same in South Africa, in Mexico, in Brazil, in Nigeria, in Indonesia, and also in Argentina. Let's go to the more interesting part, if you don't mind. We're gonna hear...
Sorry, we're gonna see a short video, on who we are at dLocal. If I can make it work.
No, I think someone has,
We want to grow in emerging markets, but it's not that simple. Accepting online payments and paying vendors and partners in emerging markets is complicated. I don't have any international credit card or anything like that.
Inside India, it is fine, but if you're giving the money outside, it is a big problem in India, right?
The transaction would bounce back.
As much as I wanted to buy something, I couldn't.
I wish we had more options.
Whenever I find a service that's not available, it just breaks my heart. It's like I'm blocked from the world.
Meet dLocal. dLocal enables global merchants to connect with billions of consumers in emerging markets with one API, one platform, one contract. We give global merchants access to over 900 payment methods in 40 countries. We offer both paying and payout services to our customers to enable them to accept online payments and pay in local currencies. Our full platform solution enables global online marketplaces to offer their sellers the ability to accept payments in emerging markets, and our Invoice Collection solution supports the B2B payment process from start to finish by enabling payment in local currencies. We power a diverse set of high-growth verticals, including ride-hailing, streaming, financial services, retail, advertising, SaaS, e-gaming, travel, and e-learning. More than 600 global merchants, such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Spotify, trust us to expand their business in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
We settle funds locally and internationally, managing FX and tax payments along the way. We make the complex simple. dLocal.
A little bit of our history, Martín was covering and others was covering around that. We started this journey in 2016. There was a clear understanding, both Sergio and I, and Rui, and Jaco, Andrés, we come from emerging markets. If you happen to be born in New York and you wanna buy from Amazon, you swipe your card, you buy online, one click, no friction whatsoever, and you get the product the next day. If you wanna do that same transaction, but you were born in Nigeria or in South Africa or Indonesia or in Mexico, there's massive friction. We didn't know about all that friction when we started. We knew about the friction in Brazil. We launched the first payment method, which was Boleto, a cash method that has now been replaced by Pix.
We thought we have covered everything. We thought that was it. We had GoDaddy, who was our first customer, and we said, "Okay, we unlocked the world. There's nothing else to be done." We were obviously very wrong. One of the things we understood is that this problem we saw initially in Brazil with cash methods wasn't only common to Brazil, not only common to cash methods, but it was something that was happening across the wider emerging markets. When we started to speak to our customers or our dream customers back then, so we went to Google, and Google knew that they had friction. We went to Facebook. They knew they had friction. What we've been doing all of these years is understanding that that friction exists and listening to the merchants saying, "How can we bridge those gaps?
How can we really create infrastructure that would make it a level playing field?" It should be the same way to pay and get paid in the U.S. as it is in Brazil. It should be exactly the same way to process a payment in Nigeria as it is in the EU. That reality is not there yet, and that's the opportunity we are going for. The other thing I'll say is that this market is huge. As Martín was saying, it only keeps getting bigger because, again, if you believe that emerging markets are here to stay, and obviously they are. Demographically, these are some of the fastest-growing countries on Earth, our market keeps getting bigger.
I sometimes get questions from some of the people in the audience: "Do you have enough fatum?" The truth is that I never think of it. It's never been a discussion in our board. Do we have enough market? It's huge. It's huge out there. Our ability is, are we gonna be able to capture that opportunity? Is it gonna be us, or is it gonna be somewhere else? Are we gonna be able to abstract all that complexity? We really don't spend time understanding the size of this market, because the market is absolutely massive. The last thing I'll say is that we bootstrapped this company, 2016 and 2017, up to 2019, when GA came on board. We bootstrapped. I think that has deeply affected our culture. We are frugal.
We are not only owners of this business, but we act like owners. We are partners in this journey. This is not busy money that we were spending. It was our own dollars coming out of our pocket. Everything that happens in our company, we take personally. You might have heard me say so. Yes, we take it personally. This company is our life, for better or worse. We really believe that that has ingrained who we are. We speak a lot about culture. Those early days have really defined us. We still remember where we come from, and we like that ambition of saying, "Okay, the opportunity is huge. We are gonna go after it," but we know where we come from, and that balance is very important to us.
Okay. Sometimes people ask us if we are tackling a niche market. It's actually, if it's a mid-niche market, it's a huge niche. We are riding on a secular trend. The same thing that Seba just said, it's something that it's a huge and secular trend. There's a very big population in emerging markets. We all know that. There's a big and growing, very fast, middle class, urban, young, connected. Those are people that want to consume the same type of services and buy the same type of goods that people here in New York or people in London or wherever in the world want to consume. They. Many of them are educated. They are getting high education, they are learning online.
They are learning the same way as my kids do, through YouTube or through Coursera or these different platforms. They are well-trained, and they, more and more, they are working as freelancers for international companies, selling their services, be it programming, graphic design, or even driving a car, a ride-sharing car, and they need to get paid. We are talking about a massive population that is growing at 10 times the growth rate of the developed markets. It's a huge market that is growing very, very fast. That's the market we are going after. And the other thing is that these consumers are in a way, forgotten. You try to buy something in these emerging markets, it's really hard.
Martín already said it, we are repeating, but we really want to get the message through. There is a lot of friction. People wanting to buy goods or services, people wanting to sell those services, transaction cannot happen because the payment cannot get through. One example, I'm a fairly sophisticated user of payment methods, as you can imagine. Last week, I was trying to buy a ticket from Toronto to here. It took me 15 minutes to complete the payment because the billing address was outside of the U.S., but the credit card was issued in the U.S. These are the type of nightmares that the consumer sides are facing every day, the ones who go through that trouble.
These are just some examples from the internet. These are all public information. There are two things I would like to emphasize here. This comes from PayPal. This is an email that went last week, last month, sorry, announcing their users in Brazil that Pix wouldn't be accepted anymore. You know what Pix is? Pix is the highest and more penetrated payment method, and PayPal is an amazing payments company, one we admire, and they cannot accept Pix. The amount of friction there is in the market, the amount of complexity a global company like PayPal needs to abstract, really compounds when you think of it. Netflix. Netflix is not a payment service.
The example I like on the right, and this is one that I'm extremely proud of, this is a tweet from a user in Mozambique asking Starlink to start accepting payments. We came in, we allowed those transactions to happen, now that user can buy internet, can buy Spotify. Obviously, we're not providers of internet, and we're not providers of Spotify. When you generate opportunity and when you create infrastructure, good things happen. The friction is really real, and I know it's very hard to find it tangible here when you're sitting in the U.S. If you are sitting in Mozambique, in Nigeria, or in Brazil, you feel that friction on a daily basis. This is what the problem is, and this is what the users want.
Sorry, if I may add to that, other payments companies, if they don't process a transaction, the transaction will be processed through another method. In many of our cases, if we don't process the transaction, the transaction doesn't happen. As I told you, I'm, I've invested and started a lot of companies. There's Y Combinator, the famous accelerator. They have this question when entrepreneurs apply, they ask this: "What do users do or go through now because the product you're building doesn't exist yet?" I want to show you some examples that apply to the market, or to the products that we serve. Things that people do in emerging markets when they want to buy stuff, and they can't.
Maybe you have to use a VPN because of security reasons of your company. People in emerging markets, they all know what a VPN is, because that's the only way they can access different services. Sometimes to watch a movie, sometimes to access, I don't know, in the case of China, to access WhatsApp or different things. Prepaid cards issued internationally, and you pay a prepaid card issued in the U.K., or somewhere else. Virtual phone number, so you can have a simulated presence in the U.S.. I am not talking about anything illegal. I'm talking about people trying just desperately to buy, and they cannot do it. Some people manage to run through all these hoops. Boxes.
You get a physical address in the U.S., where Amazon can send you a package, and these people will reship the package to your country. The people who use these things are the most sophisticated users. When a merchant tailors its offering to a certain market, and it starts with payments, then they see their conversion rates go up by, I don't know, sometimes an order of magnitude. They find an untapped market where they have much less competition, and that's where we get in.
One of the things we sometimes struggle with is make this tangible. This is a very conceptual. This is how it looks on the reality. This is a checkout from Spotify. In this case, it's a checkout in Mexico. This is how it looks in the left. Visa, Mastercard, and Amex. Pay now $10. Good luck to understand how much you're gonna be charged in local currency. You only know once the bank state. If you happen to have an international credit card, you'll come input it here, you'll get a payment. How much local currency, how many pesos you're gonna be charged, you don't know before you start. This is how that same checkout looks for Spotify with us in Mexico.
You'll see those target credit cards, but those are gonna be locally acquired, which means, number one, that anyone with a credit or a debit card is gonna be able to pay. Number two, the user will have full visibility in terms of how much they're gonna be charged in Mexican pesos. There's a small thing there that says, Oxxo. I don't know if you see it from back there. Oxxo is a cash method. People in Mexico pay Spotify subscriptions with cash, and Spotify has come up with weekly subscriptions. I know this sounds super abstract. This is how the reality looks on the ground. The other thing I'll say is that this example, we could do 900 times with 40 different countries and 900 different payment methods. All of this falls under one API.
If Spotify wants to do Oxxo, and then they wanna do Boleto, and they wanna do Fawry in Egypt, and they wanna do Verve in Nigeria, they will need to reintegrate, in example I gave, 4 times. With us, all of that is abstracted in only 1 API. This is a Nike example. This example comes from Chile. On the left, you see a traditional checkout. On the right, you see this thing called installments. Many of you have heard now about buy now, pay later. For those of you who come from emerging markets, we've been paying with installments forever. At least since I was born, I've heard of cuotas or parcelado. If you are a retailer and you don't offer installments, you are not really a retailer in these markets. We offer our merchants the ability of accepting installments without taking credit risk.
We don't take credit risk either. We abstract, again, all of this complexity. We give them the ability to get all the settlement periods to together. Again, all our... these are all the small incremental things that make our company valuable. Martín was speaking about our margins. This is where our margins come in, abstracting this sort of complexity. It looks basic. It's four boxes. It's really complex to run it behind the scenes.
We've come a long way, this is our growth curve. I remember very, very vividly, a few years ago, not so long ago, we had an off-site meeting of all the employees. Seba was saying that the dream of maybe one day processing $1 billion in a year is not that far away, and I was saying, "This guy is a dreamer." Today, $1 billion of pay-ins would be a very bad month for us. That's something we're used. This is our growth curve, and this is the... In terms of TPV, I think we have a slide.
Just to comment something on something here. In 2016, we processed $100 million for the full year. Today, we process $100 million in two good days or three bad days. The reason we are saying this is it's hard to get a payments business started. You need to get the trust of global merchants, you need to have the operations, you need to have the financial infrastructure, you need to have the licensing. There's huge momentum. There's huge inertia in our business. The fact that we've grown at this rate, I think it's a testament, not so much of how hard we work, because we did work hard, but it's a testament of our strategy. We are indexed to some of the biggest global merchants in the world, and when you hold tight to them, you grow.
This is just a consequence of our strategy.
This is. We're not going to bore you. We are running a bit late with too many graphs. We'll let Maria bore you with the numbers. I don't know where she is. Yes, we've been growing.
Not bore you, amaze you.
Amaze you. We've been growing very consistently, very fast. We were standing here in Nasdaq 2 years ago with a very interesting story to tell, I think. Since then, we grew by a factor of 3 in all major metrics. Our volumes are more than 3 times higher, our revenue is more than 3 times higher, our adjusted EBITDA is more than 3 times higher. That's super impressive. As you know, there are very few companies that have managed this growth at this stage. We feel that we are just beginning.
One of the things I'll say is that when we went public, many of you were asking us, "Are we investing enough?" It was a different world out there. No one cared about the box on the right, on EBITDA. We said, "Look, we care because we wanna run a business that is sustainable in the long term, and we believe we might be old school, but we think profits are a good thing." I think that alignment has paid off. These are the key metrics. You can ask anyone at dLocal: What should I look at? Look at TPV, revenue, gross profit, and EBITDA. Anyone on the team will know that. If you run just a business based on TPV, but you don't get profits out of that's not what you want.
If you don't manage to turn those profits, those gross profit dollars into EBITDA, then you are not really adding value to our shareholders. Diego will touch on this. 76% EBITDA margin when divided by gross profit, it's best in class. You've heard me speak a lot about daily and how much I admire them. Their target is 65% in the long run. We are already at 75%. We wanna keep the independence to invest because we believe the opportunity is massive. We are already at a profitability levels that are best in class.
Sorry, if I may add to that. People ask us, "How are you so efficient?" The truth is that we are tapping on the best talent in emerging markets, and I've seen amazing talent. I've worked with the best engineers in the world, I've worked in the best sales organization in the world, Believe me, there is the same or higher level of talent in emerging markets, and we can get that, and we can get that with a level of commitment of our management team that you don't see anywhere else.
On these slides, we're gonna cover them very quickly. These were our internal targets when we went public. This comes from 2021, both at the TPV, revenue and adjusted EBITDA level. We did what we said we would do at IPO. Not only that, we've been significantly ahead of that. In some cases, 2x, in some cases, 1.5x. When we sat down here 2 years ago, we said, "Okay, this is the vision for the company," we've widely exceeded our estimates. We take promises or guidance really seriously. We are not in the business of missing what we said we are gonna do. When I say that we take this personally, we really have our words back, backing what we say we will do.
I think this is very unique as well. We said we will do something, the market obviously changed, the world changed, but we've been able to deliver on that. Not only that, but much more.
Yeah, I think.
We're gonna be covering for a few seconds on our culture and what gets us here. Just a short video. We're back.
dLocal has a great team of great people, very different people from all over the globe, but that's what make us who we are, and that's what makes dLocal's culture.
We are one, dLocal!
dLocal, Ghana. Somos uno, dLocal. אנחנו dLocal.
Simu ye kwa, dLocal.
The most exciting thing about working here is to democratize payments, is to develop markets, and it's doing things that sound impossible.
When we innovate, we do it with and to add value to our customers, connecting global enterprise merchants with emerging market consumers.
We're bold and not afraid of climbing mountains, and at the same time, we are humble. We make mistakes, we learn from each other, from our customers, from our partners, and we learn quickly, because in emerging markets, things are moving very, very fast.
We are one, dLocal!
We would like to take a few minutes to speak about our culture. I know every company has values written on the wall, and those are worth not much. What really matters is how the company operates and the way we exist. We are obsessed with solving complex problems. The first time I went to India, I called Jaco, and I said, "Jaco, this is a nightmare. We should definitely do it. This is a market we need to be in." It's complex, it's volatile, there's full of friction. This is the type of market we need to be in. If it's complex for us, it means there's complexity for everyone. If there's complexity for everyone, there's a problem to be solved.
If we solve that problem, we're gonna be able to create value and capture some of that value. We like complex problems, you can tell. We want the most complex problems out there because the price, it's huge, and the value added is massive. Speed. People underestimate the importance of speed. Doing things fast and iterating, it's essential. In emerging markets, things are complex. We cannot be perfect from day one. We need to constantly improve. Recognizing that speed is an asset on itself, it's a huge differentiation. Everyone can say they are passionate, I would like to give a few examples. We said we wanted to win in Africa. We said it. We launched in 19, in 20, we started to take it even more seriously, in 21, we said, "We need to win." Jaco moved to South Africa.
We're not telling other people what they need to do. We are walking the talk. If we wanna win in Africa, you need to believe there. When we wanted to get our first Chinese merchants, I moved there. It wasn't easy. I didn't know anyone in China. Today, when you look at our merchant base, many of those merchants are Chinese, and they're extremely relevant. Asking not asking others to do what you wouldn't do yourself, it's a key thing for us at dLocal, and we can give many, many examples. The last point is that we want everyone to act like an owner. We are partners in this, we wanna be frugal spenders, we own this company together.
Between the management team and some of our founding shareholders here, we own close to 80% of the company. We are totally aligned in this, and I think that also has a big impact on our culture. One other question we sometimes get, you hear us speak a lot about this one dLocal concept. Fede would speak about from a product standpoint, Maria would speak from a growth perspective, John would speak from a commercial standpoint. We sometimes get asked, how do you do so much with such a small team? We made a very clear strategic decision when we started, which is, this is one company. We are not 20 different payments companies under one umbrella. This is one payments company. It means one API, one contract, one team, one culture across everything we do. Having that ability, it's massive. Why?
Because global merchants won't integrate you twice. Google won't go through the process of integrating the local ones in Mexico, and they have to do it all over again in South Africa. That will never happen. Amazon doesn't want to have an experience where the experience they get in Latin America is great, but the experience they get in Africa, it's totally different, or the experience they get in Southeast Asia is totally different. You see that we run a very diverse business, a very geographically diversified business. We offer 900 payment methods, but it's one company, and I think that's a huge differentiation.
Okay, we are very, very proud of the list of names that, of companies that trust us. These are some of the biggest names in the internet arena. There are some names missing, and there are some names that you may not know or you may not recognize, because there are some companies that have made their business of selling into emerging markets. They have gone through the trouble and the process of customizing their offerings, preparing products, especially for emerging markets, customizing their websites, translating, accepting payment, accepting payment methods. There are, of course, many other names that we are going after. Sometimes people ask us: Haven't you captured the whole market?
The answer is definitely no, because there are, of course, a second tier, a third tier, and even the first tier is not complete yet. As Eduardo said before, each one of these customers is working with us in some geographies, some with more, some in more, some in less. On average, our largest customers will work with us in 10 different geographies. We have 40, and we are adding more. We'll continue to grow with our merchants in the geographies we are at. We will add more products, we will add more merchants, and we will add more geographies to the existing merchants.
The other thing I love is that dLocal has a very basic strategy. Hear your merchants and execute on it. We have the luck to have some of the best merchants in the world. We learned how to process credit cards from Netflix. Netflix taught us how performance and credit card processing worked. Amazon told us how scale looks. What's an SLA at scale? Amazon won't allow a 0.1% mistake because everything is huge. We learned from DiDi what international expansion means and how speed is important. We've generally been hearing and listening and learning from our merchants. Everything we do at dLocal, you hear us speaking a lot about this, starts with this lowest.
We are indexed to their growth, and if you believe that emerging market, as I said before, are gonna be relevant, and if you believe global merchants are relevant in those markets, I personally really believe in that, we are the best index for that. There's no better merchant list, and there's no better geographic exposure to emerging markets than the one we have.
Sorry, if I may add?
Please.
Many of the big tech companies are seeing their growth plateauing in the large markets. They still have a lot of growth in the emerging markets. That's where they're looking at, and that's why they are coming to us more and more. We're just getting started. There's a statistic. Before I came here, I ran a report. In the last month, 40 million end users paid through our platform. That's a big number. 40 million people depended on us, and for transactions that, as I said, wouldn't have happened without us. We are operating in a geography with over 4 billion people. That's 1%, 2 billion connected people.
I mean, at least, I would expect at least, I don't know, 10% of the people to be paying for these type of services, maybe even more. We have a lot of room to grow. We are just getting started. There are more geographies to cover, there are more customers to conquer, and there is a lot of more consumers to serve. We are super proud of what we've built so far, but we are even more bullish about what's coming ahead.
I'll just add one last comment, and I'll let Maria take stage. This I'll borrow from Martín. Companies sometimes get lost in the short term. We all get very worried about the next quarter and the latest news and the latest tweet, and we are building this company for the long run. The opportunity ahead is massive. Emerging markets are gonna be a massive driver of growth. Again, we are indexed to that growth. As much as you can, I highly encourage you to look at the long term, really understand the underlying trends. That's what we are doing at dLocal. That's how we go through all this noise, because we are committed to the mission and we believe on the other side of all this noise, there's a massive company to be built.
Thank you very much. Maria will cover on our growth vectors.
Okay, now I can move the slides. Thank you, Seba. Thank you, Sergio, for the fantastic introduction to our business and overview of dLocal. I have seen many of you before, I'm looking forward to continue discussing our opportunity and our business. I'm gonna cover 3 main topics here. 1 is our market opportunity. 2, our growth strategy, how we have been capturing this growth, and how we're gonna continue to do. The third one, our competitive and sustainable advantage. Starting now on our market opportunity. Our opportunity is huge. We are talking about $1.4 trillion in digital payments in emerging markets across the markets that we operate in today. I know that everyone here loves to talk about gross take rate, net take rate.
If you do the quick maths here, it is over $50 billion of revenue ups for grabs, over $20 billion of gross profit, and over $15 billion of EBITDA. What excites us the most about this opportunity is that all those markets, they are very poorly served, as Martín mentioned earlier on. We are just scratching the surface. Even being the leader in this space, we still have, like, less than 1% of the market opportunity. What continues to excite us is the growth opportunity of these markets. There are very strong tailwinds in those markets. To mention a few, internet usage is continuing to grow across our emerging markets. Consumer spending. The growth of consumer spending across emerging markets is almost double what you see in developed markets.
Combining the internet usage with the changing behavior on our consumers, they are more and more preferring to shop online versus offline. You have the e-commerce penetration, which is growing double digits in emerging markets, and when you compare Brazil, which is one of the most developed in terms of e-commerce penetration, to U.K., we have basically a twofold opportunity just by doing that math, and U.K. continue to grow. This continues to supercharge our market opportunity, which is set to be over $3 trillion by 2028, with each of the markets that operate in growing at least at 16% CAGR. That you have seen the massive opportunity ahead of us, let's tackle how we have been growing, how we're gonna continue to grow.
Our strategy is based on three axes of growth: product, merchants, and geography, and we're gonna cover each of those. First, starting by product. You're gonna see this many times today, and it's very important to have this in your mind. We solve for many complexities across 40 markets, 900 payment methods. What is very important? We have our merchants on the center of everything that we do. Our merchants, Amazon, Google, they do not have time to think about the complexities of each emerging market. That's not their core business. They have bigger things to think about. We solve for them. More than solving for them, we have to package this in a very simple way for them. This is done through one API, one dLocal. It's one integration.
We cannot ask Amazon or Facebook or all the other logos that you have seen to do other integrations with us. It's only once. With that, we enable them to truly access 2 billion users. When I talk about truly access, it's very important to cover, like, how the payment system work in emerging markets. If you are in U.K. or in U.S., with basically three different card schemes, you can cover more than 90% of transactions: Visa, Mastercard, and AMEX . In emerging markets, this is completely different. You have markets where alternative payment methods is more than 50% of the overall transactions. You have, like, single payment methods specific to one market. I know everyone here is familiar with Pix in Brazil, right? More than half of the population of Brazil use Pix on an active base.
As you have seen before, a global payment company that I truly admire, they stop supporting Pix. It's not about just creating the connection. You have to enhance the connection. You have to continue to improve. You have to comply with all the regulatory changes. This is complicated, and it's difficult to replicate. You see the same spectrum when you look into regulatory points or tax or compliance, which Gabby is gonna cover later on here. Every single market is different. When you look into Europe, you have a very consolidated regulatory framework, tax framework, that applies across all the different markets. In emerging markets, they are completely different. Even Brazil and Argentina being neighbors, they are completely different. We solve for all that, very importantly, connected to one single API. Moving to our merchants. This is our most important stakeholder.
I know that many of you are shareholders, our merchants is on the center of everything that we do. Every time that we think of a product, geography, how we operate, we're thinking about our merchants. This is the result of that. We have grown tenfold from 2016 to 2022, over that past 7 years, and we continue to grow. Very importantly, we continue to grow across various verticals. The way that we build our product is vertical agnostic. We can serve the various verticals. Also, the way that we approach sales, and John's gonna cover this later on, we also approach this being vertical agnostic. We can serve every single merchant. Now, moving...
Once we win a merchant, once we onboarded them, our focus move into how we expand with them, how do we grow with them, how we continue adding opportunities with them. This you can clearly see through our cohort analysis. From the time that we start, year-over-year, we have been adding more geographies. We have been adding more payment methods, and this turns into a continuous growth of TPV, which is revenue, and you're gonna see this on our financial results that Diego is gonna cover later on. When you look into this cohort, this translates in our metric that we're also, like, very proud of, our NRR. We have best in class NRR. Our NRR has been consistently outperforming our peer group, which is around 120%.
Our NRR for 2022 was at 165%. What is under PIN NRR? First of all, churn. We basically have no churn. Our churn is less than 1%. Secondly, we grow with our merchants. We know that all these global companies, their growth comes mostly, like, the highest rate of growth comes from emerging markets. You have the share of wallet. The share of wallet is very important because this shows the satisfaction of our merchants in our solution. They continue to trust more and more volumes with us, and this is a conscious decision that they take every day.
We have also opportunities which continue capturing by cross-selling those merchants to new geography and new payment methods, making them enabling them to reach more and more users across emerging markets. Let's focus on our share of wallet. This is a question that I get a lot. As you know, it's very difficult to find the precise numbers of share of wallet, but what we have done here, we mapped our opportunity for our main merchants. Together with them, we saw all the opportunities that we have with them across the markets that we currently operate. We're still just scratching the surface. We have 10%-12% of share of wallet. Just by that, there is a 5%-10% fold opportunity. Why are we so confident about that?
When you zoom in the share of wallet that you can capture within one payment method and one geography, we have been consistently growing for our merchants. Let me explain here. There's a lot of information here. We have here three examples of three different merchants. The companies are very well admired for by everyone here. On the top part, we are looking to how we have been growing our share of wallet within one payment method and one geography. On the first one, this is the largest social media company in the world. We are working with them in Brazil. If we take the example of one alternative payment method in Brazil and how we have grown with them over the past four years, we got to 50% of their share of wallet. Second example, very well-known ride-hailing company.
In Mexico, if you look into credit card and debit card, we got 90% of their share of wallet. And this is also true for South Africa, with one of the largest fashion growing e-commerce in the world. We got 100% of their share of wallet. This shows the trust that our merchants have in our solution, and how we have been consistently showing better performance than peers. In the meantime, those merchants didn't stop with us on, with those payment methods. They are consistently growing countries, products, and payment methods, which have been consistently enlarging our opportunities with them. Now, let's move to the third axis of growth, geographies. We started in Brazil back in 2016 with one payment method. Since the beginning, we harbor global ambitions, and over the past seven years, we added 40 geographies, over 900 payment methods.
We enable each merchant to truly operate across emerging markets. How we do that? We have a consistent playbook that has been tested many times. How it has been so successful? We are a global company. We serve global merchants, we leverage local expertise. When we think of expanding to a new market, we started typically with the discover phase. As you know, this starts with, like, an ask of our merchants. The merchant need us in a specific country. We also look across our base, what other merchants would like us to be in that same country? We analyze the market attractiveness of that country. As you know, being profitable is in our DNA, we wanna be profitable in each region with each payment method from the outset. We analyze also the payment ecosystem, the regulatory ecosystem.
Once we decide to launch, we move to the next phase. We build a starter team. A start team, we mean we leverage the local. As you have seen, Seba spent some time in China, Jaco spent some time in Africa, and we hire local expertise. We hire local talents. We also equip ourselves with the best experts in the region, the best experts from a regulatory standpoint, from a tech standpoint, or from a payment standpoint. We collaborate with the regulators. In many cases, we come into a geography that they do not have an evolved framework for payments. We collaborate with them, we partner with them, we help them evolve this framework. Once we enable the merchants to operate in those geographies, then we move to the next phase: accelerate. We scale our volumes. We bring more merchants in there.
We build more connections. We improve our connections. We improve our conversion. Like this, we improve performance, which also translates into our numbers. Here I have two examples of geographies that we expanded. They are very different, as you can see, Morocco and Philippines. When you look into the pain points, it's very similar. We had merchants asking us to go to those geographies. We had a very fragmented payment space, where in Morocco, 5% of the population could have access to international credit cards. More than 50% of the transactions were done through alternative payment methods. competition. There was no global payment company serving global merchants. They would be there only through international acquirers. As you can see, with that, you only reach 5% of the population or less.
We collaborate with the regulatory authorities to build a framework. We got a license. What was the result of that? Besides enabling global merchants to operate in those countries, we also improved their conversions that they were seeing on their credit card transactions by at least 40%. Let's talk a little bit about how these three axes play together: product, geographies, and merchants. The way that the local platform is built, for every product that we add, that product is available across geographies. There is a network effect on that because everything is connected through one API. Every combination of product and geography, it is automatically available to every single merchant.
When you look into this slide here, you'll see that in the end, at the end of 2022, we had more than 100,000 potential connections. This means a current or potential stream of revenue. This is a combination of merchant, product, and geography. In 2018, those potential connections were, like, 5,000. We have been growing exponentially. With that, we can assist more merchants. If you compare a merchant that comes in 2018, they had one connection, one merchant, one geography, one product. We have merchants that start in 2020 with 10, 14 connections, and very quickly they expanded to 40 connections. There is a massive opportunity just inside our installed capacity, and it continue to compound on each of those axes. Let's see our competitive landscape.
There is no one doing what we're doing. We wake up and sleep every day, think about the emerging markets, how it can be better in emerging markets. When you look into the potential competition, the first one that you have here is Adyen. We highly admire Adyen, but they are focused on developed markets. You know, we, as I said, we wake up and sleep every day thinking about emerging markets. Other ones that I think are worth to comment here, international acquirers. As I said, with international acquirers in emerging markets, you are reaching 5%-10% of the population. You're not truly enabling global merchants. You have regional PSPs. They can have some global merchants, but they do not serve, like, the same kind of global merchants that we operate. They cannot serve to the same extent.
Very important here, many times they might be operating across 3, 4 geographies, but it might be required for our merchants to build another connection. Can you imagine asking Amazon, "I have an integration here, it's great, but you're gonna have to build another one to operate with us in another geography?" That's not possible for global merchants. Those are the most demanding merchants. With that, we have confidence that we are, like, positioned to be the winner in this space, to capture this huge market opportunity ahead of us. We have a unique product that is difficult to replicate. We have been growing exceptionally for our merchant base. Our merchants trust us, and they continue to trust more volumes every day. They take the decision every day. We have an outstanding playbook to expand to new geographies.
All this compounds, and we have been consistently widening our moat. With that, you know that at dLocal, we are obsessed about execution. I'll leave you with Jaco, our Co-President and COO, and Moses to talk about, like, how we have been expanding and being so successful across many geographies. Thank you.
One. Jaco, you are in the fourth seat. I'm super excited to have this chat with you today because the first part is you were a day 1 staff of the company. In the early days of startups, there are two broad things that come to mind. The first is the product you want to build, the second will be the market you want to take it to. 2016, when you guys were thinking of dLocal, what were the things that you have seen from those early days in terms of the strategy for the product and also the market you went into? What shaped your mindset?
Sure. Thank you. again, hi, everybo dy. Thank you. It's a pleasure to having you here.
Very early days on where we were building the company, the product, our geographical footprint, learning from customers as well, which has been an essence as a company since day one, there were three big lessons at the time. First, it was about having the local people in the ground, the importance of having people in each of the emerging markets we were operating. It was important to have people in Brazil at the time. explaining how Boleto works, or how online transfers or debit cards in Brazil, it works. It's exactly same important to understand how M-Pesa works in Kenya or Fawry in Egypt or UPI in India.
All those local know-how, you only get it when you have local people on the ground. For us, has been key as a company since day one. Second thing, it's defining a framework and a playbook in terms of how to expand. Being a global company, while you expand more and more, you manage to learn a lot on what works and what does not work, and we took a lot of those lessons. We defined all of that into our framework and defining a playbook on what to execute when coming to a new country. The third one, and I think Seba touched a lot, Maria just touched now, which is all the platform.
When you want to serve merchants under a single API, and you go to so many countries which have many different behaviors, it's super important to have flexible platform. The reason why, it's because you wanna keep adding new services to that product, to that platform, and you don't want the merchant to continue making new integrations. Under that single API, we understand the importance of having a flexible platform to be able to serve, to have Boleto, but at the same time, to process cards and to keep adding UPI, and then M-Pesa, which is, works totally different. 3 months ago, a new payment system came in South Africa, which is PayShap.
Yeah.
-which is the UPI version, for South Africa, NIBSS in Nigeria, and so on and so forth. The importance of having a flexible platform, it makes the whole difference to continue growing the product, and add new geographies and add new options for our merchants.
Interesting.
How is it?
I think coming from Africa, a Nigerian who I think there are three things that we had that always made things difficult, just speaking for Africa. The infrastructure. The infrastructure is super, very inadequate. The second part is also reliability of systems. The third part is the international standard that most of the global brands would expect, you don't have those behind-the-scenes sales support. When you put these three things together, shortage of infrastructure, the standard for reliability, and also after-sales support, which is typically what you call customer success, I see those things where the things that are super lacking in the continent, I think dLocal has done well in that area. The second thing I wanted to find out, like everyone here, dLocal started out from Uruguay.
The founders are from Latin America, most of the senior leadership team from Latin America. We've seen companies that start up from Latin America tend to expand regionally. That means from Brazil, you expect to go to Mexico, Paraguay, and all of those stuff. dLocal took a bold step to expand globally, to leave Latin America, to go to Asia, to come to Africa. What gave you guys the impetus to do that in the early days?
Good. Maria has presented the evolution in our geographical footprint. We started in Brazil first, we got to the rest of Latin America between 2017 and 2018. Merchants were, to be honest, I remember back in the days, early in the days, being in Palo Alto, at Facebook offices, which was a customer at the time, they asked us our ability to solve for them 13 countries in Africa, same way we were doing for them in Latin America. For us, for me, personally, it was the first time I was hearing about payments processing in Africa, to be honest. They asked about Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Ghana, and the list continues.
Very close in time, happened the same with Booking.com for Morocco. They were having challenges to collect their fees from the hotel from the hotels in Morocco. For those which are familiar with Morocco, dealing with the, what's called the ODC, which is the exchange office. It's super complex. They didn't have a local presence to handle all of that complexity. Also, Netflix came and asked us for Nigeria, which Verve has close to 40% of market adoption. For those which don't know Verve, it's a local scheme which can only be processed locally.
If you wanna offer and accept payments through Verve, you need to have local presence, and Netflix was not being able to capture all their consumers, which were Verve cardholders. Those were the 3 first times where we started hearing about outside Latin America, and we said, "Let's try it. Let's give it a try. Let's understand. Let's learn more." That's how we went first to Morocco, 2018, then 2019, Nigeria. When we put our feet on the ground, we started realizing how complex those geographies were. We decided to continue expanding and exploring more and more in Africa, in Asia. Very similar happened in Asia, 2018, India. That's how we got to be outside of Latin America.
If I hear you clearly, you are saying the expansion into the rest part of the world was not a thing of show?
Totally not.
Wow!
Totally not. It was, again, merchant-oriented. We have nothing at the time but merchant trusting on our solution, and seeing our ability to execute and to, and to solve complex problems in emerging markets. I think as Seba said, when he spoke about our culture, it's our ability to execute-
Yeah.
the speed, understanding merchant needs. it's not a show at all. We were three years ago in 28 countries. We are as of today, in 40 countries. Close to 28% of our revenues are Africa and Asia, for us, it's a reality. It's, we are solving a real problem for our merchants in those geographies.
As the co-president and also the chief operating officer, dLocal operates in 40-plus markets and about 15 time zones. That means you have people scattered across different parts of the world. Operationally, managing these markets and also managing the people, what were the key strategies that you-
Can we answer that together?
Yeah.
We would like to together start.
Okay.
Feel free to complement.
Okay.
We would like to answer your view.
Okay.
I think it's all the culture. It's about having a very strong identity and culture as a company, which blends... Again, it's the culture which blends corporate culture plus local flavors.
Mm-hmm.
It's important to understand what we want as a single company. What's define us, and again, Seba touched on a few bullet points of our culture, making sure we spread that all around each of the places we have people. Then we also manage to combine that with the local flavors to understand how is Nigeria, how is South Africa, how is China, how is India? For example, few things we did a lot, we empower people to move to other offices to spread that culture around. We had people coming from Uruguay to China for 4 years. We have people which moved from Uruguay to South Africa for already 2 years.
Yeah.
We have people which spend time in Nigeria. Myself, I went to Africa, as you know. That's the way we manage to handle our global companies, having people in 15 time zones over 40 countries. Again, it's also with people making that incremental and spreading that. How do you see-
Yeah.
How do you see it being?
I think I'll be one of the biggest beneficiaries to that. You talk about the first part, which is the strong execution mindset that comes from the center, 'cause you've done it extensively, maybe in Brazil and some of the other markets. Taking advantage of also the local knowledge, domain knowledge in the region, quite super helpful. For everyone seated here today, sometimes we think. I can imagine we've heard so much about M-Pesa, M-Pesa from Kenya, you know, Nigeria has lots of payment methods. Ghana is very close to Nigeria, just like a 1 hour flight, and the expectation is if East Africa is for mobile money, some of you will be thinking Ghana is almost similar to Nigeria in terms of the payment methods.
A Ghanaian looks like Moses, almost speak like Moses, but in terms of payment methods, they are totally different. Ghana is a big mobile money country. You just find out that those kind of nuances, the idiosyncrasies of each of those markets, and aligning that with the strong execution mindsets coming from the center, it truly helps us.
I think the fact that we have managed to share a lot of time together.
Yeah
... also was key for us to understand how each of the market works. I remember all the offsite we went in Kenya, in Nigeria.
Yeah.
The dLocal Houses, which is a plan we would tell people to get along together in South Africa.
Yes.
Some memories at the time, in Kenya, we work with, which is sitting there, and he will be presenting our product. We're going for a hiking in Kenya.
Yeah.
Suddenly, the bus got a puncture in the wheel in the middle of the road. We, we all need to leave the bus. People came to change the wheel, and we were on the middle of nowhere, kind of countryside. Some artisans which were living in the countryside, came with their handicrafts, trying to sell us, some local things. Our honest question was.
How do I pay?
How do I pay? Honestly, how do I pay? I didn't have any cash. I only have card at the time. I think was the same case for all of the team. They got a phone, which is, was not even a smartphone.
Yes, a feature phone.
A phone.
Yes.
A feature phone. They say, "You can pay me through mobile money. I give you my mobile number.
Exactly
... my phone number. You make me an M-Pesa." At the time, I had an Airtel phone, and I said: "But I have Airtel." "But no worries, it's interoperable. You can send me money through the phone." That's where we pay. I end up paying with more money in Kenya, and I realized how important it was to be really local. I think was one of the first time when I realized the importance of, in Kenya, particularly, offering mobile money. All those experiences and having the local people, right-
Yes
saying, "No, forget about card. Like, you will not pay with card here. Like, you need to have mobile money." Has been key.
Thanks. I think this is quite very, quite insightful. Seba talked about you spending time in Africa. You were in Africa for six months, six solid months. Having done it from Uruguay, like you've done it from the center, what were the things you learned? What were the things you saw when you had to stay in Africa?
Everything. You wanna go through it? We'll say again, we started expanding and giving our first steps in Africa in 2018. The theory, it's completely different than the reality, to be honest.
Yeah.
One thing is, how do you think a market works. Another thing is how you see the market works. My first time in Africa was early 2022.
Yeah.
after COVID.
Mm-hmm.
I wanted to make it in 2021. I couldn't, because there was a second wave of COVID in Africa, so I couldn't fly there. As soon as I could, I went to Nigeria and South Africa first to meet the market. I remember at the time, I was on the flight, flying back, and I started typing things I learned. Not only things I learned, similarities I was seeing between some countries in Africa and a few things we saw before in Latin America. Nigeria penetration, same as Brazil, or South Africa regulation and licenses, very similar to Brazil. The effects capital restrictions, and so on and so forth.
It was, again, the ability to learn about the M-Pesa, the ability to learn about Airtel, the ability to understand foreign Egypt or NIBSS in Nigeria, or credit cards, or 3DS, or Tanzania, Mobile Money as well, or Ghana, highly penetrated on Mobile Money. Super important. More than that, also, was the ability to build a team.
Yeah.
At the time, we were five people. I think we, as of today, we're 50 people.
Fifty
... in the ground, local people. We managed to build a strong presence. Also, the opportunity to meet with regulators.
Yeah
... super important. We have as of today, for example, a PSP license in Nigeria.
Yeah.
A PSP license in Kenya.
Mm-hmm.
We got the license in Rwanda a month ago.
Yeah.
A system operator license approval in South Africa.
Yeah
... and many more. Having the chance to meet a regulator, explain our business, explain what we were doing, what we were bringing to the continent, was super important. Meeting with customers. For first time, in years, we managed to capture customers in Africa.
Yeah.
It was not only bringing international companies to come to Africa, it also was the ability to get African companies to go to other countries as well, or go within Africa, which is huge.
Yeah.
We'll say those were key things.
Yeah. Okay. I think I also benefited from one of those sessions when we did a commercial strategy for the teams from Africa. We got them, everyone, into Nigeria. There were key things we learned. One of the first things, besides the DNA stuff, Seba talked about how the things are possible when you went to meet with the Central Bank Governor in Nigeria. It just tells you that the fintech can go to meet with the regulators and just provide insight to them. The second part is commercialization. Again, that is one of the things you talked about, how we're now able to get local merchants to grow outside of just Nigeria. It helped the team on the ground just to understand how to commercialize things we do, especially when things are very complex.
Yeah, I think.
Two more things as well. For, it was also a demonstration.
Yeah.
it was also a.
Yes
... and Seba touched on that before. It's demonstrating that what we wanna do, we need to be the ones, the first ones, in the line in order to make that happen. Need to be honest as well, I had some fun, also.
Yeah, because.
Yeah, yeah
... it brought some level of believability that it's not just a Latin American company, so that you stayed in the region means that you are truly gonna be Africa, so. We saw the kind of people that wanted to join dLocal from there. Like, we grew strongly in terms of even human resources, so that's true. Yeah. Thanks. I wonder, we hear cross-border, we hear local-to-local play, and so, again, just break it to us. What drives the cross-border? Like, why do you have to do local-to-local cross-border? Are they the same thing in each market?
It's an option we give to merchant.
Okay.
It's more of about a merchant decision.
Yeah.
We understand we are solving same level of complexity, either local to local or cross-border. Platform is the same.
Mm-hmm.
Payment methods are the same. Most of the licenses are the same.
Absolutely.
Integration is the same. For us, the difference between local to local or cross-border, it's more of about where the merchant wanna get settled. If they have a local entity and they wanna get settled domestically, or they don't have local presence and they wanna get settled abroad, it's one more building block, it's one more level of complexity we are solving for our merchants when we are selling them cross-border. At the end of day, we're agnostic because we see merchants as global. We are not going after the merchants which wanna do one payment method just in one country.
We're seeing ourself as an enabler for merchants to get access to more and more local payment methods, and sometimes they might want to get settled in Brazil locally, for example, or in Nigeria locally, or in Kenya locally, but in South Africa cross-border-.
As well.
... or in Indonesia cross-border, or in India cross-border. It's, again, it's one more flavor we give to our merchants, but we're agnostic. We're solving the same level of complexity.
Nice.
Well, we're running out of time. Just one for you. What do you see next for Nigeria, being Nigerian? What would you attribute, the local success, in Nigeria, if I may?
Nigeria, like, maybe someday everyone will dress like this.
I have mine, eh?
Yeah.
I didn't bring it, but I have mine. I have mine.
I think the fundamentals around the country will continue to be very strong and the same. We've had 250 million people in the country. I think it's not just the data of 250 million, it's the what makes up that 18%, I mean, the chunk of Nigerians will average of 18 years. It just tells you these people are youthful, these people are the digital natives of today. These are the people that will buy things online. These are the people that will do e-commerce, that is something that is very valuable. The third thing will be, Nigerians love to travel and send diaspora. That means you see lots of people.
Mm-hmm
... leave and earn from other parts of the world and send monies back home. In sending monies back home, their loved ones can continue to spend like every other person. That's very important. But I think the finest thing is that solving those complexities we talked about in the early days. As we solve those complexities, more and more people not afraid to pay with Netflix, not afraid to play with Spotify. As we solve those, more people will come into the space to play, and Nigeria will continue to grow. Above all, internet penetration is to grow. When you compare Nigeria to Brazil, we've not gone anywhere. As more people get into the safety nets, we see more that we can hit from Nigeria.
If I can add to that, I remember at the time when we launched Brazil's credit cards, if you want to make an international payment, using a credit card in Brazil was very mostly impossible or very difficult. Nigeria, it's having very similar trends today. All banks are.
Yeah
asking merchants to come local and process in nairas and not longer US dollars.
Yeah.
And we are seeing more of, more and more.
Absolutely
of that coming as well.
Yeah.
Good.
Thank you very much.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
Please help me give him a round of applause.
Thank you.
Thank you, Jaco. We'll leave the stage to Gabby, who is our general counsel. She will touch on compliance, regulations, and legal. Gabby, all yours.
Yeah.
Thank you. Hi, everyone. Good morning. Very glad to be here. My name is Gabriela Vieira. As Jaco said, I'm the general counsel at dLocal. I have a master and a PhD in international law, and I'm extremely passionate about what I'm talking to you here today. I want to talk to you about how we navigate global regulatory complexity for our clients, more specifically, how we actually deploy local expertise, how we built and how we continue to use the toolbox to apply for licenses in each country, and also how we became to be local experts for our clients as well. You heard this before, you saw this slide before, dLocal makes the complex simple.
It's important to say that when we talk about FX, regulation, and compliance, this is a incredible, incredibly complex environment that we are talking about. We are talking about different currencies, different regulatory frameworks, different reporting obligations, different taxes, different customs, so many different types of law and regulations. When we go to developed markets, such as the U.S. or even the European Union, there are certain principles or directives that allow the laws to be harmonized and to leverage certain experience in one country to another in a more easy and seamless way. That is not happening in emerging markets. Those are very distinct realities that we are facing. That being said, emerging markets, they are diverse and complex, and the regulations, they are diverse and complex as well.
We know that each authority are trying to address the risks of their countries. They're doing so also in their best abilities. We need to understand what are those risks they are trying to address. We can keep on the top of that curve as well, not only while we enter, but while we stay and progress and advance in the country. Again, the regulation in emerging markets, they are ever changing. They're always evolving. There is a lot of those countries are still addressing the digital commerce. They are realizing certain gaps in regulations or certain parts that they could improve. This means a very, very dynamic regulation. This means that our job doesn't stop when we enter the country. It continues day to day in each of those countries.
How we do that, we are local. You heard us already today, but we have people on the ground. We want to be close to the financial regulators, who are the ones that ultimately will decide what type of participants they want in their financial systems. We are also close to the tax regulators. They are the ones who are going to tell us how we account for taxes in each country. FX rules as well, that's very important. That's how we would define how the money flows in and flows out in the country. We need to be local. We need to be local in order to be able to address all of those points. Our solution of one contract, one API, it actually has a full localization layer of compliance, regulatory, and legal specificities.
As I said, we have local people, and we also leverage a very intensive expert network in each country. We also, the manner that we partner locally, it's also with the goal to achieve that specific payment method, that specific tool, that will help us even, like, monitoring the transactions that we are handling in that country. This is a full 360 compliance, legal, and regulatory partnership with not only local partners, experts, but also with our merchants, right? We have very demanding merchants. They don't expect us to say, "Okay, I can process in this country," and that's it.
We need to explain them why the license we have are enough, why the activity that we have in that country follows local regulations, follow FX rules, follow compliance standards, and why we are not gonna be blindsided by a change in regulatory framework. This is a process that I mean, I work a lot with John as well, hand-to-hand, and some clients explain why we are there, but also in the day-to-day. When something changes, we are there to say, "Okay, we are seeing this coming. We are top of it. We are ready to adapt." Yes, as I said, one contract, one API, we can offer local or international settlements with that one contract, but that unfolds this full local compliance layer of it.
We have the licenses, permissions, and authorizations that we need in order for our merchants to be able to receive the money that we are collecting on their behalf. We also have very AI-driven fraud and financial crime prevention. We want to make sure that everything going through our rails are legitimate transactions. We also have tax management. We can tell them, "Okay, this is how taxes apply in this country, especially local to local, cross-border." We can help them to also seek local partners for their own, also advise and benefit. We can say how this tax rules happens, how we manage to collect, expatriate their banking partners, FX partners, FX broker partners, et cetera. Again, we do this with all those changes and with all the changes in regulations that might come.
Yeah, that's what I want to talk to you, like, in the next slides. It's going through each of those items more specifically. This is our regulatory infrastructure, which I'm personally very proud of. You can see that there are different types of licensing colors in the map. You're gonna have those where we already hold a license, registration, authorization, et cetera, depending on what is applicable to us, of course. There are other countries that we are in the process of applying it. There are countries that we don't need a license just because the regulatory framework is not yet addressing the activities that we are performing in the country. Among that, and even in every one of them, we can also partner with already licensed partners, and then we gain efficiency after.
We can learn with a specific local partner, and they will say, "Okay, actually, that license interests us. Let's apply to it. Let's have it directly, and then we can move and have a direct license and a direct contact with that regulator." I think I missed, sorry, the green one, which are countries where we have 1, 2 type of license, but we are applying for other ones, that's just how diverse the regulatory framework are in those countries specifically. It's worth mentioning that we not only have licenses and registrations in emerging markets, we also hold in developed markets because we need them to be able to settle to our clients. I'm gonna guide you some examples. In Brazil, for example, we are sub-acquirer. We are what we call an eFX.
We are also a participant in Pix, we are within the infrastructure of the Pix, the instant payment system. We are now also in the process of application about a full payment institution license and also a payment initiator license. The reason why we have so many different figures is because Brazil is very dense, regulatory-wise, and they have a specific regulation for each type of activity you're doing within the payment ecosystem. Another example is Nigeria. I know you heard it, Jaco mentioned, Moses mentioned, we are paying a payment solution service provider there, we are able to collect funds there, connect to local acquirers, and then remit those funds abroad through licensed banks and FX brokers. We also have, for example, the U.K..
After Brexit, Before Brexit, we were able to serve our U.K. merchants through our European license. Because of Brexit, we applied to the temporary regime, now we are in the process of getting a license as a paying institution directly with the FCA. Just a last example that is a bit different from the previous ones, for example, is the one in Philippines. In Philippines, we are registered as an operator in the payment system. It's very different from the other ones, but it's so full of nuances as well. It's very interesting to see how each country addressed their payment ecosystem differently, and to be able also to learn and to navigate personally, it's what make my job a lot of fun.
This, I just want to show to you how we have been more and more efficient in how we apply to licenses. The more we are going through that experience in different countries, we are developing a toolbox that serve us to keep applying in new countries, to leverage our knowledge, to understand also how to explain to local regulators what we do. There are countries that they might have a very strong local payment ecosystems, but they are not maybe so familiar with the cross-border payment scenario. We want to be sure that we are transparent. We reach out to the authorities, we say, "That's what we do." Sometimes the regulation might be clear on what we need to apply, sometimes less clear.
We need to make sure that we also have the dialogue, so we can apply and be able to move fast. If we are able to go there and talk to the regulator, like, for example, we did that in Kenya: "That's what we do. What do you think is applicable license to us?" We did that in Indonesia as well, and they say, "Look, from what I've heard, ABC is the one that fits the most to you." This is how we have learned to gain time and leverage our expertise and be faster every time we go to a new market. Again, this is not only by entering the market. We need to keep that in every single day throughout our presence in that market. It's beyond entrance. Those markets, they are...
Any market, actually, they are prone to change, even more so when we are talking about 40 emerging markets, which are keeping, developing, evolving their regulations. Again, I mean, just here, I just want to make the point that we partner with local experts. We have our people on the ground, we partner with local regulators, such as the examples I just told you. Tax and FX rule, that's another very interesting element of what we bring to the table because, again, there's no unified way to approach taxes, such as in the European Union. This means to go to each country and understand how that applies. For example, one of the questions we make ourselves is: Can the local collect and pay taxes on behalf of our customers? Can we not? Or actually, the law doesn't address that.
We have very tangible examples. Let's say, in Argentina, for offshore merchants, we have to, and we do, collect and pay taxes on their behalf. There are countries, such as Egypt and Nigeria, that we are not allowed to do so, and both regulations has its own reason. In Argentina, they're saying: "You are the last mile in the country, so you should be doing this, so we ensure that taxes are being collected." When we think about the logic with in Egypt, in Kenya, sorry, I think I said Nigeria, it's Kenya. The logic is, a merchant could have more than one payment provider, so actually, I need to go to the source of information, which is the merchant.
Again, it's different ways to approach sometimes the same need, which is collect taxes, but they are addressed with their own uniqueness, and we just need to make sure that we are there, we understand, and we can act when possible on behalf of our clients if they need to. I think what we are also very proud is the way we mastered our local-to-local tax payment. We collect, like, normally, we are withholding agents in the local-to-local flow, and we actively also talk to tax authorities to say: "Look, this is what we do, so this tax we are collecting actually should be a credit of our merchants." We try to create value even sometimes when the merchant is not asking, because we understand that that is the chain, that is what a payment processor needs to do in that flow.
We believe in being transparent and letting the authorities know what we do in that and what is our revenue, what is the merchant's revenues, and therefore their own credit. Another layer is compliance, right? We handle data in a very unique way. Our systems are very technology and AI-driven. We monitor the transactions as go through our systems, and we cross that data among countries, within a segment, specifically, so within merchants, within a segment, and that allow us to make sure that everything going through our rails are legitimate transactions. There is, like, a very good example with one of our providers, because we make sure we use the best available systems that they are there.
That when we turned it on, turned them on, sorry, we were able to see a specific flow of a user, that she was doing cash in in Mexico, cash out in Brazil, and that was continuous, and that, of course, raised some flags from our compliance and transaction monitoring team. I don't think other payment company would be able to detect that in the way we did, because that user was using different ID numbers, was using different personal data. How could we actually identify that that was the same user? That's part of our AI training model that says: "Okay, I can sign as Gabriela Vieira, and the other one I can put Gaby V, and I can have a passport or a national ID, but that's the same user.
I need to make sure I can address the behavior of those users in our systems. Why merchants choose us? We believe we have an unmatched solution because it goes further, which, I mean, the part of our core solution is product, the way we interact with our merchants, but we do that with a layer of compliance, regulatory, and legal compliance. For us, this means that we have a very strong solution, and we do that in one of the most difficult countries they are. And yes, they can rely on us to navigate through those changes, as I said, to explain them some uniqueness of the market and how regulators are also thinking. They know that we interact with regulators.
We try to seek what is their mindset. Again, that's also why we are ready to tackle new markets and new realities. We also share the mission of those countries. We share the mission that we need to empower consumers and sellers in emerging markets. We need to empower the emerging market itself, and we believe in financial inclusion, we believe in sustainability, we believe in all of those things that the local authorities are trying to address. This part is a core to our product as well. Thank you for listening to me. I want to hand on to Fede, who will talk about products. Thank you.
Hi, everyone. Good morning. I'm Federico Mazzoli, I lead product at dLocal. Everything you've been hearing so far, it's really complex, especially considering the size of dLocal today. The only way to achieve what we are building is relying on the biggest leverage there is, which is technology. Over 40% of our headcount is technology, so we are basically a technology-first company. Today, I wanna tell you about some of the products that we are building at dLocal, but most importantly, how do we decide what to build and how do we make it happen? On our mission to build the best payment infrastructure in emerging markets, it is key to build products and services that are up to the expectations of these global enterprises.
That means building the tools to manage payments in 40 countries a breeze, but at the same time, building the payment experiences for customers, which are both modern and adapted to the latest UX trends on the industry, but at the same time, feel familiar to the average consumer in the countries that we operate. Let me show you a few examples. With Meta, we launched in over 14 countries in just a matter of months, crazy months, where we developed a bunch of custom built payment experience using alternative payment methods. One of those examples is Pix in Brazil. As it was mentioned before, Pix is right now the top alternative payment method in Brazil by a mile. For Facebook, we built custom payment experiences, so Facebook didn't have to lift a finger.
It was all done by dLocal. Now, users can pay for advertisements on Facebook, thanks to us. For Amazon, in Chile, we built a white label payment experience where the user cannot tell that dLocal is behind the scenes, for them to pay with local cards in the country. Not only that, but we also enabled installments, which was a first for Amazon worldwide, and that is key in Latin America. For Spotify in Kenya, we enabled M-Pesa. As Hago mentioned before, M-Pesa is everywhere in the country. It's the most relevant payment method out there. Now, users on Spotify can pay for packages of Spotify Premium, either monthly packages or weekly packages, using any feature phone. In fact, the weekly package is only available using M-Pesa, both because it's cheaper and it's also the most relevant payment method for their target audience, for the product.
Philippines has a very low market penetration, banking penetration. Only about half of the population have access to a bank account. By combining payouts to bank accounts and to e-wallets, we've managed to accomplish a 99.5% payouts approval rate for Deel. Of those payouts, about a third of those are made to e-wallets. If any of these merchants wanted to launch any of these experiences and even expand to other countries, they will have to partner with dozens of different providers around the globe. We've centralized this in one place, and we provide the tools to do so.
From centralized reporting, where you can see all the transactions around the globe with all the different payment methods from one place, to refund and chargeback management from one spot, to tools for the fraud prevention teams, so they can dispute chargebacks in many countries at once. How do we make this happen? How do we decide what to build and how do we do it? First of all, we're B2B native. This means that we've been working with enterprise companies since day one. That has been our focus. Our product team works very closely with our key customers. In fact, our product roadmap is directly driven from the feedback of our customers. We're not trying to invent the metaverse or anything. We just listen to them.
By listening to them, and these big companies, they obviously, they require custom solutions, and we are there to help. Whatever works in the U.S. and Europe, the markets that they are usually familiar with, will probably not work in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America, and we're there to bridge that gap. Second of all, we prioritize our developments based on their business impact. For this, we take a very first principles approach. Basically, our utmost priority is keeping the business continuity. That means keeping our platform secure, scalable by very diligently automating every manual process that's out there, but also adapting to the ever-changing local regulations. That's important to keep the business running, we need to make it grow. For that, we use the gross profit as our North Star.
For every new development, We work very closely with the commercial team to analyze how much new TPVs that development gonna bring, or with the operations teams to see how much cost we're gonna save by developing a feature. By using these metrics, it allows us to be very aligned with the rest of the company. That's super important. Our one API principle that you've been hearing before, it's at the core of everything that we do. We've said this already. By integrating to our one API, you have access to all the features that we offer in all the different markets. This is key because every feature that we build for a merchant in a country, will also be available for other merchants and in other countries. I'm gonna explain a little bit about that in a second.
Finally, we're agile to the core. We are completely allergic to bureaucracies, excuses. We move fast, and by delivering and shipping fast and often, we make sure that we are up to expectations of our merchants for both speed and performance. Now, let's see how our merchants sees us compared to the competition, in all the aspects that are essential for the product. First of all, as Maria showed, we've been doing cross-border payments since day one. Any merchant, any global merchant, that wants to launch in multiple countries and complicated as ours, very fast, they're probably not gonna have a local entity. It takes years of getting the licenses, getting the people. It's super complex. They usually want to get paid abroad, either in USDs or euros. We made that happen, as opposed to most of the other competition.
By offering the most relevant local payment methods in every country, we make it as easy to pay online as it is to buy the newspaper in the next door kiosk. Global PSPs, who are mostly focused on the U.S. and Europe, they leave the emerging markets as their last priority. That's the truth. They don't even have the fraction of the payment methods that we support. Our state-of-the-art API makes it as easy as easy to launch in Nigeria or Bolivia, as it might be to launch in Spain or Canada. It is up to the par of those of global PSPs, but with the added complexity of emerging markets. Finally, as I mentioned before, we are enterprise first, so that means custom solutions. We need to build custom solutions.
Every merchant comes with the very different, very special requests, you're only gonna get that deal if you listen to them, and you do what they need. How do we balance custom solutions with the speed that I was mentioning before, with the scale that is needed to work in 40 countries? That's a big question, right? Part of the reason to answer that is the way that we are organized as a company. The stack that Gabby showed before does not only reflect how we are organized as a team, but it's directly reflected on our technology stack as well. It all starts with integration layer with our merchants. Many of the merchants like to integrate to us via our API, but many others, they want to ask to integrate to theirs.
That's what we call a reverse API. They ask for a custom-built checkout, because maybe today they don't have the resources, the technical resources to do it, or many other crazy things that they come up with. We have dedicated teams to make that happen, and this is a lot of work that most other PSPs are not willing to take. Comes the product layer. This is where all the business logic of our cross core products comes in, from our pay-ins, payouts, Local Issuing, even our fraud prevention engine, our Smart Routing, our transaction monitoring. This is where the brains of our product comes, but the key here is that all of these products are completely agnostic of the country of operation.
Whenever we design one of these products, we design it in a way that is going to work everywhere, in the countries that we have today, and the ones that we're gonna have tomorrow. Comes the localization layer. This is where the real magic of dLocal kicks in. Every of these 40 markets that we work with today, they're extremely different from one another. From regulatory compliance reasons, different taxes that apply, even some countries have different FX sources, they're all completely different from one another. So by splitting the localization layer from the product layer, we make it as easy to add new countries, as easy as possible, and whenever we need to adapt a country because the regulation changed again, it won't affect the operation of the other countries. Finally, at the bottom, there's a local partner layer.
Since 2016, we've integrated with over 400 local partners. That's a lot. Each of these partners, each of these integrations can take up months at a time to do so, without counting the, maybe the licenses that you might need to get to work with them. We have 400 of those. Those 400 partners enable over 900 payment methods. As I mentioned before, this reflected on our teams, our technology. We have teams dedicated to launching new partners in Latin America. We have teams in Africa dedicated to launching payment methods in Africa. The same thing in Asia.... We don't make it as regional as that. We have people in China who work with payment methods in Brazil. We have people in Chile who work, integrate payment methods in South Africa.
This cross-regional knowledge is something that we really value because it's a way to expand your head, see what's possible. In many cases, working in India gives us the experience to see what's going to happen in Uruguay or in Argentina. It's a way to see the future. Why going this local? Why even bother to go this local? Well, there are many reasons to do so. First of all, merchants can maximize their reach or maximize their audience by using local acquiring and local payment methods. As Sarah mentioned before dLocal, if you wanted to process in any emerging markets, users would have to pay with an international credit card. That's probably less than 10% of the audience. Perhaps I was a little bit generous with the happy faces there. With dLocal, that's a completely different picture.
Using local acquirers, which are both, they know the local issuers a lot better than international acquirers. They enable local solutions like installments, which international acquirers cannot, but also the local payment methods. Being able to pay with cash, with bank transfers, with e-wallets, with mobile money. Every country is different, our recommendation always is just offer everything. Give all the options, let the user pick. That's the only way to maximize your target audience. It doesn't stop here. Having multiple partners per country also allows you to maximize conversion rates. Whenever a transaction come through, a card transaction come through dLocal, our Smart Routing, it's an AI engine that we built in-house, will dynamically pick which is the best converting processor for that transaction, based on dozens of different attributes.
It depends on the strategy of the merchant. We can optimize for conversion rate or to minimize delay or even to minimize costs. If a transaction gets declined, we can try. The Smart Chaining kicks in, so we can reroute the transaction to the second-best option and recover the transaction. Just to put an example, with DiDi Food in Mexico, once we launched and we turned on the Smart Routing, we got a 2.6 percentage point increase in conversion rate. That's a lot. Once we turned on the Smart Chaining, that number went up to 7 percentage point increase. That means that 7 out of 100 additional people were able to order their food just fine, thanks to dLocal. It obviously doesn't stop here.
In 2016, when we launched pay-ins and payouts, we've been evolving and expanding our products by working very closely to our merchants and listening to their feedback, and listening to their requirements and the requirements of their customers as well. Nowadays, we've made it as easy to work in Nigeria as it might be to do it in the U.K.. By launching white-label payment solutions for both cards and alternative payment methods, for multicurrency management, so you can aggregate the payments of 40 countries into 1 single solution. We even found synergies between our products. For example, doing refunds for alternative payment methods that are not cards, is extremely complex. By leveraging on our payout infrastructure, now users in emerging markets can receive their money back after doing a payment with alternative payment methods.
In 2021, we launched Local Issuing. Today I want to tell you about two of our new products, which are dLocal for Platforms and Invoice Collection. dLocal for Platforms is an end-to-end solution for marketplaces and other kinds of platforms to process payments in the emerging markets from one single place. Managing any of these platforms is complex enough already, we try to make it as easy as possible so they don't even have to worry about payments. These kind of platforms come in all shapes and sizes, we designed our platform to be as flexible and dynamic as possible. Let me show you a few examples. You can think of an e-commerce marketplace in Mexico, for example.
Imagine the experience: A user in Mexico selects a few products, some might be from a local Mexican seller, some might be from a cross-border one, and they click on pay. With dLocal, they have access to all the relevant payment methods in the country, and they can pay. Let's say they pick a card. They can pay in one transaction to their card. We would collect those funds, we would split those payments between the different sellers. For the Mexican seller, we would settle in Mexican pesos to their account. For the international sellers, we can settle in U.S. dollars, and then they can withdraw those funds in their currency of choice, in their country of choice. We make it that simple. You can also think of a ride-sharing app in Brazil.
There's local regulations in Brazil, where it requires the acquirer, or the sub-acquirer, in the case of dLocal, to settle directly to the merchant, which in this case, would be the driver. In this case, we would onboard thousands of sellers each week. We would run KYC to make sure that they are legitimate, and we would directly put the funds in an account created by dLocal exclusive for those drivers. From there, the drivers can use a dLocal issued card to pay for groceries, or they can choose to withdraw their funds to their own external bank account. You can also think about a social media app, let's say a Chinese social media app that wants to launch in Nigeria. This platform, they already have the ledger and the balance of each of their content creators or sellers.
They don't want to rely on dLocal to manage all those different balances themselves. That's fine, too. We can centralize those balances, and at the moment of the payout, the platform can choose how much money to send, either locally or cross-border, to each of their partners. Building all these experiences, and these are just a few examples, there are much, much more, requires this suite of products, right? Each of these products could be accompanied by its own. We can go through them one by one really quick. First of all, it's the onboarding and KYC. We provide APIs to make the onboarding experience feel white label, so the user doesn't need to know that dLocal is behind the scenes.
We run automated KYC process to make it very easy, fast, and scalable to check if the user is legitimate and able to process on our platform. Comes the accepting payments, which is obviously our bread and butter, but this time with the added complexity of accepting payments for multiple sellers in one single transaction. We provide the tools to either split the payments when a transaction comes in or to move funds around between accounts. Fourth, we have the settlements. As I mentioned before, we can pay out to sellers either locally or abroad, or even split funds for the platform itself, so we can pay out to them as well. Finally, we provide all the tools to manage these complex platforms in a centralized manner, from centralized reporting, refund and chargeback management, fraud support.
This sounds like a lot, but it's actually the easy part. This belongs to the product layer that I was mentioning before. We are not the first to build this. We are not gonna be the last. The key challenge for this, for all of this, is to make it available in 40 emerging markets. That's the localization layer. That's how do we adapt this complex problem, so the regulations, the complexity, the limitations, but at the same time, the opportunities that these markets have. Let's talk about the other product I wanna talk about today, which is Invoice Collection. Historically, at dLocal, we've been helping global merchants reach their small customers, or the individual customers, let's say. With Invoice Collection, we're helping them reach their largest paying customers as well.
The teams that usually deal with this problem are the accounts receivable team, that usually sit on a different table, from the payments team that deal with the small customers. This accounts receivable team, they usually don't count with the technical resources that the payments teams do. They require the tools to make their life easier. If it's in a centralized way, even better. That's exactly what Invoice Collection does. They are flexible tools for multiple users. There's no coding required whatsoever, so as soon as the commercial deal is done, they can collect payments the next day. Just to put you an example, there are two ways to do it. The first one is what we call merchant-initiated payments. In this way, the accounts receivable teams, they can upload the invoices that they need to charge.
They can upload all the regulatory and tax documentation that might be required for the country. They can send a payment link to their customer. We have the other flavor, which is customer-initiated payments, in which the customer already has a bunch of invoices that they need to pay for the merchant, and they can go themselves to the local hosted checkout, upload the invoices, upload the tax documentation, and send the payment in any payment method that they want to the merchant. In that way, the accounts receivable team doesn't need to do anything. As I was mentioning before, we handle all the taxes complexity. Every country is different. Every country might require different documentation or different tax logic.
Users can pay using their local rails, as opposed to sending an international wire transfer in USD, which in some cases, that can be complex. The best of all, is that it's one solution for 40 markets at once. To summarize, with dLocal for Platforms, we allow small and medium businesses that operate via global enterprise to collect funds in local currency. With Invoice Collection, we allow the account receivable teams of these enterprise companies to collect money from their largest paying customers as well. With dLocal for Platforms and Invoice Collection, we're expanding our target market.
On our mission to build the best payment infrastructure in emerging markets, we will continue to work very closely to our merchants, to build the products and services that will become the enablers for the experiences that they want to bring into the world. In the same way that a woman in Kenya can pay with M-Pesa for bread, we want any Kenyan to be able to pay for an online course made in the U.S., or buy Chinese goods for their new business, or even receive funds from their social media business in Kenyan shillings. That, for me, sounds like a very cool future. Thank you very much, now I'm gonna hand over to John. He's our chief revenue officer, he's gonna tell you about how we work with our merchants. Thank you.
I'm on. Can you hear me? You can hear me. Great. Morning, all. How are you? Top crowd this morning? Yeah. Okay. All right. I guess, we have been talking for some time this morning, maybe it's a bit more challenging. Guys, just a very brief introduction to myself. It's fair to say, John O'Brien, the Chief Revenue Officer for dLocal. I can't quite believe I'm saying this, I've been in payments for over 15 years. I know I don't look it yet. I'm 38, been in payments for 15 years. All of that time has been in enterprise e-commerce payments. Last five years prior to joining dLocal, I was an executive on the management team for Worldpay's enterprise e-commerce business.
All of the clients that Seba and others referenced earlier today in the slides, I worked with all of those companies in developed markets and in some markets in Asia and Latin America as well. The really good understanding of the business. I first met Jacobo and Seba in 2019, when they were looking for, I think the first outside funding, so got to know the business really, really well then. Was really impressed with the team. And to be honest with you, I was a bit frustrated why some of these customers were not working with us in some of those markets, given I already had volume with them in the US and Europe and other markets as well.
I know some of you, I think, from putting together the revenue synergies on the Vantiv Worldpay deal, I cannot quite believe that's coming back again, to put that combination together. Hopefully, we'll share some of the experience I've had here in the last year of working with dLocal, to change how we've structured the teams to enable the growth that what Maria mentioned earlier. Okay. We seem to love this slide. I've seen love this morning. Here's what we're gonna cover, guys. I'm gonna go over the go-to-market strategy for dLocal, which is obviously underpinned by our one dLocal concept. I'll talk you through the sales funnel.
It might sound like a really boring thing to talk about, but the sales funnel for us is incredibly important because there's an inherent feedback loop in that sales funnel, which drives our acquisition of new logos, and I'll touch on that briefly. I'll also talk about our approach to pricing and negotiation. I understand from our IR guys, that's come up quite a bit, like, how do we actually handle those negotiations with customers, and how do we target the team, et cetera? We'll do a brief pipeline overview for both our existing and also our net new customers. I'll talk a little bit about the team structure and how they're organized. Then finally, we'll hear from some customers.
I'll walk you through a couple of case studies, one from a global internet satellite company, which I think Seba may have already given a name to earlier, and then also one from our partners at Spotify. I'll play two testimonials or one testimonial. I believe this morning we had two, I'll play one from our partners at Deel, who work with us across three regions and in 20 different markets. Finally, I'll wrap up and hand over to Diego and hopefully get you guys out of here on time. Okay. As Seba shared, you know, clients are at the heart of everything that we do. I mean, I have a fundamental belief myself that B2B enterprise strategy is really not that complicated. We talked about it yesterday.
The really difficult stuff is the execution side of things, and that's been my experience learning over the last 15 years. Like, we do not have to guess or be really clever about the products the customers want us to build. Like, we just have to talk to them and listen to them, and that's a key thing that attracted me, you know, when I was looking for my next challenge to join the company, you know, and coming into the company, too. Like, that is the way that folks think on a day-to-day basis. Like, there is not a lot of ego around how we think about the products and markets. All of those things are very closely tethered to a real-world outcome with a merchant on the back end.
As Seba and Maria mentioned, I mean, these guys, we're really proud to have them as customers, and they drive our overarching underlying growth. Again, this is what we call a plan on the page for our go-to-market strategy. If I was summarizing our go-to-market strategy, I would use I probably should have put it on the slide, but I would use 3 Ps. Platform, product, and people. The platform, like, it is not normal in emerging markets to have scalability and reliability, and that is what the platform brings.
The product for us is hyper-responsive to client needs. I said that piece around really not being too clever and making sure we're closely tethered to the customers is a critical part of our go-to-market proposition and how we engage and talk to customers. Finally, our people. The people obviously underpin the delivery of our service. We go for a true localization model there and meet the customers where they're at. If I give you an example of SHEIN today, we work with them in South Africa, we work with them in Brazil, in Mexico. Their entire payments team is all in China, right? We have to meet them where they're at.
We have to have folks that speak Mandarin and offer that local service. We also have to have experts who work in those markets to ensure we're delivering a best-in-class service for them as a customer, too. We wrap those 3 Ps together. That's really how we get into our lead generation. That's how we talk to new prospects and get them interested in the company. Once we have boarded those prospects, boarding the prospects for us is all about long-term partnerships. When we sign this customer, is this the customer who's gonna be with us for 10 years, 15 years, 20 years? We want these customers to be longer term. From my own experience in the enterprise space, dude, it doesn't really behoove you to be signing up a lot of really small companies.
You're much better off focusing on the parental principle and signing up those top 20% of customers, 'cause, you know, without a shadow of a doubt, they deliver the 80% of the result that you're looking for. Land and expand is a key tenet of our commercial strategy, and we'll go into that in a bit more detail on the later slides there. The key thing about this strategy is once we've landed those customers, we use that feedback loop from the problems and pain points we've solved for those customers to drive our lead generation going forward.
If I know I've solved this specific pain point for SHEIN as a fast fashion retailer, it's highly probable that that pain point I've solved is applicable to, like, a Farfetch or a Temu or somebody else, and we'll use that to be really targeted in our outreach to those companies and the key stakeholders that work there that make those decisions. Apologies if I speak really quickly, I also have an accent that not from Latin America, as I think most of you have picked up on. I've had far too much coffee this morning. The key part of this slide, guys, that I've said it a few times now, is just on the constructive feedback loop for us, so making sure we're tethered to that feedback loop from clients.
The bits I would call it in terms of the structure of the team would be how we think about account managers. I think in a lot of software businesses, you think about account management as a quite an operational role. For us, really, account managers for us are like account executives. We really target those guys on growing the absolute gross profit dollar amount we get from those customers and being the custodians of the relationship internally and driving everything related to that client. The targets for these guys are all based on cross-sell and upsell and not on the underlying organic growth of the customers, and we believe that's the right way to reward our people and to push them as well.
From an operational standpoint, we have a follow-the-sun model for our customer success teams. We've got 53 people in the customer success team today, based in China, based in Africa, India, and across Latin America, and those guys own the operational relationship with all of our customers to free up the account managers to do that upselling and cross-selling that I noted there earlier. Really, really important that we have that feedback loop, and then when we're learning from boarding those customers, like in Expedia and Travel, you know, we will pick up on what were the specific pain points that they had.
We can use that for an Etraveli, an Airbnb, a Booking.com, et cetera, and have a much more informed dialogue with them as it relates to our initial outreach and trying to board them as a client. This thing does not like me. I don't know. Okay. Okay, lead generation. As Seba's mentioned, I think, several times this morning, we're very big on ownership internally, and for me, inbound lead generation is owned by the marketing team. I haven't had them for the last month or so. They've been completely outsourced to our investor relations team, I'm looking forward to the event being over so we can get back to working with them.
The marketing team own our inbound lead generation, and the inbound lead generation is all about events that we attend that are, you know, industry specific or vertical specific. If we know we're going to went to travel, like Phocuswright, we know, is a huge event to travel, so we should be there to try and meet those customers, understand their pain points, talk about our solution, et cetera. Driving specific marketing campaigns to generate awareness and leads. This year, we've launched our first-ever newsletter. We call it the Emerging Perspective. I'm sure we can get folks signed up to that after the event as well, which details what's going on in the company and what kind of pain points we're solving for customers on a global basis, and the marketing team own that inbound lead generation.
The outbound lead generation is done by our sales and our sales development teams and is really, really specifically targeted on things like vertical attractiveness. Those verticals that Maria indicated to you that we work on earlier. I also want to make sure we replicate the process to go after those verticals, because in my experience, if I introduce a new vertical into the sales cycle, that causes a lot of friction with Gabby and the team as well, and slows down the overall path to revenue. It's really, really important for us that we learn those lessons from the verticals that we're in with those customers and tethered to that active feedback loop to be really, really precise and targeted when we reach out to customers as well.
Of course, we use all of the modern software tools that are out there around research, like Apollo and others as well, to see where do these customers have traffic? Do they have traffic in our markets? Have they visited our website? Are they expressing interest in our type of solutions, et cetera, et cetera. This, again, is just our sales process on a page. It's actually eight stages in total, but we're collapsed it here for you guys because I imagine a lot of you find it pretty boring and didn't want to go through all of it. On the next slide, I'll go through the proposals and the commercial negotiations as well.
As I think about the sales funnel in total for us, I know some folks have questions about, like, what part of the funnels and should you optimize? I've been running sales teams for 15 years in enterprise. I've never seen a lot of benefit in optimizing between due diligence and integration. I see a lot of benefit in optimizing for the amount of qualified leads that you have upfront. That's what we focus on, because if we do that, the natural conversion rate of the business will kick in. For me, in a sales process, you want some natural tension, because if you don't have natural tension, you get customers squeezing through who don't want to squeeze through. You get opportunities with clients that are not that, are not that relevant for you either.
If I give you one example, we had a really large German company come to us last year. They're a public company. They wanted to work with us in 20-plus markets. Initially, sounded like a really great fit for us. We put them through the process. As we got to the integration with them, they said, "Actually, you know, we think the revenue you guys should get from us in each of these markets is about two basis points." When we looked at operationally what we thought that customer would represent for us and the load it would create on the organization, we turned that deal away.
You know, it's really, really important to me and to the team that we're discerning about those things because we have to be good teammates to our colleagues as well, and I want to make sure in my role as well, that we're putting resources to the clients that are going to generate revenue for the company. I take that responsibility really, really seriously, and it's a core tenet of the company, as Seba mentioned earlier, to understand that we're custodians of that that we manage as well, and we don't try and, you know, bring customers on just 'cause it's a great name, but it may end up actually not being a great revenue deal for us and not representing the kind of upside that we want and looking like a really longer term partnership for us. Okay.
A little bit on just the proposal and negotiation phase. You're probably sick of hearing this, because you've heard it on all of our earnings calls, but, you know, we've asked the team to prioritize absolute gross dollar, gross profit dollars on each individual, on each individual deal. There's no discussion I have with the team where I'm talking about the gross take rate or the net take rate, et cetera. Again, my own experience in payments is, like, it's not typically something that you can, you can manage either. As you look at the other public payment companies, like Adyen or others, or Worldpay, it's not really something you're in charge of too much, given the large underlying costs you've got with interchange and scheme fees and things of that nature as well.
What we do ask the team to do, and it's really, really important for us, is be really clear on what is the pain point that we're solving for that customer. Because a deep understanding of that pain point allows us to develop a solution that articulates really, really clear value, and then we price that value in. Absolutely, we ask the team to price on value, and that comes from a deep understanding of the pain point that we're actually solving on behalf of the customer. Then finally, you know, making sure the pricing for those things and conditions are really, really clear in the agreements. I mean, we went through when we had to do our full year audit this year. I think PricewaterhouseCoopers, we see all of.
Not just the balances, but all of the fees that we were charging for the customers as well. With the nature of the book we have of customers, like, we have some people, like in Amazon, whose full-time job is to do contract compliance, right? Someone who's checking every quarter, like, the fees are they meant to be? Are they gonna charge me the correct way, et cetera. It's really, really important for us that those things are clear and transparent in our agreements with customers. Also, we apply learning from our sales process.
As I go through a sales process where we're onboarding customers, if we see a specific legal term with Gabby and the team that is continually to come up from a certain cohort of customers, we'll have a dialogue to say, "Should we just adjust this wholesale in our agreement? Because actually it's slowing down the pipeline and is, you know, creating some challenges with we're onboarding customers as well." Really, really important that we're clear and upfront on those things with customers. Although it's a simple strategy, we believe it to be really, really effective and drives the right incentives with the team. Okay. Next is just an overview on our pipeline. I'll just give you a very quick summary on what I mean by the different headers here. On the top, you'll see net new sales.
On the bottom, it's a pipeline for existing customers. Global multi-vertical companies are like your Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, et cetera. They typically have a B2B and a B2C component to their business, and they're successful in multiple verticals globally. The second one here, regional and vertical champions, you'll hear from one of our regional champions, I think, through lunch, when we play a video from Alejandro Stein at Rappi. Regional champions for us are companies that have had success in one specific region, in, like, in five or six countries. Rappi, I think, is a great example of that, Latin America. Foodpanda is a great example of that in APAC. Carry1st or Jumia in Africa would be great examples of that as well. Vertical champions are typically single-line businesses. Like, think about an Airbnb or an Expedia.
They're the vertical leaders in that particular business, or a Farfetch or SHEIN in fast fashion as well. The vast majority of where we ask the team to spend their time is on those 2 types of customers. There's obviously very few of the global multi-vertical companies. As you can see here, we're in the process of onboarding 3 new ones, and we've got 2 at very late stage who are integrating with us now as well at the moment. Finally, we have growth companies. Growth companies are folks who meet our minimal TPV threshold to work together. We have a minimal TPV threshold of $6 million a year, and then a minimum market threshold of 2-3 markets.
Really, if it's just one market, we're not really solving the level of complexity we need to for those specific companies. These are companies we believe have the ability to become a regional or a vertical champion, or in some instances, to go out and become a global multi-vertical champion as well. Really important part of our sales process, and it's how we segment the clients internally and how we organize ourselves from an account management perspective as well. Okay. Yeah, next, guys, is just on our land and expands. We said, for us, it's really important to start the relationships with customers in one market. What you'll see here on this page is a cross-selection of various different clients that we have when they made their initial purchase with dLocal.
As I flick through the slides, you'll see where that map is currently at today. You know, you'll see pretty significant growth, as I think Maria outlined earlier. I quite like it because it looks like Lego. Maybe you're not as simple as I am, that's why I like it. Okay. Here you can see when the all these companies added a new country with dLocal plotted on the map here. This is when the new countries added for us became significant because it became over $1 million in TPV per month. You have to bear with me for the collage of colors here on the next slide. We've added here also a second product in existing country. In each example here, it actually means payouts.
That company was doing pay-ins with us, they're now doing payouts as well. The slightly brighter green is to indicate when the second country in an existing market has gone over $1 million of TPV. Finally, we've added. I have no idea what these colors are. I think it's a light pink and a kind of red. I don't know. That's for invoicing that we've added more recently, which Federico touched on in his presentation. What we haven't added here is our marketplace solution, we have had some of our top 20 customers take that solution from us really recently. The next time we update this slide, we will be able to reflect that with you as well.
You know, I think you can clearly see that that strategy we have is working to start the relationship with the customers, structure the team so the account managers are targeted with upselling and cross-selling to those customers. You know, I think if the guys will allow me, they've done, I think, a really phenomenal job of executing on that over the course of the last six years. I touched on this earlier, so I don't need to dwell on it, but again, the feedback loop and learning and listening to what's happening with customers is super important for us, and also goes into our product development methodology, which was so well articulated by Fed earlier.
It's really, really important for us that we have that relationship and work together in concert as a team to make sure we're listening to those feedback loops actively, not overcomplicating things ourselves or getting in our own way. We believe the closer we stick to these customers, we see time and time again, that they take us to places that we want to be, and we think that will continue to happen in the future as long as we stay well tethered to those clients. A little bit on how the team is structured. We run the team regionally, so we'll have a head of each individual region. That person will then look after new sales. New sales is new logo acquisition.
Sales engineers are folks who help customers with integrations and e-configurations. Thankfully, for us, because of the scale of the platform, we only have 18 of those folks globally. We don't need to materially add to the team. Historically, those folks have gone into other roles in the company. Celia, who's here, ran that team for us previously, now runs geo expansion. I believe we have, Seba Delfino, who's running one of our engineering teams, who used to run that function as well. That's really important for us because it means people got frontline experience with clients, but then go off to work in more of an operational or back office role in the company. They...
Again, they have that feedback loop really, really close to their chest about what the reality is like to sit in front of the customer, sell something to them, or have an issue or challenge with an integration as well. Our account management team, which we touched on, is doing cross-sell and upsell, and our customer success team, which is focused on delivering exceptional operational services to each of our customers. We have two other functions which we wanted to centralize for now. One was on revenue operations.
That team basically makes sure that all of the things that are happening globally and learnings that we have are shared across each of the different regions, because it can be quite difficult to connect the team in China, with the team in Americas, with the team in EMEA, et cetera, and we wanna make sure we're sharing and learning from the best practices that are happening in each of the regions, what things customers are saying to us, et cetera. The revenue operations team help us do that. We often will have things like fees we have to pass to these customers as well, and that's all centralized through the revenue operations team. A really important feedback loop with Diego and his team on forecasting, opportunity analysis, et cetera. Huge part of the team.
Really important to make the whole structure run well, and we believe it's important to have that global for now, but we will regionalize it over time. Finally, our marketing and sales development team. Our marketing team, Gabby's here from the marketing team, and our sales development team are kind of regionalized today, but our view is we're and I think this is a good thing. I don't think historically we've been great at marketing. I think we're getting better. I don't know if I want to be a company that's great at marketing. I want to be a company that's really good at product and known for that.
This is something that you're starting to see us spend a little bit more on, because our learning, I think, over the last 12 months or so, has been, as we make clients aware of the problems that we're solving, it's generating much greater interest. Obviously, marketing is a really easy way for us to do that. We want to keep those teams centrally for now, because if you don't, that cost can also get out of control as well. I think now we're in a position where we're very actively managing what's the ROI we're getting from each of these events.
I laugh when we go to Money20/20, everyone's spending, you know, $200,000 on a booth, and we've got the coffee stand, which doubles as a booth, but is a third of the cost, you know? Again, that's ingrained in the company. It's the kind of culture we have. It's important to be frugal and to be smart about how we're spending things and to really carefully track that ROI as well. And over time, we'll also look to regionalize those teams, because as you've heard from folks here, hyper-localization for us brings extraordinary benefits to us. It really does. Okay, I think now the video will play from our partners at Deel. Maybe I'll just give a brief intro to Dan. Yeah, Dan is CEO of Deel. It's a payroll company.
He'll talk more about it. super demanding client. They push us a lot. We work with them in 20 markets across APAC, Latin, and Africa as well, and really pleased that Dan took the time to put this together for us, and we will let you hear from him. I have to press?
Cool.
Go on. I'm Dan Westgarth, the CEO of Deel. Deel is a global HR company that helps businesses hire, manage, and pay a global workforce, no matter where they're located. Remote work and paying global workforces has manifested a number of new needs, primarily around collecting and dispersing money. Deel helps businesses onboard, employ, and pay employees and contractors around the world. We're able to collect money from those businesses and distribute funds to their employees and contractors globally. That's where dLocal comes in as our infrastructure provider to help us settle those transactions around the world. Sending money in emerging markets is incredibly difficult. You're basically limited to the interbanking network, which uses SWIFT. Sending funds into emerging markets typically is very slow, expensive, and opaque. Working with a provider like dLocal makes it transparent and an all-around better customer experience.
As a global payroll company, our clients cannot miss payroll, which means the payments we make with dLocal must be accurate and on time every time. That level of service isn't typically required in the payment industry. Many players in the payment industry are paying vendors. They're paying other businesses, they're paying other counterparties. Here, we're paying contractors and employees, and that salary must arrive on time without error. dLocal has been able to meet our needs. They've been able to successfully deliver millions of salaries around the world to the tune of $ billions on time and accurately. We started working with dLocal in Latin America, primarily in Uruguay and surrounding markets.
We were very impressed with the operational efficiency and local market expertise in LATAM. Then we were able to extend that relationship into parts of Middle East, Africa, and also APAC. We've seen the same level of expertise and operational quality over there. I think of customer success working in two different areas. One is the transactional, operational area, and the second is the longitudinal relationship, and commercial area. In the transactional one, dLocal has been amazing. We're able to resolve any operational errors or issues very quickly. On the longitudinal side of things, the relationship has been really good, and dLocal is able to understand our needs as a business and help build solutions that meet those needs. I think when there's a difficult payment corridor, dLocal is the preferred partner.
dLocal isn't covering the entire globe, or at least we aren't using dLocal to cover the entire globe. We are using dLocal in the most difficult markets, and that's really where the value is for us.
Cool. Thank you, Dan, if you're listening. Okay, I'm just conscious of time. I think I've got to get Diego up here. Just two quick examples we'll run over here, guys. This is for a global leading internet service provider, or satellite internet service provider. Pain point for them was needing to become a utility in 11 emerging markets across APAC, LATAM, and EMEA in an incredibly short space of time, so over a 3-month span, primarily because they'd received licenses to offer those services domestically in those markets. They had no staff or people in those markets as well, so really, really difficult for them to operate there. Before we interacted with them, they were contemplating integrating into 11 different processors across each of those markets.
Obviously, the 11 different processors bring with it, you know, issues with reconciliation, contracts, re-relationships, et cetera. Main cause for that from their end was prior to this, they worked with an international acquirer, so a number of those payment instruments, like Verve and others that were mentioned by the team here, were not able, were not enabled for those folks. You know, having that goal of wanting to become a utility in those particular markets is really, really difficult if you're trying to do it on a cross-border basis with an international acquirer. You're really happy to say we're able to meet the deadlines for client, launch them in the 11 markets. They had a plan to do 15 with us this year. I think we'll now do over 20 markets with them in the next year.
We launched Mozambique last week, we launched Nigeria with them 2 days ago, really excited to be partnering with those guys as a company. I think as that product and business scales, it will be a really phenomenal customer for us in the future as well, also drive one of the pillars that Maria mentioned earlier, which is internet penetration in emerging markets also. Good. The final slide here on Spotify in Nigeria, just to explain the pain points we had. Acceptance rates were dropping rapidly in Nigeria last March for Spotify. Obviously, the impact for them were reduced sales in Nigeria and churning subscribers.
Causes for that, I think Moses and Jacobo touched on some of them earlier. Government restricted access to USD locally. As I think, as you guys know, they export oil in Nigeria. They import more or less everything else in the country. USD liquidity comes at a premium, and that resulted in a net acceptance rates of about 20% for Spotify or 20% for Spotify overnight, from 50% or 60% prior. We were able to turn on local processing for Spotify, both with Verve cards, but also with Naira locally, stopped the churn of those subscribers, increased the conversion to back up to over 60%.
From what we've seen from the team, and they've shared from their own data, we actually helped increase sales in that market for Spotify as a customer as well. Really, really happy to be able to do that. Jaco and I had a lived experience of this when we were in Lagos last September, where Uber's general manager thanked us for enabling this because he could finally pay for Spotify in Naira himself as well. You know, really rewarding for myself and for the team to see the labors of our work as well when we travel to the different countries that we operate in. Okay, guys, I think we've covered this a number of times, and I mentioned kind of the three Ps, which are the critical thing really for how we work.
It's the platform and reliability, and the fact we're able to do that at scale, you know, are people providing a true localization on the service and, you know, really being modest and humble when it comes to how we think about our product. I think that's really underpinned by the fact that, as I think Fedi mentioned earlier, or maybe Jaco, over 40% of the people in the company are software engineers. We're really able to deliver quickly for people on those type of solutions. Because of the nature of the kind of folks we have who are engineers, they think through things in a really systematic fashion, so we don't tend to run into some of the other challenges that the other payment companies had. As we continue.
scale the company into these different markets, for me, that moat just continues to build because it's really, really difficult to replicate these things, and really, really difficult to run a business like that truly locally. Okay, I've taken up far too much time. I think I'm going to hand over to Diego. Guys, thank you very much for your time. I'll be around all day and hopefully catch up with some of you in person.
Thanks, John, and hello, everyone. Very happy to have you here. Diego Cabrera Canay, CFO of dLocal. You have heard today from us how we created what this one, the dLocal model. You heard it from Seba, you heard it from Fede, and how that allow us to solve payments, complex payments in emerging markets from our merchants. You heard from John and Maria how that generate a lot of stickiness and engagement, and it allow us to grow with our merchants. Now we're going to see how that, together with our DNA and culture, generates a very powerful financial model. Our financial model has three pillars: growth, profitability, and cash flow generation. When we talk about growth, we focus on all the numbers, starting with TPV, but we particularly focus on gross profit dollars.
We have all our internal incentives aligned to maximize gross profit dollar growth. When we talk about growing gross profit, we talk about bringing new merchants on board, but particularly, as we saw today, growing with our merchants. That implies having basically zero churn, growing organically with them, and bring them to new countries, payment methods, and products. That resulted in the last two years to have an 83% CAGR on our gross profit growth. The second pillar is profitability. We have bootstrapped this company from the beginning, with a very lean culture. We are 700 people managing more than $10 billion in TPV, and we have a very cost-discipline approach. We fly coach, we don't have fancy dinners, particularly, we are negotiating every expense that we make as if it was our own.
We hire people and spend resources in emerging markets, finding the best talent, but at more convenient costs. That results in a total investing class profitability that we measure as adjusted EBITDA over gross profit of 76% in the last 2 years. The last pillar is a strong cash flow generation. We measure the cash flow generation by the conversion from net income to free cash flow, and that has been above 100% or above 100% in the last 2 years. How do we achieve that? Well, first, with having, as many other payment companies, negative working capital. That implies that the more we grow, the more cash we generate, but particularly, we don't have to spend our own money in growing. Second pillar to that is being laser-focused with capital expenditure.
Our capital expenditures are fully focused on software development, technology, and automation, and that basically represents 5% of our gross profit. Finally, we have a very tax efficient structure, which also allow us to have a strong cash flow generation. When you combine these metrics, particularly growth and profitability, you get to a Rule of 40, in our case. You know that a Rule of 40 of 40 is very good, 80 is great. In our case, it has been 159% in the last 2 years. Now let's dive a little bit more in each of these pillars. Growth, I think the slides speak for itself. TPV and revenue have basically doubled in the last 2 years, and gross profits have grew 83%. This is not by chance.
You heard from us today, we have grown our countries from 19 to 40. We have grown our premium methods from 300 to more than 800, and we have grown our merchant base from 190 to 650 in the last 2 years. The result of these are clearly here. When we talk about profitability, we look at adjusted EBITDA growth, which very in line with what we just saw, has grew 91% in the last 2 years, and particularly, adjusted EBITDA over gross profit. If you look at all the periods, you see that it has been on or above 70%, particularly the last 2 years, which is 76%. It's not because we haven't invested. We invest a lot.
You see, both in OpEx and in headcount, that we have significantly invested over the last 2 years, particularly focused in technology and sales and marketing, but also in G&A, as we became a public company and reinforced our processes and controls. We have a lot of operational leverage. What does that mean? Even though we invested a lot, gross profit grew even more. You can see that by the metrics on the top, when you do OpEx over gross profit, it was 44% 2 years ago. Now it's 33% of the gross profit. The same applies to headcount. If we do the gross profit over headcount, we were generating $184K 2 years ago, and now we are generating $278K in 2022.
The last pillar is cash flow generation. We measure this, as we mentioned, as free cash flow in absolute basis and also over net income. For this particular graph, we are considering the cash in escrow that you are aware that we put in 2022 as part of our free cash flow, because we consider that to be temporary. Actually, in Q1, you see that we already collected $14 million, and the rest is expected to be collected throughout this year. When you look at the CAGR of our free cash flow, has been 76% in the last two years, and particularly, we are close or on 100% of cash conversion.
With all these metrics that you just saw, it's not a surprise that we compare very well against our peers. Companies in general, that we admire and great companies. We look at the last two years of gross profit, the last two years of margins, as two years ago we did the IPO, so it's a good track from there to now. If you take net revenue, so what we call gross profit, we are clearly first and way above the average. If you consider EBITDA growth, we come in second after a peer that comes from a much lower EBITDA margin base. When you consider profitability measured by EBITDA or net revenue or gross profit, we also come in first.
Another way to see this is with a Rule of 40, again, that combines profitability, and growth. You see it here. I mean, these are all great companies. We stand out clearly first, in a 159 ratio for the last 2 years. With this, and considering the audience we have today, I would like to touch base on a couple of topics that come up very frequently in Q&As and in meetings with you guys. One is net take rates, and the other is capital allocation. When we talk about take rates, the first thing I'm to understand is that there are factors that we control, more or less, like pricing or to some extent, cost efficiencies, and some factors that we don't control and we don't solve for, which is basically mixes.
Mixes of product, mixes of services, mixes of countries, and mixes of merchants. When we talk about product mix, we talk about pay-ins and payouts. All things equals, payouts have a lower take rate. Why is that? They have a very short settlement period, and they are settled through bank transfers, which is a very efficient payment method. As you see, in the last year or so, the share of payout has increased, and that affected the take rate, net take rate down. The second mix is what we call service, local to local or cross-border. Again, all things the same, local to local have lower take rate than cross-border because it doesn't have the FX service implied in it.
As you see there, sequentially, in the past year or so, we have increased our local-to-local share to almost 50%, and that had an impact on take rate. The last one is country mix. We operate in 40 countries. All those countries are different. When the country is more complex and we have a more mature solution, we typically have higher take rates than in a country that is more less complex, and we are, or we are just starting. You have countries like Brazil or Chile, which are quite on average of our net take rate. You may have countries like Mexico, which are lower in take rate, it's a very efficient market, and you have countries like Argentina, Nigeria, which are above the average of take rate.
If you look at last year, you see that we sequentially increased our share, particularly in Mexico, which is a country with lower take rate. We increased our share in Argentina, and that basically resulted in a decrease in the net take rates. Another way to see this is with a bridge. If we do a bridge from 2021 to 2022, and then to Q1 2023, we basically see the impact of each of these effects. In last year, we have a higher share of payouts of 5 percentage points, a higher share of local to local of 10 percentage points, and an increase of share in Mexico, and a decrease in share in Argentina. Those three combined, resulting in that decrease in net take rate.
On the other hand, we have efficiencies in different markets that offset that by 0.1%. In the last quarter, we didn't have a change in net take rate, but when you look at each of the specific drivers, it was quite the opposite. We have more share of cross-border. We had a partial recovery of Argentina and growth in Nigeria, and that contributed to the higher take rate, and we had some temporary inefficiency that we expect to reverse going forward. If there are two takeaways to this, is first, the main driver of take rate increase or decrease is the mix: the mix of products, the mix of services, and the mix of countries. The other one is, for us, take rate is an output.
I'm sorry, it's not pricing pressure, it's mixes. The second and most important is this for us is an output. We will always try to maximize our gross profit dollars. If a merchant choose to work with us with payouts, with lower take rate and pay-ins, that is great. If they want to launch a country that has lower take rate than the average, it's great, as long as we will always try to maximize the gross profit dollars. With this, let's move to capital allocation, which is a topic that has recent more interest from you guys. When we talk about capital allocation, we have basically three strategies. The first one, and most important, is organic growth. That was, been the bread and butter for us since we started. As you know, we would start the company from the beginning.
We invest in technology, we invest in sales and marketing, we invest in expansion and customer acquisition. Even after we invest significantly on that, as you saw, we generate a lot of cash. That's why the other two strategies become more relevant. We see them as complementary, actually, they compete with each other. In terms of strategic decisions, we have two factors there. They need to be strategic, they need to bring commercial distribution or allow us to expand faster to Asia and Africa, and they have to be consistent with our culture, and they have to be opportunities. What do I mean by that? Obviously, in times where our share price is higher and multiples are higher, we have a better trading currency than when our share price is lower.
The opposite appears for buybacks. When we believe that our price is low, dLocal is the company we know the most, we compete against any other potential acquisition, that's the time when it makes sense for us to buy our own shares, to bring the most long-term value to our shareholders. That's what we did. We launched our first buyback program back late in December. It was a $100 million program. It's expected to finish in July. We will probably achieve the $100 million or very close to that.
If we show you the public information, which is what we show in the last issued financial statements, at that point in time, in mid-May, we had already bought $4.4 million in shares, $47 million at an average price of $5. That represents already 3.4% of our float. We did that while continuing to increase our cash flow. Even after buying that represented only 87% of our free cash flow of Q1. Again, we will continue to analyze these alternatives. We have a strong cash generation, we will evaluate whether to use our cash, particularly for M&As or for share buybacks, as the context tell us that will be the best value for our shareholders.
This slide just shows, you know, part of that analysis. It's just a comparison of price to earnings and net income growth, and you see how or why we believe it's a good moment for us, to buy our own shares. The last topic is something that you guys have been asked for, and it's showing you for the first time our medium-term objectives. Also an update on the guidance. The guidance we gave for the annual still remains the same. We have more thorough reviews every quarter, so once we publish our next quarterly financial statement, we have a more thorough review.
The guidance we gave, it was $620-$640 gross revenue dollars, and $200-$220 adjusted EBITDA dollars, is consistent with the current forecast. Medium-term. When we talk about medium-term, we think of 3-5 years, and we have objectives that we're sharing for you for each of the pillars of our business model. For growth, we expect to continue having basically zero churn. Whenever we measure churn every quarter, every year, it's always below 1%. Growing at this pace implies not losing a single merchant. We will continue to benefit from the organic growth from them, 15%-20%, we saw before with Maria in emerging markets. On top of that, we will continue to add countries, payment methods, and products.
We expect that to result in a gross profit CAGR for the medium term, from 25%-35%. Profitability. The ratio we use is adjusted EBITDA over gross profit. The same that we have done, we will continue to have a very disciplined cost culture, a very lean organization, and we continue to hire mainly and spend in emerging markets where costs are more convenient and there's a lot of talent. With that, we expect to have a gross profit, an EBITDA over gross profit, ratio of 75% or more in the medium term. Finally, cash flow generation. For cash flow generation, the metric we use is basically CapEx, which is one of the main drivers from EBITDA to cash flow. We continue to be laser focused.
Our cash, our CapEx will be software development, technology, automation. It has been consistently close to 5% of our gross profit, and we expect that metric to continue that way. We don't expect to spend more than 5% of our gross profit in CapEx. What is more interesting, again, when you combine the metrics, if you combine growth and profitability, that will bring us a Rule of 40 as a target for us of 100% or more. We like a lot that metric, because it gives us the flexibility to focus more on profitability or on growth, but at the end of the day, we will have to maximize the combination of both. With that, I will pass up the floor back to Seba and Sergio for the closing remarks. Thank you very much.
Okay.
Mic up again? Yes.
Eh?
I was checking if we were live again.
Can you hear me? Yes. Okay, thank you very much for bearing with us for this last few hours. As we said before, we were here in Nasdaq two years ago. Tomorrow, we'll be ringing the bell once again. We are extremely proud of what we have achieved over the last two years, and we are amazingly optimistic about the future that's coming up. As I like to say, we like to put our money where our mouth is. We announced yesterday that the shareholders bought $160 million worth of shares over the last few months.
That was $100 million that General Atlantic bought, and an additional almost $60 million that the shareholders, Andrés, I don't know where he is, Eduardo and myself, bought out of our own pocket. I think that shows the commitment that we have to the business. Again, we are very proud. There's a lot of work to be done. We are only scratching the surface. As I mentioned before, 40 billion people paid through us during the last month. Just three and a half million people were paid through us for the services that we provided. We expect both numbers to grow very significantly ahead. We are super proud of what we've done.
We are super proud of the team that we have. It's a diverse team. Initially, it was mostly Uruguay and then Latin America. More and more, we are hiring people in Africa, in Asia, and we are very proud of our Uruguayan origins. We are very proud of being Latin American, and most of all, we are very proud of bringing and showing the vibrancy and the potential of the emerging markets that are still underserved and that represent a major source of growth going ahead.
Thank you, Sergio. Just to complement on that, I hope you felt the passion that we have for this business. I feel it when I hear our team. This is the work of our lifetime. I wanna insist on this point: if you believe in emerging markets, and if you believe in global companies, there's no better way to index yourself to that growth. We could not be more bullish about our opportunities. I wanna thank you for the support, I wanna thank the team, obviously, for putting this together. It was a lot of work. Thanks for the support. Thanks for the questions. You make us better. This is an iterative process, and we are very open about the fact that we are learning. That's the thing I like the most about my job.
We need to keep learning. Keep challenging us. Merchants will keep challenging us, and we'll hope to continue to be able to deliver. We have a break now?
Ten-minute break.
10 minutes break.
We go.
We'll go to Q&A?
Yes.
Thank you, everyone.