How payments go from Person to Business (P2P to P2B), with insights from EBANX

The emerging market payment trend that's reshaping how businesses get paid

Jun 26, 2025

Disclaimer: Views expressed here are my own and do not represent any other organisation.

The original modern payment card was Diners Club, which allowed those dining at a select group of New York restaurants to build up a balance and pay it off centrally at the end of each month.

In 1958, Bank of America launched BankAmericard by sending thousands of cards to consumers in Fresno, California. A selection of local merchants, including grocery stores, restaurants, pharmacies, and dry cleaners, had been manually enrolled to accept the card.

In the early days, there were issues with fraud and missed payments, but this was the first general-purpose card. Eventually, BankAmericard evolved into what we know today as Visa. In 1966, Mastercard was created as a competitor to Visa by banks excluded from Visa’s network.

Over the following decades, payment cards became ubiquitous as both card supply and merchant acceptance increased. Not offering card payments could mean losing sales. But a big change was on its way. The rise of the internet would soon require new business models.

With the emergence of platforms like eBay in the dot.com boom of the late 1990s, customers found that card infrastructure wasn’t up to scratch. A new system was needed. Visa and Mastercard were only set up for consumers to pay businesses, but not for person-to-person payments. PayPal allowed users to securely pay each other directly and soon became the payment method of choice on eBay. Eventually, PayPal developed as an online checkout solution and is still among the most popular e-commerce payment options in many countries.

New payment methods in emerging markets are speed-running a process which took PayPal many years. Going from person-to-person use cases to person-to-business use cases in a short time frame is now standard. What can we learn from this process, and why does it matter?

Understanding the shift

To understand how this acceleration is happening and shaping global payments, I spoke with Daniel Kornitzer, Global Head of Partnerships at EBANX, at Money20/20 in Amsterdam.

EBANX started in Curitiba, Brazil, in 2012. The mission was to connect consumers in Brazil to global brands wanting to enter the Brazilian market. At that time, Brazil was a market with low card usage, especially among middle and lower income users. Back then the main local payment method was Boleto Bancário (Boleto), a voucher-based system which bridged e-commerce and cash.

EBANX helped international companies integrate and accept payments in Boleto. Which was no mean feat. The way Boleto operated was, looking back, and from my Western lens, somewhat absurd, generating a voucher online, printing it out, then queuing to pay in cash at a store or bank. International companies needed a hand, not just in terms of technical integration but in understanding how this wildly-different-to-cards payment mechanism functioned in the real world.

Aerial view of Curitiba, Brazil (the home of EBANX) - source

Today EBANX operates in 29 countries and supports more than 200 payment methods. Clients include global brands such as Canva, Ubisoft, Uber, Shein, Shopee, TikTok and Coinbase. Daniel explained that:

EBANX helps global companies reach consumers in emerging markets by connecting to the payment methods people actually use.

This is key because international companies can’t assume that everyone uses cards like in the US or Europe. He emphasised that:

By working with local payment preferences, we can expand market access while supporting financial inclusion.

Why P2P Becomes P2B

There’s a pattern of person-to-person (P2P) payment methods evolving into person-to-business (P2B) solutions. This transformation is driven by key factors affecting both users and merchants.

For users, these payment methods become trusted through daily P2P transactions. Take Pix in Brazil, where people grew comfortable using it for transfers to friends and family, or sending money between accounts. Merchants benefit from this user familiarity, plus several key advantages:

Instant payments - funds are usually sent and received instantly
Lower cost than card payments - in some cases there’s more than a 50% difference
Lower fraud - user authentication, in some cases via biometrics for more security

This is not to say that there is no fraud at all. There can still be scams. Fake QR codes and social engineering have been seen on plentiful occasions. Consumer protections are still evolving. But overall, the level of fraud is much less than that of card payments.

In Western economies, non-card payment methods have often been referred to as Alternative Payment Methods (APMs), a term that indicates that these payment types are secondary to cards. But as the chart above shows, in Latin America, Africa, and India, APMs are now the norm and the primary payment method used in terms of transaction value. The source of this information is EBANX’s Beyond Borders 2025 report.

In every case where a payment method has gone from P2P to P2B in a short time period, it’s been because the market is mobile-first. According to World Bank data, 83% of people in developing countries have a mobile phone, a much higher penetration than bank accounts (71%) or cards (46%). Mobile penetration allows economies to leap straight from predominantly cash usage to mobile-based payment methods, with many users bypassing card payments entirely.

Markets leading the way

Brazil’s Pix has become one of the best-known non-card payment methods in the world. Its success has been both its speed of growth and the extent to which it’s completely saturated the market. Purely in terms of scale and reach, it’s the best example of moving from P2P to P2B.

Pix started very much as a P2P payment method, but Q1 2025 data shows that 41% of Pix transactions are now P2B. At the same time, in Q1 2025, Pix’s total volume was more than double that of card payments, with approximately 18.6 billion Pix transactions compared to 9 billion card transactions (credit and debit combined). Pix launched on November 16th, 2020, so astonishingly, this transformation happened in just over four and a half years.

The transformation seen above is dramatic. Q1 2021 was the first full quarter after the launch of Pix, and we can see that P2P transactions dominated at 79%, with P2B representing just 10% of transaction volume. By Q1 2025, this had drastically changed, demonstrating how rapidly payment methods can evolve from personal payments to essential business infrastructure. Source - PCMI

One of the lesser known examples of a move from P2P to P2B, at least outside of Latin America, is Colombia’s Nequi.

What began as a mobile wallet for peer-to-peer transactions, Nequi evolved into the leading payment method for online purchases.
As of early 2025, Nequi serves 21 million users, around 50% of Colombia's adult population. Users can make online and offline purchases via QR codes, while the Visa-branded Nequi card extends acceptance to anywhere Visa is accepted.
EBANX reports that global merchants offering Nequi as a payment option have seen 33% monthly growth in transaction volume since September 2024.
Nequi is expanding its use cases, including into bill payments and in-person purchases at retail stores. This signals a decisive shift into P2B usability.

Nequi started as a subsidiary of Bancolombia, one of Colombia’s biggest banks. It has since been spun out as its own company. Nequi has a distinctive visual style that is quite different from most banks. Here’s the image source.

Another example of a mobile-first payment option growing from P2P into P2B is mobile money in Kenya:

While still nascent in e-commerce compared to its widespread P2P usage, mobile money (especially M-Pesa) is beginning to see measurable growth in P2B transactions.
The latest available data (2023) shows the average value of online merchant payments via mobile money increased by nearly one-third compared to prior year, and the number of active merchants rose by 20%.
EBANX notes that mobile money represents 48% of all online transactions in Kenya, though most are paid upon delivery, not at checkout. This signals a potential tipping point. Once infrastructure improves, mobile money could dominate the P2B space.

According to EBANX’s Beyond Borders 2025, such innovation isn’t about technological change for its own sake, it's about expanding financial inclusion.

Merchants adapt to meet consumer demand. As Daniel Kornitzer explained:

When payment methods evolve from being used primarily for person-to-person transfers to enabling payments to businesses, it signals a convergence of consumer demand and merchant acceptance.

As per Pix and other examples, systems which begin as tools for informal person-to-person exchanges mature into foundational infrastructure. These foundations allow for business payments, subscriptions, and wider commerce including B2B transactions to flourish once acceptance is widespread.

What can we learn from this shift?

With cards entrenched in the US, and UK, it would be easy to view this evolution from P2P to P2B as an emerging markets phenomenon.

But this is wrong.

Block’s Square platform will allow all merchants to accept Bitcoin by 2026. Thirty million Bitcoin wallets hold more than $100, while Square serves over 4 million merchants globally. This convergence could be valuable for expanding Bitcoin as a payment option. However, given its rising price, the question remains whether users will actually want to spend their Bitcoin.

But the most telling example is Wero.

In simple terms, Wero is a digital wallet that has been adopted by many banks, including a majority of the largest banks in Germany, France, and Belgium, with the Netherlands and Luxembourg to follow. Wero is replacing many existing, and some very successful, payment schemes/wallets across these countries, including Giropay, iDEAL, Payconiq, and Paylib.

Wero has explicitly set out a road map to go from P2P to P2B and then further to other use cases:

P2P (live from launch in July 2024).
P2B (live from late 2025)
Subscriptions (during 2026)
Cross-border (post 2026)

What’s fascinating is that Wero is running the same playbook as Pix, Nequi, and other payment types from emerging markets. Wero’s path highlights that this progression is universal rather than rooted in specific geographies. Wero sees starting with P2P as a great way to build user familiarity. Adding P2B at a later stage, once there’s a mass of users in place, will help businesses adopt the solution.

Just like Pix, WERO is starting with P2P payments

Incidentally, having implemented P2P and P2B, Pix is now implementing subscription payments. Pix Automático, as the subscription solution is known, went live on June 16th, just ten days ago. This opens up recurring service payments to the roughly 60 million Brazilians without credit card access.

An additional, much anticipated product will follow in September this year. Pix Parcelado will allow users to pay in instalments, a solution that has long been popular for card transactions in Brazil. While some banks are already offering a similar product, Pix Parcelado will see Brazil’s central bank, Banco Central do Brasil, standardise and simplify the implementation at a national level.

EBANX will be on hand to help their clients understand and make the most of these enhancements to Pix. As a company that originated in Brazil but now operates across tens of countries, Daniel told me:

One of the keys to our success is having deep local knowledge, and feet on the ground in all markets so we can truly understand the needs of consumers

EBANX has helped its clients implement a wide array of payment methods, and the shift we’ve seen from Brazil to Colombia to Kenya, is now taking place in Western economies too. Next time you see a P2P app, don’t write it off, it could be dominating the economy within a few years whatever market you’re in.

What P2P payment methods are you watching in your market? Share your thoughts.