A conversation with Spreedly
In this episode of Payments Dialog, I sat down with Spreedly’s founder and CTO Nathaniel Talbott to discuss the unique challenges of building and scaling payment systems across Latin America while at PedidosYa.
Topics We Explored
Latin American Payment Culture - Why consumer distrust of digital payments remains high, with only 25-30% online payment adoption in markets like Uruguay. The cultural and historical factors that drive preference for cash transactions.
Multi-Country Operations - How PedidosYa expanded across nine countries, evolving from food delivery to broader goods delivery including groceries, pharmacy, and alcohol—each with different payment preferences.
Payment Infrastructure Complexity - Why we needed 10-11 different payment providers to serve different countries and card types. The challenge of integrating with varying authorization, capture, and refund protocols across the region.
Fraud Prevention at Scale - The reality of fraud targeting through small-value test transactions, and why online fraud became more prevalent than cash-on-delivery fraud as we scaled.
Market Innovation - How cloud kitchens and logistics optimization changed delivery times, and Uber’s unexpected role in normalizing online payments among Latin American consumers.