Brazilian payments unicorn Ebanx focuses on Asia-Pacific with upcoming Singapore headquarters

[SINGAPORE] Brazil-founded payments company Ebanx is shifting gears and focusing its efforts in the Asia-Pacific, said its chief product officer Eduardo de Abreu.

Founded in 2012, Ebanx first expanded to other markets in Latin America in 2015, and then headed to Africa with operations in South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria, among others.

The company entered Asia in 2023. It received its major payment institution licence from the Monetary Authority of Singapore in 2025, having applied in 2020.

“Our history in Singapore actually goes way back to 2015, when we decided to make Singapore our global financial hub,” de Abreu, who is also CEO of Ebanx Singapore, told The Business Times.

“All the payments we process globally go through Singapore,” he added.

In 2025, 36 per cent of Ebanx’s total payment volume (TPV) was processed for the Asia-Pacific, with customers including AliExpress, Weverse and Canva. The company expects TPV growth of 30 per cent in the region this year.

Ebanx will open its Asia-Pacific headquarters in Singapore with a team of 26 in the country.

The move is in part to serve its current Singapore merchant customer base better, and to grow it.

Opening an office in the Republic will help Ebanx with merchants’ region-specific needs, and help it get closer to customers as the region’s payment needs get more sophisticated and mature.

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The Asia-Pacific, said de Abreu, holds many opportunities that can be harnessed by having a physical presence here. “To build that from Asia, it will be better, because we can better understand the consumer base, the regulations and everything else.”

He added that the timing is right for Ebanx to make this incremental investment, which would enable the company to seize opportunities from new discussions around payments in the market.

Across borders and systems

In establishing its headquarters here, Ebanx is entering a saturated payments market, where multiple players operate throughout the payments chain.

But the way de Abreu sees it, players here are specialised in specific markets, and few are global like Ebanx.

This means that customers can expect the same level of service and performance from Brazil to the Philippines. While the Asia-Pacific is a competitive market, Ebanx believes that there is room for a player like it.

“What merchants appreciate from us is the ability to replicate models they have in other countries with minimal operational burden on their end,” said de Abreu.

For instance, customers can pay with one payment method in Colombia and another in the Philippines. This enables merchants to work on their core business, rather than worry about payment compliance across markets and regions.

With its new physical office in the region, Ebanx will focus on growing its payments footprint in the Asia-Pacific. This means adding new payment methods as they pop up.

“So when there’s a new payment method, you won’t know for certain if it’s going to pick up traction or not, but we need to take the first step,” said de Abreu.

Ebanx took that leap with Brazil’s Pix – similar to PayNow in Singapore – becoming the first payment service provider offering the payment system. The company has also pioneered several payment methods in its markets, as customers expect it to keep investing and improving its payment network.

In South-east Asia, Ebanx has added QR PH, a QR-code-based system that is the fastest-growing payment method in the Philippines.

Besides growing Ebanx’s payments footprint here, de Abreu is also focused on improving payments performance – the ability to approve more transactions and ensure they go smoothly – in the region.

There will be more investment in this segment of the business in the next two years, with these two areas taking up about 80 per cent of de Abreu’s energy and focus.

“This requires a lot of technology on how we do our routing, fraud prevention set-up and the number of payment rails we have to connect, (and) the number of partners and the quality of these connections,” he added.