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Welcome to Xchange by Money20/20 Middle East – where money meets ideas 

Bold thought

If your checkout needs explaining, it’s already lost the sale.

Snapshot

There’s a shift happening in Middle East commerce – and it’s not about which new payment method is trending. It’s about recognition.

Across the region, shoppers increasingly arrive at checkout with a mental picture of how payment should work. And that picture is very specific. It’s the wallet they use every day; the domestic scheme they trust; the flow they recognise from other apps. When that picture matches reality, conversion feels effortless. But when it doesn’t, the friction could kill the sale. 

Wallets, A2A, and local payment schemes have become normal. In several MENA markets, digital payments already carry the emotional weight that cards once did: speed, familiarity, and trust. Cards are still around, of course – but they’re no longer the default mental model for how online payment works. 

So the localisation challenge now is to align with what feels most obvious to the customer. 

Voices

Carlos Menéndez (Chief Operating Officer at dLocal):

“When you let consumers pay with the methods they already trust, whether that’s a domestic scheme at the heart of a government’s digital agenda or a super-app wallet on their phone, you remove friction at the checkout and dramatically improve conversion.

“For businesses, that localisation is not cosmetic; it’s directly linked to performance. dLocal's integration of local rails lifts approval rates, reduces drop‑off from declined cards, and unlocks new customer segments that would otherwise be invisible to global brands. 

“In MENA, the companies that succeed are the ones that treat payments as a strategic growth lever, meeting customers on their own rails so they can pay locally and scale globally.”

What to watch and do

• Watch: The next phase of competition will focus on ordering, prominence, and flow – which payment option appears first, and which reduces steps (instead of adding them).
• Watch: Checkout becomes a brand moment as online and remote payments continue to outpace physical channels across MENA.
• Do: Audit your checkout like a local customer would: can a first-time user complete payment without instructions, and are local methods visually and structurally equal to cards – or buried?

Further reading…

• The State of Digital Commerce in MENA – Checkout.com, 2025
• Global Payments Report – Worldpay, 2025
• Middle East & North Africa Digital Payments Market – Mordor Intelligence, 2025

Share your perspective 

Across the Money20/20 Middle East community, operators are comparing notes on what actually converts, market by market. 

Open this newsletter on LinkedIn and tell us: what’s the one payment assumption your organisation had to unlearn in MENA? See you in the comments section. We’ll feature the sharpest insights in a future edition of Xchange by Money20/20 Middle East.

Catch you next week,

The Money20/20 Middle East Team