How do LatAm customers fund an account in local currency?

Why does the deposit decide whether onboarding worked?

Because a signup is global and a deposit is domestic. A customer in São Paulo or Bogotá can complete a registration form built in any country, and then has to move money using the payment system they actually have access to. If your product cannot receive money that way, the account exists and stays empty. Registration counts a user; a funded balance counts a customer.

This is why the funding leg behaves like a distribution channel rather than an operational detail. It sets which customers can reach your product at all, in which market, and how long they wait before the balance is usable. Every decision underneath it, which method you accept, which entity receives the money, where the currency conversion happens, is made once and then shapes every deposit after it.

August 2026: a global brokerage made the deposit the announcement

On August 18, 2026, Interactive Brokers said eligible clients in Latin America could fund IBKR accounts directly from personal bank accounts in local currencies (Interactive Brokers, August 2026). The company framed it as removing friction rather than adding a feature. Its chief executive put it as plainly as it can be put: funding an account should be straightforward.

Read that as market evidence and not as a product comparison. A brokerage with access to more than 170 markets already had international wire transfers working. It went and built the local deposit anyway, which tells you what the local deposit was costing it. The interesting part is not that a local method got added. It is which side of the transaction the company decided it had to own.

What does funding in local currency actually require?

Three things, and they are separable. First, the payment method the customer already uses in that country. Second, an account in that country that can receive it. Third, a conversion, if the balance the customer ends up holding is in a different currency from the one they deposited.

The methods are specific to each market, and the real-time ones matter most because they set the waiting time:

• Brazil. Pix and Pix Automático for real-time transfers, with boleto (bank slip), TED (same-day bank wire) and credit and debit cards alongside them.
• Mexico. SPEI, the interbank electronic payment system operated by the central bank, defined in its own governing rule (Banco de México, Circular 14/2017), plus OXXO cash payments and cards.
• Colombia. PSE for online bank debits, plus bank transfer and cards.

On our Pay-In rails, Pix and SPEI settle in minutes and PSE settles the same day. Those are different planning assumptions. A product that promises the customer an immediately usable balance can hold that promise in two of those three markets and has to word it differently in the third.

Three decisions sit between the deposit screen and a usable balance

Each one is a choice somebody makes, and if you do not make it, your provider makes it for you.

Which entity receives the money. A local transfer has to land in an account inside that country, with a locally valid identifier: branch and account number in Brazil, a CLABE in Mexico, RUT and account in Colombia. Whether that account is in your name or in somebody else's is the whole question, and we wrote it up separately in local accounts without a local entity.

Where the conversion happens. If the customer deposits in reais (BRL) and holds a dollar balance, a currency conversion occurred somewhere between those two facts. It has a rate, a moment and a legal instrument behind it. In Brazil that instrument is the exchange contract, and it is what an auditor asks for later, which is the subject of the exchange contract as an audit trail.

What your product learns, and when. A deposit your system finds out about by polling a report is a different product from a deposit that tells your system it happened. Our transaction management layer fires a webhook when the money settles, so the balance and the customer-facing status move at the same time. The gap between money arriving and your interface knowing it arrived is where support tickets live.

Who holds the money between the deposit and the position?

Somebody does, for some period, under some license. That is the counterparty question, and it is worth asking before the commercial conversation rather than after the incident. If the answer involves an intermediary holding customer funds on the way through, the customer carries that intermediary's credit risk for as long as the money sits there, whether or not anyone described it that way.

The general version of this diligence, and the six other questions that go with it, is in seven questions before choosing cross-border infrastructure. For a funding flow specifically, the short form is: name the entity, name the account, name the license, and ask how many of each there are between your customer and their balance. Fewer hops is not a slogan. Each hop is a party that has to be solvent, reconciled and reachable.

One regulated FX route, three local methods

ATTRUS runs licensed local entities and direct clearing connectivity where regulators allow, rather than aggregating third-party processors. For platforms onboarding investors in the region, that means the local deposit and the currency conversion happen inside one regulated route: onboard Latin American investors, and settle dollar positions through a regulated FX route, converting reais (BRL) to dollars inside an exchange-contract framework rather than through informal ones.

This shows up earliest in investment platforms, where the product only starts when the money is in. An investor who cannot deposit in the currency they hold does not become a customer, however good the onboarding flow was.

The same structure sits under embedded finance more broadly, where the interface belongs to one company and the regulated activity belongs to another. Funding is usually the first place a customer notices that division, since the deposit is the moment they have to trust a name they may not recognize.

Four questions to settle before the next market

• Which method do your customers in that country already use? Not the one that is technically available. The one they use to pay for things now.
• In whose name is the receiving account? And what identifier does the customer type in.
• When does the conversion happen, and at which rate? If the answer is a daily average applied afterwards, your customer's balance and your customer's expectation were set by different numbers.
• How does your product learn the money landed? If the answer is a report, the customer will know before you do.

None of these need the next market to be chosen first. They are the same four questions in every country, and the answers are what make the fifth market faster to open than the second one was.