The corporate card barely changed in fifty years. The way we pay for travel should have.
Latin America has the lowest corporate card adoption in the world. I do not think that is the problem people assume it is.
There is a number in this year’s GBTA data that everyone reads as a gap to be closed, and I read as a question worth asking.
More than a quarter of companies in Latin America have no corporate card program at all, the highest proportion of any region in the world. The standard interpretation is immediate: the region is behind, and catching up means handing out more cards. I want to offer a less obvious reading, from someone who has spent a career in this industry and has never loved the instrument everyone assumes we are missing.
Because here is the uncomfortable question underneath that statistic. What if part of the reason the corporate card never fully took hold here is that the corporate card, as a piece of technology, barely deserves to be called one?
The instrument that time forgot
Think about how much the tools around you have changed in fifty years, and then think about the credit card.
The plastic rectangle in a corporate wallet today is, in almost every meaningful respect, the same object my grandparents were issued decades ago. A number, an expiry date, a name embossed on the front. It got a chip. It got contactless. But the fundamental design, a physical token carrying a static number that anyone who copies it can use, is essentially unchanged since the era of carbon-paper imprints.
Everything else in corporate finance has been rebuilt. The card mostly got a new logo.
And the physical corporate card carries real costs that we have simply learned to accept. It is hard to trace at the moment of spend, which means governance happens later, in reconciliation, when the money is already gone. It is easy to misuse and slow to control, because changing a limit or shutting one down is rarely instant. It generates a receipt-chasing ritual at the end of every month that consumes enormous amounts of finance-team time. And, in a detail that bothers me more every year, it is still a piece of plastic, manufactured and shipped and thrown away by the millions, for an instrument whose entire function could live on a phone.
I am not going to pretend the corporate card has no place. Plenty of excellent companies, including many I admire and work alongside, build serious products around it. But I think treating its low adoption in Latin America purely as a deficiency misses something. Sometimes a market does not adopt a technology quickly because the market is behind. Sometimes it is because the technology was never good enough to be worth the trouble, and the region simply never built the habit.
What the region did adopt
Because here is what Latin America, and Brazil especially, did adopt, fast and almost universally.
Instant payment. In Brazil, Pix went from launch to near-ubiquity in a handful of years, faster than almost any payment technology anywhere in the world has ever scaled. A country supposedly behind on corporate cards turned out to be years ahead of most of the developed world on real-time, account-to-account payment, because that technology was genuinely better and solved a real problem people could feel.
That is the detail that reframes the whole statistic. This is not a region that resists new payment technology. It is a region that skipped an old one and leapt to a better one, in exactly the pattern that emerging markets so often follow, going straight to mobile without ever fully wiring the landline.
So when the GBTA data shows low corporate card penetration next to some of the highest mobile and app-based behavior in the world, I do not see a contradiction. I see a region that was quietly waiting for corporate payment to catch up to the rest of its financial life.
What corporate payment should actually do
If we were designing the way a company pays for travel and expenses today, from scratch, knowing everything we now know, it would look nothing like a plastic card and a monthly reconciliation.
It would be virtual by default, so a payment method could be created in seconds, assigned to a person or a trip or a single purchase, and switched off the moment it was no longer needed. It would carry the policy inside itself, so the rules lived at the moment of spend rather than in an audit weeks later. It would reconcile in real time, so finance never again spent the last three days of the month chasing paper. It would include the instant-payment rails people already use in their daily lives, so the corporate experience finally matched the personal one. And it would be traceable end to end, because every transaction would be data from the instant it happened, not a line to be decoded later from a statement.
This is the thinking behind what we built at VOLL as the VOLL Wallet, and I mention it not to sell it but because it is the clearest example I know of the argument I am making. Unlimited virtual cards created on demand. Pix corporativo with full governance and real-time reconciliation. Policy embedded so that a purchase is checked against the rules as it happens. And artificial intelligence reading every receipt and every transaction as it lands, auditing in real time, surfacing the anomaly that a human reviewer skimming a monthly report would never catch.
That last part matters more than it sounds. The value of AI in corporate payments is not a smarter card. It is that the audit stops being a monthly ritual and becomes a continuous, silent background process, checking every real against policy the instant it moves, and asking a human to look only at the handful of things that genuinely need a human.
The governance point, said plainly
I care about this for a reason that goes beyond convenience, and it is the reason the plastic card has always bothered me.
A physical card is, at its core, a governance compromise. You hand an employee a token, you trust them to spend within the rules, and you find out weeks later whether they did. Every control is retrospective. Every correction happens after the money is gone.
A payment model built as software inverts that. The control moves to the moment of the decision, not the month of the reconciliation. The rules are checked as the money moves. The trace exists from the first second. Nothing has to be chased, because nothing was ever lost. That is not a nicer version of the card. It is a different philosophy of control, one where governance is designed in from the start rather than reconstructed afterward from receipts.
Not behind, ahead of the question
So I would retire the reading that says Latin America is behind on corporate payment.
The region under-adopted a fifty-year-old instrument that never fully earned its place, and over-adopted the instant, digital, real-time payment that the rest of the world is only now reaching for. On the technology that actually matters for the future of corporate spend, this region is not lagging. It is, if anything, standing exactly where the rest of the market is heading.
The corporate card barely changed in fifty years. The way a company pays for travel finally is changing, and it is worth noticing that some of the clearest signals of what comes next are coming from the region everyone assumed was behind.
About me
I am an entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience at the intersection of tourism and technology. I am co-founder and Chief Business Officer of VOLL, the largest mobile-first corporate travel and expense management platform in Latin America, and a recognized reference in the development of the corporate travel industry.
A Marketing specialist from Fundação Dom Cabral, I serve on the Tourism Council of FecomércioSP and on the Executive Council of the Latin American Association of Corporate Events and Travel Management (Alagev). A frequent traveler and close observer of human behavior in motion, I write and speak about innovation, digital transformation, entrepreneurial leadership, and the future of corporate travel.