DEUNA, a payment orchestration platform that started in Latin America, expanded its partnership with PayPal on August 21, 2026. Merchants that use DEUNA can now reach PayPal’s full product lineup through a single integration, in every market where DEUNA operates. The Paypers reported the deal. Three products are covered:
- PayPal wallet: 439 million active accounts in about 200 markets, according to PayPal.
- Venmo: more than 90 million active users, mostly in the US.
- PayPal Pay Later: $40 billion in payment volume in 2025, with a 96% repeat-use rate worldwide.
A Latin American partnership goes global
The two companies first worked together in Latin America before widening the scope. Jose Torres, DEUNA’s chief strategy officer, described the deal as a way for enterprises to access PayPal’s capabilities through a single integration. Juan Bordes, PayPal’s vice president and general manager for Latin America, said it would help merchants expand into new markets and add payment features without adding integration complexity. DEUNA’s listed customers include global retail and restaurant brands.
Checkout friction is the business case
The partners pitch the deal as a fix for friction at checkout. By the figures they cite, one online shopper in five abandons a purchase because the checkout is too long or complicated, and poor checkout design costs US and EU e-commerce about $260 billion in lost revenue a year. The logic is simple. The more separate integrations a merchant has to build, the longer it takes to add a payment method its customers expect, and the more conversion suffers.
What an orchestration layer does, and what it does not replace
A payment orchestrator sits between a merchant and the payment methods it wants to offer. Without one, every wallet, every installment product, and every acquirer needs its own technical integration, its own contract, and its own maintenance. The orchestrator pools that work. The merchant integrates a single API, and the platform maintains the connectors, updates, and routing. DEUNA says on its website that it connects to more than 400 payment providers, fraud tools, and local payment methods.
An orchestrator does not replace the acquirer that processes card transactions over the Visa and Mastercard networks, or the contract between the merchant and each payment method provider. It centralizes the technical integration, the routing logic, and the reporting. The savings show up in time to go live and in maintenance costs more than in per-transaction fees.
| Product | Use | Claimed scale |
|---|---|---|
| PayPal wallet | Online checkout with stored credentials | 439 million active accounts, about 200 markets |
| Venmo | Peer-to-peer payments and merchant checkout | More than 90 million active users |
| PayPal Pay Later | Splitting a purchase into installments | $40B in volume in 2025 |
Payment brands increasingly sell through intermediaries
Payment methods are increasingly distributed through intermediary layers. For PayPal, sitting in an orchestrator’s catalog means appearing by default among the options a merchant can switch on without an IT project. The approach extends a trend seen among large providers since the start of the year: rather than signing merchants one by one, they aim to be available wherever merchants have already plugged in their checkout.
For merchants, the tradeoff is dependency. A single integration lowers the cost of entry and speeds up the addition of payment methods. In exchange, it adds another layer to the value chain, with its own pricing, its own lead times, and its own point of failure. The calculation is the same as for multi-acquirer routing: flexibility gained against control given up.