Payments don’t fail as an abstract metric. They fail for a freelancer waiting to get paid, a small business trying to accept the locally normal method, or a customer who gets told “we don’t support how you pay.” That’s why our conversation with Clarice Lehman, Alternative Payments Operations Lead at DLocal, keeps landing on one theme: the future of payments has to stay human, even as the industry gets more automated, embedded, and AI-driven.

We start with Clarice’s journey from Uruguay to fintech, including a pivotal dinner-party moment that redirected her MBA path to MIT, followed by consulting at BCG, and a return to DLocal to lead strategy and operations across alternative payment methods. We unpack what “APMs” really include (instant payments, wallets, cash-based options, BNPL operations, card-present initiatives, and crypto operations) and why delivering a consistent cross-border payments experience is hard when every market’s infrastructure looks different underneath.

Then we get practical about leadership and trust: why smarter systems can’t mean more exclusion, what transparency should look like when AI makes decisions, and why reliability and accountability are non-negotiable when downtime or a wrong decline hits. Clarice also shares the trend she’s most excited about: AI-driven credit and underwriting using alternative data, and how that can expand access to capital for consumers and SMBs that traditional credit bureaus overlook.

If you care about emerging markets, payments strategy, fintech leadership, and building products that actually include people, this one is for you.