OKTO PAYMENTS Names Marcos Techera as Managing Director to Lead Latin American Expansion

OKTO PAYMENTS has appointed Marcos Techera as Managing Director for Latin America, a move designed to scale its regional commercial operations. For fintech professionals, this signals a shift from infrastructure building to aggressive market capture in high-volume sectors like iGaming and the creator economy, leveraging Techera’s deep experience in cross-border routing and emerging market scaling.

What was announced

Marcos Techera joins OKTO PAYMENTS to lead the group’s operations and commercial growth across Latin America, overseeing local leadership teams in Brazil, South LatAm, and Northern Latin America. Techera brings over 15 years of executive experience in fintech and global payment infrastructure, having previously served as Global CEO at OneKey Payments and Chief Operating Officer at Directa24 / AstroPay. A Computer Systems Engineer by training, Techera is tasked with optimizing OKTO’s existing infrastructure, which includes local payment rails, domestic and cross-border settlement, and treasury management.

The appointment comes as OKTO PAYMENTS reports an annual run rate exceeding €17 billion. The company currently provides the underlying payment infrastructure for more than 40 international and local merchants. Its regional footprint focuses on complex, high-volume eCommerce verticals including iGaming and sports betting, FX and trading, digital content, and the creator economy. By integrating instant pay-ins and payouts on domestic rails with liquidity management into a single layer, the firm aims to improve approval rates and reduce the cost to serve for merchants operating in these demanding sectors. Techera’s focus will be on taking the company's infrastructure and capabilities further, translating them into commercial performance for merchants while expanding the company's presence across the broader Latin American market.

"OKTO has done the hard part. Local licenses, local rails, local banking relationships in each market, that takes years, and there is no shortcut. What it creates is the ability to compete on things that are difficult to copy, approval rates, cost to serve, settlement speed, control over the money. It also takes people who know these markets from the inside, and OKTO has built that talented team market by market alongside the infrastructure. My focus is to build on both and turn them into measurable commercial performance for our merchant partners."

Marcos Techera, Managing Director, LATAM at OKTO PAYMENTS.

The companies involved

OKTO PAYMENTS is a next-generation payment service provider that specializes in high-volume, complex eCommerce sectors. The company has established a significant footprint in Latin America by building its own local infrastructure from the ground up, rather than relying solely on third-party aggregators. This includes securing local licenses and establishing direct banking relationships in multiple jurisdictions across the region. The firm is led by Founder & CEO Filippos Antonopoulos and CMO Diana Theodoridi.

OKTO has positioned itself as a specialist for industries that require sophisticated treasury and liquidity management alongside standard payment processing. By maintaining control over the entire payment stack—from routing optimization to domestic settlement—the company competes with established regional players and global PSPs by offering deeper technical integration in markets where local nuances often dictate transaction success. Its focus on sectors like iGaming and the creator economy reflects a strategy of targeting verticals where regulatory compliance and high-speed payouts are critical to merchant retention. The company's infrastructure handles the complexities of both domestic and cross-border transactions within a single operational layer.

What FF News has reported before

FF News has previously tracked OKTO PAYMENTS’ expansion of its technical capabilities in the Latin American region. Earlier this month, the company announced a significant move to improve its footprint in the Andean market. In the report OKTO PAYMENTS Directly Integrates With Yape to Boost Merchant Conversion in Peru, the company detailed its direct integration with the popular Peruvian mobile wallet. This integration was designed to provide merchants with access to a massive local user base, further demonstrating OKTO's strategy of building direct connections to local payment methods to drive higher conversion rates for international merchants.

What this means

The appointment of a former CEO to a regional MD role highlights the intensifying battle for Latin American market share among specialized payment service providers. As the region’s digital economy matures, the "easy" phase of simple payment aggregation is ending. The industry is moving toward a model where technical depth—specifically in treasury management and cross-border settlement—is the primary differentiator. OKTO’s focus on high-volume, high-complexity sectors puts pressure on generalist providers who may lack the localized licenses or the specialized routing logic required to maintain high approval rates. The challenge for the sector now lies in balancing this technical complexity with the speed of delivery that merchants in the creator and gaming economies demand.