From OneKey Payments to OKTO – Marcos Techera Takes Charge of LATAM as Managing Director
OKTO PAYMENTS has appointed Marcos Techera as Managing Director LATAM, tasking him with leading the group’s operations and commercial growth across Latin America. The move places a payments engineer and operator at the head of a business that already runs the payment rails behind 40 or more merchants in the region, and it signals where the provider expects its next phase of growth to come from.
Why OKTO’s Latin America Payments Business Matters Now
The appointment lands at a point where OKTO PAYMENTS has already done the slow, expensive groundwork in Latin America. Announced from São Paulo on 22 September 2026, the company describes years spent building local payment rails, compliance and regulatory expertise in each market, treasury and liquidity management, and both domestic and cross-border settlement. Techera’s remit is to take that infrastructure further and turn it into commercial performance for merchants while expanding across the region. He will work closely with OKTO’s local leadership in Brazil, South LatAm and Northern Latin America.
What the Techera Appointment Actually Involves for OKTO PAYMENTS
Techera brings more than 15 years of executive leadership in fintech, global payment infrastructure and cross-border solutions for high-volume ecosystems. He joins from OneKey Payments, where he was Global CEO, and previously served as Chief Operating Officer at Directa24 / AstroPay, driving operational scaling and market expansion across the region. A Computer Systems Engineer by training, he pairs technical depth in payments and routing optimisation with a record of scaling payment networks in emerging markets. The combination is the point of the hire. In Latin America, whether a transaction succeeds depends as much on how it is routed and settled locally as on the strength of the merchant relationship, a distinction that is easy to miss in a pitch and decisive in production.
What This Signals for iGaming Operators in Latin America
For iGaming and betting operators, the relevant detail is what OKTO’s built infrastructure translates into on the ground. OKTO runs the payment layer behind 40 or more leading international and local merchants across Latin America, at an annual run rate of over 17 billion euros, combining instant pay-ins and payouts on domestic rails with treasury, liquidity management and settlement in a single layer. The regional business spans iGaming and betting, FX and trading, digital content and the creator economy, and other high-volume eCommerce verticals. Techera framed the value in his own terms:
“OKTO has done the hard part. Local licences, 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,” said Marcos Techera, Managing Director LATAM at OKTO PAYMENTS.
Founder and CEO Filippos Antonopoulos positioned the hire around that same dual competence.
“Marcos has run payments in this region from both sides: the engineering of how money actually moves, and the commercial reality of what merchants need from a provider. Few people in this market understand both halves so deeply. We have spent years building local infrastructure across Latin America and with Marcos now on board, we will build on that foundation and turn it into an even greater value for the merchants who run on us,” said Filippos Antonopoulos, Founder & CEO of OKTO PAYMENTS.
The Limit on What a Single Appointment Tells the Betting Market
An appointment is an intent, not an outcome. The release sets out capability and ambition, but the metrics that would prove them, approval-rate gains, lower cost to serve, faster settlement for named merchants, are not quantified here, and translating an infrastructure base into commercial results is exactly the hard part that follows the announcement. Readers weighing the significance should treat the run-rate and merchant figures as company-reported and watch for evidence of movement in the coming quarters.
What Comes Next for iGaming Payments in Latin America?
The hire suggests OKTO believes its infrastructure position in Latin America is now built enough to compete on commercial delivery rather than coverage, and that converting local rails into measurable approval and settlement gains is the next battleground. For operators, the practical read is that the providers who own local licensing and banking relationships are positioning to compete on the metrics that are hardest to copy. Whether OKTO turns that position into share will show up not in this announcement but in the performance its merchants report over the year ahead.
Source: OKTO PAYMENTS
