At Stanford, Ezequiel Israel helped change a race-car tire. The Localpayment chief executive was taking part in a pit-crew exercise during the Aleph Executive Program, trading the usual language of payments for a task with a rather less forgiving finish line. His team finished with the fastest time. A payment can disappear into a dashboard; a wheel offers considerably less room for interpretation.
The exercise had a name worthy of an executive education brochure: “Over the Wall.” Participants worked under time pressure, coordinating the different jobs required to change tires. For a founder whose company connects businesses to local payment networks, the analogy was conveniently close to work. Speed depends on several people doing their part in the right order. Enthusiasm alone will not secure the wheel.
It was September 2026, and Israel had arrived at Stanford with colleagues, clients and partners. Eight years after Localpayment’s founding, he was back in a classroom, now as the leader of a business with a new owner and an expanding geographic brief. The company had brought its customers along to learn, too. That choice offers a useful place to begin his story.
Before the single API
Israel’s route into Localpayment ran through the practical end of finance. His professional background includes managing-partner work at Israelconsult & Asoc, country-management roles at AstroPay and dLocal, financial advisory work for paysafecard, and tax advisory work for PPRO. It is a career populated by the questions that arrive after a company decides it would like to sell abroad.
Those questions have stubbornly local answers. Which payment methods will customers use? Which domestic networks must a business connect to? What happens when the money needs to move out again? A sales presentation can cross a border with remarkable ease. The financial arrangements tend to ask for more paperwork.
His earlier roles put accounting, advice and market operations on the same career path. The distinction matters when considering the company he later co-founded. Localpayment’s business includes receiving money, sending it and managing the currencies and settlement in between. Its scope extends beyond the moment a customer clicks a button.
In 2018, Israel co-founded Localpayment with Jonathan Grynszpancholc. The business was established in Buenos Aires. Israel now lists Panama as his location on LinkedIn, while the company retains its Buenos Aires headquarters. The geography of the founder and the geography of the business already tell a small version of the larger story: a regional company can be run through connections that extend beyond its original base.
A country is an operating detail
Read Israel’s announcements of Localpayment’s expansion and the language is concrete. Paraguay and Bolivia joined the payout network in 2022. Panama payouts followed in 2023. In 2024, he announced round-the-clock, real-time payouts in Bolivia. These are small dispatches from the less theatrical side of building a financial business.
The difference between adding a country and improving its service is worth pausing over. The first announcement puts another place on the list. The later Bolivia announcement changes when money can arrive. For a business paying recipients there, the operating hours and speed of the service have consequences that a coloured patch on a coverage map cannot describe.
Israel’s posts focus on those additions rather than lengthy accounts of himself. They give his public career a distinctive rhythm: another market, another payment capability, another invitation to start processing. His record is partly a sequence of doors being opened for other companies.
Localpayment’s present offering follows that pattern. Businesses can connect through one application programming interface, or API, to accept local payments, make payouts and use treasury and foreign-exchange services. The company handles connections to banks and payment methods behind that integration. The promise to a client is a shorter list of things it must arrange for itself. Making that promise credible is the work.
The advertising company at the checkout
On October 9, 2024, Aleph announced that it had acquired a controlling equity interest in Localpayment. For Israel, the deal placed his company inside a group whose established business was digital advertising. For Aleph founder and CEO Gaston Taratuta, payment processing extended the group’s relationship with businesses selling into emerging markets.
The connection is easy to follow. Advertising helps a business reach a customer. Payment infrastructure helps it collect the money when that customer decides to buy. Aleph already had relationships with global digital platforms and a large advertiser network. Localpayment brought payments technology and regional operating expertise to that relationship.
Israel described the immediate attraction in five words: “This deal accelerates our growth.” Access to Aleph’s platform relationships, brands and online retailers formed a central part of his explanation. The buyer was bringing a route to customers as well as a change in ownership.
The scale figures attached to the announcement belong to the combined businesses: more than $3 billion in annual total payment volume, 640-plus payment methods and support for more than 70 currencies. Aleph’s presence in more than 130 countries described the group’s network. These figures explain the scope of the opportunity without turning every Aleph market into an already completed Localpayment launch.
“This deal accelerates our growth.”
Ezequiel Israel · October 2024
More names around the table
An acquisition changes the next set of management problems. The founder has to make a wider organisation work. Localpayment’s expanded executive team gives a fairly precise picture of that job: revenue, operations, product, technology, strategy, compliance, marketing and finance each have named leaders.
Israel remains CEO. Grynszpancholc is listed as chief strategy officer in the company’s 2026 leadership announcement. Juan Stadler leads revenue, Rodrigo Couto operations, and Emanuel Vilte Ferrero product. Gustavo Fuentes leads technology; Lucas Raldi covers compliance and risk. Pamela Chavarria leads marketing and Martin Abatedaga finance. A company that moves money needs several kinds of expertise to agree on what should happen next.
That roster makes the founder’s role more interesting than a simple expansion story suggests. A new market brings commercial prospects, but it also brings operational requirements and questions for compliance and treasury. More specialised leadership creates more capacity to handle those demands. It also creates more coordination to do.
The public outline of Israel’s work has therefore changed. The early announcements celebrated individual country capabilities. The leadership announcement describes an organisation preparing to pursue several kinds of work at once. The progress can be seen in the number of responsibilities that now have someone’s name beside them.
Eight billion, in the future tense
By May 2026, Localpayment’s expansion plans had acquired a larger number: a goal of processing more than $8 billion in cross-border payments during the year. The target accompanied plans to extend operations in Asia-Pacific and Africa. It is an ambition, with the execution still doing the deciding.
The company had tripled its Latin American team after the acquisition and established local teams in China, Singapore and Hong Kong. That combination is revealing. Israel’s company was adding people in its original region while also placing people closer to new business abroad. International reach still required colleagues who knew where they were working.
Israel’s stated objective was to make Localpayment a reference point for payments infrastructure in emerging markets, combining geographic coverage, technology and reliable execution. The words put a considerable burden on the last item. Coverage gets a company considered. Execution has to justify the choice each time money moves.
A payments founder can announce a destination in a sentence. Reaching it involves hiring, integrations, partnerships and the operating habits of an enlarged team. The distance between those two activities is where Israel’s next chapter sits. An annual target gives it a number; the work has to give that number a history.
Cross-border payment volume
The classroom, and the conversations after it
At Stanford, the Aleph program put leadership, negotiation and artificial intelligence on the agenda. Israel’s own account of the week lingered on the people. He described partners and clients comparing how they were building and scaling their businesses. The gathering made the company’s growth visible in a way a transaction count could not.
His most personal observation was brief: “I feel we leave as friends.” It followed his emphasis on conversations and shared meals as part of building trust. A founder selling infrastructure spends much of his time discussing systems. Here he chose to describe what happened between the people responsible for them.
The team’s reflections after the program also had a practical cast. They explored the relationship between AI and decisions, the importance of proprietary data, and the way successful organisations can develop blind spots. These are useful questions for a company attempting to carry an established regional business into a wider set of markets.
Put the classroom beside the pit-crew exercise and a consistent management problem appears. Different skills have to work together, people need to understand their responsibilities, and a plan must survive contact with the task. Israel’s company now asks that of an executive team spread across functions and markets. Occasionally, an exercise with a tire is an unusually direct way to rehearse it.
His next public stop is scheduled for Money20/20 USA on October 20, 2026, where he is due to discuss AI and cloud technology in B2B payments. The subject fits the business he is running. Yet the Stanford week leaves another image alongside the technology agenda: a founder working with a team, against a clock, trying to get everything fitted before moving on.
Follow the connections
Continue with Israel’s professional updates, the business he leads and reporting on its next phase.