LATAM exports nearly $90 billion in digital services. Why can’t it sell more to itself?

By Jonathan Joel Mentor | @jonathanjmentor

I’m not convinced that Latin America and the Caribbean have a digital trade problem. We have a regional conversion problem.

That diagnosis is uncomfortable because the technology is doing much of what we asked of it. A new joint report from the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization shows that the region’s exports of digitally delivered services rose from US$18.5 billion in 2005 to US$87.7 billion in 2024. They now account for roughly one-third of the region’s commercial services exports.

Impressive, but incomplete. Latin America and the Caribbean captured only 2% of global digitally delivered services exports in 2024. We are growing while converting far less of the global digital economy than our talent, companies and markets should allow.

The number that should bother us is closer to home. Intraregional trade in digitally deliverable services totaled just US$7.8 billion in 2023, only 8.4% of the region’s exports in that category. Europe was at 62.4%. Asia was at 41.3%. North America was at 14.7%.

The region has learned how to sell digitally. What we have not learned is how to make our own markets feel commercially close.

The neighbor is still far away

Here is the trap: digital delivery makes the border look solved. Software demonstrated in Santo Domingo can be used in Bogotá that afternoon; a San José team can serve Kingston without boarding a plane. It feels frictionless until somebody has to buy.

That is where the real border reappears. The buyer must understand the offer, trust the provider, navigate procurement, contracting, data, payment and compliance, and decide who owns the risk. Somewhere in that sequence, somebody with authority still has to say yes.

The internet compressed the distance between supplier and customer. Our institutions can quietly put it back between interest and purchase.

The interest exists. Too little of it becomes regional business.

The cost falls hardest on firms that should use neighboring markets as a proving ground. Emerging service providers often begin exporting nearby before moving farther. If the market next door is hard to read, a young company loses its natural bridge to the rest of the world.

Distance survived the internet

Regulation is the respectable answer. It is also a convenient one, because it allows almost every institution to point somewhere else. Regulation matters. It is not the whole story.

A company can have broadband, cloud infrastructure, a good product and a valid electronic contract and still fail next door. The hard part is knowing which buyer matters, how the institution buys, which local partner adds trust, what must be localized, how payment works and what evidence unlocks the next customer.

Those are not abstract regional-integration questions. They are commercial questions about power, trust, budgets and who owns the route to a transaction.

In a recent column, I argued that local capital often waits for foreign validation before acting. Digital markets can develop the same reflex. A company becomes easier to understand after Miami, New York or Madrid has priced it, bought from it or introduced it back into the region. The fundamentals may not have changed. The signal did.

That should make us suspicious of the habit. We are producing companies capable of serving global clients while leaving the commercial pathways between our own markets underdeveloped. Foreign validation becomes a shortcut for regional commercial judgment.

Market entry is an operating system

Market entry is still too often treated as marketing: translate the website, attend a trade mission, hire a representative, run ads, make introductions. Useful, sometimes. A market-entry system, no.

The commercial question is harder: how does a qualified opportunity become a signed regional transaction, and can the company repeat it without rebuilding from scratch?

A serious market-entry system makes the offer understandable, establishes a route to the budget owner, makes contracting and payment workable, and prevents the founder from rebuilding the process at every border. Market entry is not visibility. It is a repeatable route from interest to revenue.

Before the next border: four commercial questions · Successment

A company can have product-market fit and still fail these four questions. A region can have talent, connectivity and ambitious founders and still fail when the route to the buyer is weak.

The Dominican Republic should care

The Dominican Republic should care because we have enough signal to stop treating this as a theoretical opportunity. The WTO estimated that Dominican digital-service exports reached nearly US$2 billion in 2024, roughly ten times their 2005 level.

That is a meaningful base. The more interesting question now is whether the country wants to be merely another exporter of digital services or one of the places from which regional commercial routes are built.

We like the language of gateways. But a gateway is judged by the friction it removes. If the Dominican Republic wants to sit between the Caribbean, Latin America and larger markets, companies entering and leaving need more than visibility. They need institutional routes, buyer access, transaction infrastructure and repeatable paths to revenue.

This is not a startup problem wearing a regional-integration costume. Export agencies, banks, payment providers, corporations, chambers, investors and development institutions control pieces of the transaction. The opportunity appears when those pieces behave like a route, not a collection of well-intentioned organizations.

The market between the markets

If our most ambitious firms still need U.S. or European wins before becoming legible to the next Latin American or Caribbean buyer, we will have built an export economy with a weak internal commercial spine. We gain revenue while leaving regional customers, institutional learning and repeatable cross-border scale underdeveloped.

What is missing is not identical laws, currencies or one giant regional marketplace. It is enough compatibility between buyers, institutions and transaction systems that a capable firm does not start from zero at every border.

That is more demanding than creating startups or attracting capital. It means treating market access as infrastructure, with owners, pathways, evidence and measurable conversion. If nobody owns conversion, fragmentation quietly wins.

Latin America and the Caribbean have already proved that they can produce and export digital services. The next test is whether we can become one of our own most useful markets, instead of waiting for foreign markets to make our companies legible to us.

The next digital trade opportunity is not simply to export farther. It is to make Latin America and the Caribbean commercially close enough that our companies do not need a foreign market to introduce them back to their own.

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Jonathan Joel Mentor is CEO of Successment and founder of Digital Nomad Summit Santo Domingo, working across revenue systems, innovation architecture and economic modernization. A UN World Summit Award nominee and ADOEXPO National Export Excellence Award winner. successment.co | digitalnomadsummit.co