With 11 years at global fintech Unlimit, Yulia Shevchenko has helped lead licensing and regulatory approvals in Europe, the UK, the US, Asia and Africa. It has given him front-line insight into how payment products need to be rebuilt on a market-by-market basis, from banking channels and local partnerships to consumer behavior and compliance expectations.

Explain to RBI why being licensed in one jurisdiction does not automatically mean you can operate in another. In addition, Shevchenko explains why localization and discusses

what’s next as regulators step up scrutiny of digital assets and crypto infrastructure.

RBI: Unlimit operates in a busy and competitive market. How would you summarize Unlimit’s value proposition and what sets it apart most clearly from other payment providers?

Yulia Shevchenko:

The key differentiator is that Unlimit acts as the lead architect, not as an intermediary. While most suppliers rely on third-party licensing, we have built a proprietary global network of local direct procurement licenses in the world’s most complex markets, from LATAM to APAC and EMEA.

Unlimit offers merchants the sophisticated interface of a global fintech powerhouse, but with the raw performance and profitability of a local local provider. By owning the full payments stack and the regulatory licenses behind it, we reduce costs and technical latency. Unlimit is not just a gateway; is a unified financial interface that allows a business to treat a customer in Mexico City or São Paulo with the same operational ease as a customer in their hometown.

What have been Unlimit’s key regulatory or expansion milestones over the past 12 months and what are the top priorities heading into 2026?

From a regulatory expansion perspective, one of the biggest achievements of 2025 was becoming an authorized payment institution in Brazil, which allowed us to continue developing our payment infrastructure as a direct participant in the Brazilian Payment System. This allows us to offer more comprehensive financial solutions to our customers, such as issuing accounts and cards, and to expand our portfolio of payment methods available to merchants.

We also expanded the scope of our license in India, obtaining an authorization to operate as a cross-border payment aggregator, after being authorized as a domestic payment aggregator in 2024. The expanded scope of our license includes import and export capabilities. It enables Indian merchants to access our global payment infrastructure and seamless cross-border settlements worldwide. At the same time, Unlimit can facilitate market entry for international customers by removing barriers to accepting payments from Indian payers.

In 2026, our focus continues to grow our presence and service reach across multiple regions simultaneously, including EMEA, APAC and Latin America, underscoring Unlimit’s commitment to removing barriers to growth for our customers anywhere in the world.

To what extent should payment products be built on a market-by-market basis, from bank lines and local partnerships to consumer behavior and compliance expectations? Can you share some practical examples of Unlimit’s expansion into a specific market?

There are some common regulatory expectations around the world: they are largely driven by regulators’ response to the rapidly evolving scale and complexity of financial technology and its capabilities. The implementation of each of these seemingly comparable regulatory requirements, however, is unique to each country and involves identifying and adapting to the specificities of the local market and local financial systems rather than applying a single framework. In fact, the common expectation among national regulators in different countries is exactly that: that a global company seeking permission to operate within a country’s financial system should take due account of the location of its operations.

This includes not only adapting the governance, AML and compliance framework to the regulatory regime in question, but also fine-tuning the infrastructure to be efficient and compliant in each location. The adoption of country-specific payment methods, such as UPI in India or Pix in Brazil, as opposed to card payments that still dominate in many European countries would be one example. Localization and data processing regulations requiring the deployment of dedicated control frameworks would be another.

How is Unlimit demonstrating its ability to outperform incumbent players in terms of launch speed in new markets?

Incumbent players are held back by fragmented licenses and legacy partnerships. Unlimit is one of the few global acquirers that hold direct licenses in multiple highly complex markets simultaneously.

For a merchant, this changes the scaling paradigm: instead of spending months or even years setting up local entities, bank accounts, and home integrations, they can trigger real local processing through our API almost instantly. We enable them to launch into emerging markets at local exchange rates, avoid the high failure rates of cross-border transactions and settle funds globally.

Unlimit turns go-to-market from a strategic headache into a plug-and-play feature for its customers. In essence, we’ve leveraged the complexity of global regulation, allowing our partners to scale at the speed of their ambition, not the speed of a bank’s compliance department.

What’s next as regulators step up scrutiny of digital assets and crypto infrastructure?

The move towards a more structured and controlled approach to the virtual asset business is providing clarity and operational standards to market players. The industry will benefit from directly regulating or at least including virtual asset services in the scope of regulatory oversight (for example, bringing crypto service providers into the scope of obliged entities in the context of money laundering prevention). Another trend is the adoption of stablecoins as a fast and profitable means of payment, with the regulatory approach to stablecoins somewhat different from the approach to crypto assets as speculative instruments. This has been clearly codified by MiCA, allowing only EU credit and electronic money institutions to issue euro-denominated stablecoins.

Unlimit has invested in a facility in Belgrade. Why was Belgrade chosen and how does this investment support Unlimit’s broader regulatory and expansion strategy?

Belgrade has become a center for advanced technology research and development, with a strong and growing AI and technology community and clear opportunities to grow our R&D team. This investment supports the development of an AI-powered financial infrastructure and facilitates Unlimit’s geographic expansion and global regulatory compliance. It allows us to maintain a strong compliance position in the markets where we already operate, while accelerating entry into new markets. We also expect it to shorten our regulatory research and discovery phase and allow for faster implementation of local regulatory requirements.

With experience in EMEA, Latin America and APAC, how do you navigate the growing regulatory divergence when launching similar products in multiple jurisdictions?

The key consideration is to firstly identify differences and understand their impact on core processes, with the aim of developing global products that incorporate adjustable country-specific features. For example, customer onboarding requirements for a multi-currency account product can be tailored to reflect local regulatory divergence as an extension of an existing process. When launching products in different jurisdictions, AI-driven regulatory technology provides valuable tools that enable compliance teams to transform manual regulatory oversight and impact assessments into high-speed, adaptable systems while maintaining human oversight of the outcome.

What is the most common mistake fintechs make when entering new markets, and what lessons has Unlimit learned from its own expansion journey?

From my expansion perspective, the most common mistake is underestimating the differences and complexities of regulatory requirements, as well as the additional product development required in each new country. Applying a single internal process framework or standardized product approach to a new jurisdiction, without a detailed analysis of the changes required, will inevitably delay launch. Successful regulatory expansion depends on adapting, localizing and integrating regulatory divergence into global fintech products, while maintaining a consistent culture of compliance at Unlimit.

“Interview: Unlimit’s Yulia Shevchenko on the regulatory reality behind the global expansion of fintech” was originally created and published by International Retail Bankera trademark owned by GlobalData.

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