With 11 years at global fintech Unlimit, Yulia Shevchenko has helped lead licensing and regulatory authorisations across Europe, the UK, the US, Asia and Africa. It has given her a front-line view into how payments products must be rebuilt market-by-market – from banking rails and local partnerships to consumer behaviour and compliance expectations.
She explains to RBI why being licensed in one jurisdiction doesn’t automatically mean you can operate in another. In addition, Shevchenko explains why localisation and discusses
what’s next as regulators accelerate scrutiny of digital assets and crypto infrastructure.
RBI: Unlimit operates in a crowded and competitive market. How would you summarise Unlimit’s value proposition, and what most clearly differentiates it from other payments providers?
Yulia Shevchenko:
The fundamental differentiator is that Unlimit acts as a primary architect, not a middleman. While most providers rely on third-party licenses, we have built a proprietary global network of local direct acquiring licenses across the world’s most complex markets – from LATAM to APAC and EMEA.
Unlimit provides merchants with the sophisticated interface of a global fintech powerhouse, but with the raw performance and cost-efficiency of a local domestic provider. By owning the full payment stack and the regulatory licenses behind it, we reduce the costs and technical latency. Unlimit is not just a gateway; it 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 home city.
What have been the key regulatory or expansion milestones for Unlimit over the past 12 months, and what are the main priorities looking ahead to 2026?
From a regulatory expansion perspective, one of the major successes of 2025 was becoming an authorised payment institution in Brazil, which allowed us to continue developing our payment infrastructure as a direct participant of the Brazilian Payment System. This enables us to deliver more comprehensive financial solutions to our clients, including accounts and card issuance and expand our portfolio of payment methods available to merchants.
We also expanded the scope of our licence in India, obtaining an authorisation to operate as a cross-border payment aggregator, having been licensed as a domestic payment aggregator in 2024. The extended scope of our license includes both import and export capabilities. It enables Indian merchants to access our global payment infrastructure and seamless cross-border settlements across the world. At the same time, Unlimit can facilitate market entry for international clients by removing hurdles for accepting payments from Indian payers.
In 2026, our focus remains on growing our presence and scope of services across multiple regions simultaneously, including EMEA, APAC and Latin America, underscoring Unlimit’s commitment to removing barriers to growth for our clients in any part of the world.
To what extent do payments products need to be built market by market – from banking rails and local partnerships to consumer behaviour and compliance expectations? Can you share some practical examples from Unlimit’s expansion into a specific market?
There are some common regulatory expectations across the world – these are, in large part, 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 in each country and involves identifying and adapting to the specifics of the local market and local financial systems rather than applying a single framework. In fact, the common expectation across national regulators of different countries is exactly that – that a global business wishing to obtain permission to operate within a country’s financial system gives due consideration to the localisation of its operations.
This includes not only adapting the governance, AML and compliance framework to the regulatory regime in question but also adjusting the infrastructure to be efficient and compliant in each location. The adoption of country-specific payment methods like UPI in India or Pix in Brazil as opposed to the card-based payments that still dominate in many European countries would be an example. Data localization and data processing regulations necessitating the deployment of dedicated control frameworks would be another.
How is Unlimit demonstrating its ability to outperform incumbent players when it comes to speed of rollout in new markets?
Incumbent players are slowed down by fragmented licensing and legacy partnerships. Unlimit is among the very few global acquirers that hold direct licenses across multiple high-complexity markets simultaneously.
For a merchant, this changes the paradigm of expansion: instead of spending months or even years setting up local entities, bank accounts, and domestic integrations, they can activate true local processing via our API almost instantly. We allow them to launch in emerging markets at local interchange rates, bypass the high failure rates of cross-border transactions, and settle funds globally.
Unlimit turns market entry from a strategic headache into a plug-and-play feature for its clients. In essence, we’ve commoditised 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 accelerate scrutiny of digital assets and crypto infrastructure?
The move towards a more structured and controlled approach to virtual asset business is providing clarity and operational standards to market players. The industry stands to benefit from directly regulating or at least including virtual asset services into the scope of regulatory supervision (for example by including 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 means of fast and cost-effective payments, with the regulatory approach to stablecoins as somewhat distinct from the approach to crypto assets as speculative instruments. This has been distinctly codified by MiCA allowing only the 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 wider regulatory and expansion strategy?
Belgrade has emerged as a hub for advanced technology research and development, with strong and growing tech and AI community and clear opportunities to grow our R&D team. This investment supports the development of AI-driven financial infrastructure and facilitates Unlimit’s geographic expansion and global regulatory compliance. It enables us to maintain a strong compliance posture in markets where we already operate, while also accelerating entry into new markets. We also expect it to shorten our regulatory research and discovery phase and enable faster implementation of local regulatory requirements.
With experience across EMEA, LatAm and APAC, how do you navigate growing regulatory divergence when launching similar products across multiple jurisdictions?
The key consideration is first and foremost identifying the differences and understanding their impact on the core processes, with the aim of developing global products that incorporate adjustable country-specific features. For example, client onboarding requirements for a multicurrency accounts product can be adapted to reflect local regulatory divergence as an extension of an existing process. When launching products across different jurisdictions, AI-powered regulatory technology provides valuable tools that allow compliance teams to transform manual regulatory monitoring and impact assessments into high-speed adaptable systems, while still maintaining human oversight over the output.
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 needed in each new country. Applying a single framework of internal processes or a standardised product approach to a new jurisdiction, without detailed analysis of the changes required, will inevitably delay the rollout. Successful regulatory expansion depends on adapting, localizing and integrating regulatory divergence into global fintech products, while maintaining a consistent compliance culture across Unlimit.
“Interview: Unlimit’s Yulia Shevchenko on the regulatory reality behind global fintech expansion” was originally created and published by Retail Banker International, a GlobalData owned brand.
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