Imagine a player in Cape Town opening the Playtomic app to book a court for tonight. The listing is in South African Rand, the club expects to be paid in Rand, and the player wants to use their preferred local payment method. What they don't want is to struggle with a rigid checkout flow designed for a market half a world away.
That gap between how a booking happens and how the money actually moves is where platforms managing cross-border payments often lose users. Every unfamiliar checkout experience or declined card is a lost player, one booking at a time.
With the explosive rise of padel, addressing this gap becomes a requirement. More than 35 million people now play the sport across 150 countries, and global court numbers grew 15% in 2025 alone, surpassing 77,300. Spain-based Playtomic is the platform behind much of this growth. Serving players and clubs across 50+ countries, Playtomic has replaced the old hassle of phone calls and manual coordination with a single, seamless booking flow. But as the platform scales, keeping that booking flow frictionless means mastering the art of local payments.
Why checkout gets harder as Playtomic adds markets
Every new country Playtomic enters comes with its own expectations at checkout. A player in Riyadh, a player in Bogotá, and a player in Johannesburg are not going to convert at the same rate if they all see the same card form built for a different market.
As Playtomic expands into more markets, payments become a foundational part of our ability to scale internationally. We need infrastructure that lets us connect to the right providers in each market, improve acceptance, enable local payment experiences, and optimize costs, without turning every new PSP connection into a separate and long-running technical integration project. Payrails gives us that orchestration layer, and dLocal is a key partner to start localizing the experience in emerging markets.
– Mozart Morale, Payments Product Lead, Playtomic
Rather than building a brand-new payment integration from scratch every time they open a new market, Playtomic needed a way to scale their checkout as fast as their sport was growing.
How Payrails uses payment orchestration to connect Playtomic to 100+ providers
With Payrails, Playtomic connects to local payment methods and acquires through a single integration layer that already reaches 100+ providers, with advanced analytics behind it to track performance market by market. Instead of scoping and engineering a new integration for every local provider, launching in a new country becomes a simple configuration exercise inside the same dashboard.
Playtomic is growing fast across 50+ countries, and every new market comes with its own customer expectations at the checkout and unique challenges. Payrails empowers them with an intelligent platform, insights, and expertise in one place to efficiently manage all of it. Opening a market becomes a configuration rather than a rebuild.
– Orkhan Abdullayev, CEO, Payrails
dLocal brings local payment methods to South Africa first
Playtomic's first live provider on the Payrails platform is dLocal, starting in South Africa. Through dLocal's local acquiring network, players there can now check out using their preferred local payment methods in South African Rand (ZAR). This removes the currency mismatch and unfamiliar payment flows that typically cause checkout drop-off, directly supporting higher conversion rates.
The benefits extend to the other side of the counter, too. Playtomic can now pay out South African venues in Rand through dLocal, saving clubs from absorbing foreign exchange conversion costs on bookings that were priced locally to begin with.
Through our strategic partnership with Payrails and Playtomic, dLocal is proud to be the first provider to bring local acquiring and local currency to players in South Africa today, with the same setup ready to travel as Playtomic moves into new markets. The seamless integration with Payrails allowed for a fast and efficient go-live.
– Agustin Botta, Head of EMEA, dLocal
What changes for players and venues
- Players pay the way they already pay: Local payment methods and local currency replace a checkout built around a single global card flow.
- Fewer declines at the moment of booking: Removing currency mismatch and unfamiliar payment methods targets the specific friction that causes declines.
- Venues get paid in their own currency: Local currency payouts through dLocal mean clubs are not absorbing conversion costs that were never theirs to carry.
- New markets don't require new integration projects: Once a provider is connected through Payrails, adding it to another market is a quick fix.
Where this partnership goes next
South Africa is just the first milestone. For Playtomic, the focus is about repeating the orchestration playbook: using the same underlying Payrails layer to quickly toggle on new local providers and currencies wherever padel players want to book a court.
See how Payrails supports global platforms that run local payments at scale.
About Payrails
Payrails helps businesses use payments as the foundation for optimizing growth and global performance. With a comprehensive financial infrastructure platform spanning Payment Orchestration, Tokenization, Unified Analytics, Reconciliation, Chargebacks, and Fee Monitoring, Payrails empowers companies to boost revenue and margins through AI-native workflows and a collaborative, hands-on approach. Payrails is a trusted partner for brands and high-growth platforms including Puma, HelloFresh, Vinted, Preply, Flix, Careem, abd inDrive.
About Playtomic
Playtomic is the world's leading app for racket sport players and clubs. They help players find courts, connect with others, and focus on enjoying their game. Playtomic is where players, clubs, and coaches come together to share the court, learn from each other, and enjoy the sport they love. Playtomic is more than an app, it is a community built around the joy of playing.
About dLocal
dLocal powers local payments in emerging markets, connecting global businesses with billions of consumers in regions such as Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa. Through the "One dLocal" concept (one direct API, one platform, and one contract), global companies can accept payments, send outbound payments, and settle funds globally, without the need to manage multiple processors or establish local entities.
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