Case Study: MercadoLibre protects 90% of sellers with Twilio Phone Verification

Mercadolibre Protects 90% of Sellers With Twilio Authentication Solutions

MercadoLibre, Latin America’s largest e-commerce marketplace with roughly 190 million users, needed to protect a massive, often non–tech‑savvy user base while keeping sign-up and transactions low‑friction and meeting SOX/PCI requirements. With hundreds of thousands of merchants relying on the platform and growing payment volume through MercadoPago, the company had to deliver adaptable, cross-system verification that didn’t disrupt sales.

They implemented Twilio Phone Verification and an incremental 2FA approach—integrated in about ten days—to require stronger verification for high‑value listings, suspicious activity, and financial operations. The move shifted more buyers to MercadoPago (>95% of transactions), increased protection for top sellers (over 90% of top sellers and 62,000+ major sellers enrolled), raised user trust and NPS, and reduced backend maintenance by offloading verification complexity to Twilio.

Mercado Libre

Pablo Abad

Head of Site Security