Airbnb's engineering team launched the "Pay as a Local" initiative to integrate 20+ payment methods across 220 countries in just 14 months. The goal was to overcome limitations of credit card-only payments that excluded millions of potential users in markets where card penetration is low or local payment preferences dominate.

Before supporting local payment methods, Airbnb modernized its monolithic payment infrastructure through a multi-year replatforming initiative called Payments LTA. The team shifted to a capability-oriented services system using domain-driven decomposition, creating specialized subdomains like Pay-in, Payout, Transaction Fulfillment, and Processing. This architecture reduced time to market for new features and empowered teams to work independently.

The Processing subdomain became crucial for LPM integration. Airbnb adopted a connector and plugin-based architecture with Multi-Step Transactions (MST) to handle complex payment flows. MST provides a PSP-agnostic framework that describes intermediate steps required for local payments, from redirects to third-party apps to asynchronous QR code payments. This approach enabled consistent handling of diverse payment experiences across different markets and vendors.