What Happened
DLocal Limited, a payments company operating across emerging markets, held its Q2 2026 earnings call on August 13, 2026. CEO Pedro Arnt and CFO Guillermo Perez addressed investors and analysts. Earnings calls are high-stakes communication events: every word is recorded, parsed, and used to form judgments about leadership credibility. How executives speak in these moments shapes how the market sees the company.
The Communication Angle
Here is the lesson: when you are speaking to a skeptical audience, your job is not to inform them. Your job is to convince them you are in control.
Earnings calls are not presentations. They are auditions. Investors are not sitting there absorbing facts. They are listening for hesitation, contradiction, and spin. The moment a CEO sounds like they are managing perception rather than reporting reality, trust evaporates. Pedro Arnt, stepping into the CEO role at a company that operates in high-volatility markets, faces this challenge in its sharpest form. Emerging markets are inherently unpredictable. Currency risk, regulatory shifts, political instability: these are real and constant. If you lead with those realities without anchoring them to your decision-making framework, you sound like you are making excuses.
The right move is to lead with your position, not your context. Do not open by explaining the environment. Open by stating what you did about it. "We grew TPV by X percent despite currency headwinds" lands completely differently than "Currency headwinds impacted our results, but we grew TPV by X percent." Same facts. Totally different signal. The first version says: we are drivers. The second version says: things happened to us, and we survived. One is leadership. One is damage control.
CFOs face an even harder version of this challenge. Numbers are blunt instruments. A CFO who just reads figures sounds robotic. A CFO who connects every number to a strategic choice sounds indispensable. The communication goal in an earnings call is to make the listener feel that the leadership team sees things others do not see and acts on that clarity with precision. That is the trust signal. Not the numbers themselves.
The broader lesson for any professional reporting results to a demanding audience: structure your communication around agency, not circumstances. Every statement you make should answer the implicit question "so what are you doing about it?" before the audience even asks.
This is exactly the kind of scenario I break down in Say It Right Every Time. The chapter on high-stakes speaking gives you a framework for what I call "positioning before proof": the discipline of stating your stance before you state your evidence. Most people do it backwards. They pile up context and data hoping the conclusion will feel inevitable. Confident communicators state the conclusion first and let the evidence confirm what the audience already senses is true. In a room full of skeptical investors or a boardroom full of critics, that sequence is everything.
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for Words Again
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Never Be Lost
for Words Again
Get word‑for‑word scripts for the conversations that shape your life, from job interviews and negotiations to difficult talks with family and partners, so you always know exactly what to say and how to say it.
Key Takeaway
Before your next results presentation or performance update, take every sentence that starts with an external factor ("the market," "the environment," "conditions") and rewrite it to start with what your team decided or did. "We responded to the market shift by..." beats "The market shift caused..." every single time. Do this for every major talking point. You will sound like a leader instead of a reporter.
