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A first-hand account of the payment landscape in Brazil

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A first-hand account of the payment landscape in Brazil

YouTransactor welcomed Murilo Malta to its office in Paris, a few weeks back. Murilo lives in the area of Sao Paulo and manages the commercial activities for YouTransactor in Latin America. 

His mission involves reaching out to new prospects across the region (large acquirers, fintechs, PSPs, and marketplaces), managing the relationship with existing accounts, and establishing local partnerships in Brazil.

We took his visit as an opportunity to get his views on the Point-of-Sale solutions market as well as YouTransactor’s positioning.

Q: How has the Brazilian payment market evolved over the last 12 months?

A: The market is very warm, in terms of demand for POS terminals. YouTransactor has a long experience serving top players and operating in this market since 2017. So far we have been able to keep up with growing volumes while addressing the challenges associated with component sourcing. So, many opportunities ahead!

Q: What are YouTransactor’s competitive advantages in Brazil?

A: We have full capacity to produce locally, in Manaus. We also work with local, long-established partners.

In parallel, there is high anticipation for a high-end, innovative, and autonomous 4G product like the uCube Touch. The more affordable Bluetooth version also has some demands to offer competitive packages. In addition, with the advent of PIX in Brazil, QR display functionalities are very much of interest. All of these needs can be served with our product, the UCube Touch.

Last but not the least, Brazilian clients like to work with agile companies that operate in a start-up mode.

Q: What are the challenges to growing a business in Brazil?

It can be a little difficult to deploy an innovative product that is new to a foreign market for the first time and raise awareness about the brand. 

For a POS terminal provider, certifications specific to Brazil are a must-have, in particular, ANATEL for communications, and ABECS for payments. YouTransactor is currently passing these certifications for the new generation of the uCube Touch. The terminal has a large potential in Brazil and has already generated considerable interest among several players.

Other challenges include tax management, which can be complex in Brazil. 

Q: What do you think about SoftPOS?

Nb: payment acceptance through an App installed on an Android commercial smartphone

With the increase of NFC cards, everybody is starting to pay using contactless. Brazilian shoppers are quite digital-savvy so SoftPOS becomes an interesting and cheap option for independent merchants to accept payments.

It is seen as a disrupter. Nevertheless, SoftPOS is not going to be a one fits all solution: it makes sense only for self-employed and there is still a large base of contact-only cards in the region. Overall I see it as a great complement to the mobile POS.

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Sopra Banking Summit

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Sopra Banking Summit

YouTransactor will partner with Sopra Banking Software on the week of 18-22 October 2021 for the Sopra Banking Summit, an event designed to tackle the biggest issues in the financial sector.

The weeklong fintech fest aims to touch upon some of the most current topics in financial services and highlight the new paths that the industry leaders are pursuing.

                                                            SBS Summit Logo Black Center

The event is supported by a powerful ecosystem of enterprise, fintech, and industry partners with names like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Axway, Currencycloud, Digime, Fidor Solutions, France FinTech, Galitt, IBM, Paymium, Rubyx, Smile & Pay, Tink and will feature key voices from 1,500+ financial institutions, 100+ fintechs, and 25+ CXO speakers — participating in a dialogue about the future of finance.

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How mobile POS simplifies tipping and donations

How mobile POS simplifies tipping and donations

Tipping customs vary across countries – In the United States, it is customary to tip a restaurant server 15-25%, in Brazil, 10%, in Sweden, 5-10%.

The customer may not, however, always feel comfortable parting with cash.

Can both the customer and the waiter ever be happy?

Enter non-cash transactions. 

In 2016, the Federal Bank of Boston found a 409% disparity between cash and non-cash transactions. A study from the Journal of Applied Psychology found that diners tipped an average of 4.3% more just by seeing a credit card logo on the tray that holds their restaurant bill.

Tipping has predominantly remained a cash activity. The current Covid-19 crisis has resulted in fewer people carrying, and less likely to leave or exchange notes or coins, for health or hygiene reasons. The servers in the hospitality industry have borne the brunt, with the shift to more cashless methods of payment squeezing their revenues further. 

Tipping is made much easier with the option of having cards or phones to tap and tip.

In addition to tipping, charities are also heavily reliant on cash. Goodbox has taken on the initiative to combat the problems charities face in a cashless world through contactless technology leading to an uplift of 64% in the donation income of their charity partners. ING has rolled out contactless charity donation boxes, while animal welfare charity Blue Cross has kitted out dogs with coats featuring contactless terminals so that Brits can make donations with a ‘pat and tap‘. 

In 2020, the Royal Canadian Legion partnered with HSBC Canada to pay tribute to the nation’s heroes on tap-enabled readers supporting credit cards or mobile and wearable options like Apple Pay.

Busk in London, a Mayor of London initiative, partnered with Zettle in 2018 to give card readers to performers. The project allowed street musicians across London to accept payments via contactless cards technology in addition to cash and chip cards. Launching the scheme, London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, said it would allow more Londoners to support the capital’s street performers. Charlotte Campbell, a full-time busker in London, said she had seen a significant impact on her earnings after trialing the scheme for two weeks. She has the card reader set up to deduct £2 per tap so fans do not have to select a donation amount. “I believe if street performers like myself don’t adapt to the cashless society we are edging towards, we’re at risk of becoming a dying art,” she said.

To address this emerging trend, YouTransactor provides a complete mPOS technology and software suite, as a foundation for your lightweight terminal project. We also offer the hardware, thereby allowing you to create a sleek, affordable product facilitating fixed amount cashless payments, to make tipping and donations time-efficient and compact.

PS. In the early days, before Justin Bieber became an international pop icon, he often used to busk on the steps of the Avon Theater Stratford.

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White Paper- What’s next for Proximity Payments

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White Paper- What’s next for Proximity Payments

In recent years, much attention has been paid to the apparently relentless migration of consumers to online, mobile and digital sales channels. Over the same period, there’s been rather less focus on the steady and sustained growth of cashless proximity payments – mobile and card-enabled electronic transactions that are made in person. However, the unwelcome arrival of Covid-19 is rapidly accelerating what was already a profound shift in consumer behaviour. In the process, it’s putting a fresh spotlight on both the immediate and long-term consequences of an increasingly cash-free world.

For all stakeholders in the payment ecosystem, the surging popularity of cashless proximity payments merits careful consideration. New challenges and opportunities are emerging fast. Primarily, that’s because the current uptick is not simply a matter of more contactless transactions being handled by the existing POS infrastructure. In reality, a much bigger story is unfolding. Proximity payments are being revolutionized by an explosion in new use cases, with an ever-more diverse array of enterprises and organizations, most notably SMEs, adopting customer-friendly solutions. The range of transaction values undertaken via electronic proximity payments is also expanding quickly. Active engagement by governments, regulators and other influential players is further stimulating the switch to cashless.

Innovative new technologies are also playing a central role. Most notably, this has seen an inexorable rise in the adoption of mobile POS (mPOS) to both complement and replace legacy fixed terminals. Indeed, such has been the pace and scale of this development, it is more accurate to describe the new wave of compact and portable products as not simply mPOS, but NextGen. As well as offering a wealth of choice in terms of product designs, features and costs, the market for Next-Gen terminals is also characterized by a wide array of distributors. These include both long established players and disruptors such as Payment facilitators and neobanks. What’s more, the emergence of SoftPOS, the smartphone-based payment acceptance technology, shows that the momentum for change is only set to accelerate.

 

This white paper looks at the deep-rooted trends shaping proximity payments, the impact of the pandemic, and the likely future path of this highly dynamic business ecosystem.

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    Case Study- Serving Star Fintech Players with White-Label Payment Solutions

    Case Study- Serving Star Fintech Players with White-Label Payment Solutions

    Turn your checkout process into a unique customer experience

    In 2020 Covid 19 incentivized merchants to change their focus toward the implementation of e-commerce, and click & collect strategies. But sanitary measures also impacted the customer journey in-store as the demand for cashless and mostly contactless payment methods proliferated. The shift in customer habits has been quite rapid but the need to offer user-centric and contactless payment solutions is expected to prevail.

    In parallel, a transformation was already in progress among micro-entrepreneurs, such as taxi drivers, delivery personnel, street vendors, etc. to accept card payments in mobility while providing their clients with the option to pay by the latest popular methods (Apple Pay, Alipay etc). Consequently, a few payment facilitators emerged in the past few years and have been serving this unexplored segment of customers successfully by providing highly competitive and attractive offers, not only in the terms of affordability but also ease of installation and more importantly modern mobile POS design and features.

    The renewed demand for seamless checkout solutions presents a unique opportunity for the fast-growing neo banks, acquirers and payment gateway providers to extend their existing business service portfolio and capitalize on it.

    In addition to the merchants who are now migrating to a new cashless economy, SMEs represent a booming and captivating market segment for innovative companies who want to disrupt the way we accept payments. Here we present YouTransactor’s key takeaways from our experience supporting leading European and Latin American Fintechs in their upcoming mobile POS launches.

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