Accepting Payments in Latin America

Latin America is one of the fastest growing and most innovative regions for e-commerce. With a rapidly growing population and rising incomes throughout the region, more — and more affluent — consumers are omni-present. The growth of consumers has led to two trends that are driving payments and e-Commerce innovation across the region:

• More Latin American e-Commerce Start-Ups: Leveraging its well educated workforce and business savvy has led to a new wave of Latin America-based start-ups. And the trend has only increased over time. Looking at data from Crunchbase, of the 683 companies in their data that have taken at least $1M in funding since 1999, 123 of them have raised (or raised again) since Jan 1, 2019. That’s a frenetic pace! These new and hyper-growth companies, like PedidosYa, Cabify, and Rappi are building innovative experiences for their customers across Latin America. And they’re using payments as a way to enhance that experience.
  

• Greater Expansion into Latin America: The growth in population and spending power in the region hasn’t gone unnoticed by companies in other regions. Increasingly, businesses from APAC, the US, and EMEA are looking at Latin America as an opportunity for growth. As with any region, there are challenges of how to localize your offer to appeal to a new region. And that challenge is made more difficult by the complexity of the payments and e-Commerce space in the region. Different payment systems, payments fraud, and other payments challenges mean that companies expanding into Latin America need to have a robust payments strategy as part of their e-Commerce plan.
  

Flexibility to Use Multiple Payment Gateways Across Latin America

Spreedly helps companies in both scenarios to accept payments in Latin America. Our ability to connect to virtually any payment service means that high-growth and massive merchants and marketplaces use Spreedly to support e-Commerce across the region. Spreedly lets companies store customers’ payment details in a single, secure vault. Payment details can then be used across different gateways throughout Latin America.

For instance, you may decide to mix-and-match your payment gateways based on their success rates, coverage, or other factors across the region. Spreedly makes it easy to use one payments gateway in Argentina, another in Brazil, another in Colombia, and still one more in Mexico.

Combatting Fraud in Latin America

Fraud is another major challenge in the region. Different companies see varying results with the fraud services they use. As a result, we often see merchants use third-party fraud services as their primary fraud detection tool or even in concert with their payment gateway services. Spreedly’s API is designed for flexibility. So, our customers can connect once to Spreedly and then communicate with third-party fraud services as part of their payments flow to validate a transaction and improve success rates.

Perspectives on Latin American Payments

Because of the innovation we see in Latin American payments, we thought it’d make sense to collect our various payments resources into one place. Read on, and if you have topics that you would like us to address, please let us know!

Payments Dialog with Mathias Fonseca from PedidosYa

PedidosYa is a major food (and almost anything) delivery company based in Uruguay. They’ve grown fast, expanding their service throughout Latin America. For them, it’s vital to provide a great customer experience, and that means accepting payments effectively — in mobile and in a browser. Plus, with fraud an everyday problem, Mathias discusses his approach to maximizing success rates in this video interview.

Plus, here’s a case study overview of PedidosYa and how they address Latin American payments.

“Latin American E-Commerce: Rapidly Growing But Challenging Markets”

One of the advantages for our customers that comes from our ability to connect to virtually any payment service is that we collect data across many different payment gateways. In this blog post from Spreedly CEO Justin Benson, the Spreedly team explores success and decline rates, particularly in Mexico.

Payments Dialog with Juan Ortega from Rappi

Juan Ortega co-founded Rappi with a vision of improving customer experience via delivery of just about any item — even cash. He and his team recognized that payments are a vital part of that great experience. Especially when operating across countries in Latin America — the company services 9 markets in Latin America. This interview explores how Rappi uses multiple payment gateways and a flexible card vault to drive success rates and improve the customer experience.

The Current State of Payments in Latin America

In this panel discussion from PAYMENTSfn 2019, a group of global payments experts discusses a few things that make payents in Latin America unique.

Payments Meetup in Mexico City

We're taking our PAYMENTSfn road show to Mexico City! If you're in the area and want to network and chat payments, we'd love to meet up! Get info and RSVP here.

Watch for even more content on Latin American payments coming all the time!

‍

Download the Multiple Payment Gateways eBook Below