Mercado Pago, a transactions unit of Argentine e-commerce company MercadoLibre, expects to launch its own credit and debit card business in 2020, as part of efforts to gain scale as market competition continues to intensify.
With more than 220 million users in seven Latin American countries, Mercado Pago is expanding credit operations to reach customers beyond MercadoLibre's e-commerce platform, its vice president, Tulio Oliveira, said on Friday (24.01.2020/XNUMX/XNUMX).
"NOTOur client today has a more credit-taking profile and that is why we have focused on credit solutions rather than investments in our digital wallet.he told reporters.
As of September last year, Mercado Pago had granted 1.400 billion reais ($334.72 million) in credit to sellers and 351 million reais to consumers, it said in a presentation.
The fintech also aims to soon enable cash withdrawals using QR code, according to Oliveira. Another goal is to launch its own credit and debit card acquiring business in 2020, he added.
«We will gradually stop using services provided by other companies that acquire credit cards as we fully operate our own.", He said.
Mercado Pago totaled US$7.600 billion in transactions in the third quarter, of which US$4.000 billion were outside of MercadoLibre's e-commerce platform, a record for the period.
Mercado Pago's director of payments, Gabriela Szprinc, warned that lThe company is committed to overtaking its rival PagSeguro Digital Ltd in the number of card processing machines in 2020.
In September they had 3,3 million card processing machines in operation, while PagSeguro had 5 million in the same period.
PagSeguro did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Source: Reuters
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