EBANX, the Brazilian unicorn specialized in payment solutions for Latin America and owner of LABS, announced this Thursday its expansion to new markets in Central and South Americas. During its annual event about business in the region, Latin America Summit, the fintech also announced the future launch of EBANX GO, its prepaid card and digital account in partnership with Visa that already operates in Brazil, in other Latin American countries, and the offering of hybrid services within the region in the next 12 months. The fintech is calling these string of new services of Push LatAm.
EBANX’s expansion to Central America comprises Panama, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, and Guatemala. Paraguay, in South America, is also a destination.
According to João Del Valle, EBANX’s co-founder and CEO, the company’s roadmap is to start operations in at least one of the four markets in Central America already mentioned – he didn’t reveal which one – during the first quarter of 2021. Paraguay would come in the second quarter of next year.
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These five new markets will be added to the nine countries where the company currently operates: Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Uruguay, Bolivia, and Ecuador. When talking about consumers, EBANX’s aim is to increase the number of Latin Americans served by the fintech today from around 70 million to over 100 million in the region.
Besides the geographical expansion, Push LatAm also consists of a model of expansion, that is, after exploring new markets and growing in Latin America with its main cross-border solutions for international companies, EBANX will combine this with local processing services within the same territories.
“This will enable us to keep excelling in our commitment with Latin America: to be highly specialized in the region, translating each one of its countries and their singular cultures to businesses around the world,” said Del Valle. This combination of cross-border and local solutions will begin focused on Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia.
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As already mentioned, one solution that EBANX is going to launch locally, in other Latin American countries, soon is EBANX GO. As LABS has shown in recent months, there is an ongoing trend in electronic payments and digital accounts in Latin America, which has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. About half of the region’s population does not have a bank account, so payment solutions that combine common local methods, such as debit cards, and electronic means, such as digital wallets, are booming in the region right now.
EBANX GO was soft-launched in Brazil at the beginning of 2020, with a Visa card and a digital payments account, and has been growing ever since. According to Del Valle, until the second quarter of 2021, EBANX Go will be announced in a second country within Latin America.
Since its foundation, in 2012, EBANX says it has helped over 1,000 merchants to expand to Latin America. AliExpress, Wish, Uber, Pipedrive, Airbnb, and Spotify (these two in a partnership with Worldline) are some of the companies that use EBANX solutions. In 2019, the year when EBANX also achieved the market valuation of more than $1 billion, the company processed $2.2 billion in payments.
