Business

Wave of subscriptions make recurring payments grow 17.6% in Brazil

Consumers are increasingly signing up to subscription clubs, plans and boxes, a realm of services which now includes entertainment platforms, fitness centers, booksellers, toll and parking lots payments. In Brazil, this business tide is felt strongly and reflected on an increase in recurring payments.

According to a study made by fintech Vindi, which operates in the recurring payments segment, the number of such transactions grew 17.6% in the market as a whole and 38.3% in its platform over the past year.

Vindi’s head of marketing and growth, Efrain Corleto, says the trend in the service industry is a migration to subscription-like models.

“In the past, we used to buy CDs to listen to music, today we pay a monthly fee for a service. Another example comes from softwares: paying for a license instead of buying them is becoming the norm. The supermarket sector may also adopt the recurrence model”, he says.

The Vindi analysis takes into account operations carried out by 10.4 million users of its platforms, which represent 20% of the total of cards used in Brazil.

Shopping holidays

Brazilians also spend more on subscriptions to products and services on Valentine’s Day than on Christmas. This is another conclusion obtained in the study made by Vindi.

In 2019, the average Brazilian consumer spent BRL 173 in recurring payments on Valentine’s Day. Christmas came next, with average expenditure of BRL 140. Other important shopping holidays are Father’s Day (BRL 133), Mother’s Day (BRL 115) and Children’s Day (BRL 114).

According to Corleto, this data might be valuable for companies that plan a one-off promotion. “Shopping holidays with the best sales performance may also be perceived as the best time to improve or increase a subscription plan.”

BRL173

was the average amount Brazilian consumers spent on recurring payments during Valentine’s Day. For Christmas they spent BRL 140

Methods

The vast majority of recurring payments (82%) are made with a credit card, but boleto bancario, a popular cash-based payment method, still holds a significant preference among Brazilians buyers or subscribers, accounting for 17.7% of all recurring payments. Automatic account debits, debit cards and e-wallets add up to mere 0.03% of transactions.

82%

of recurring payments in Brazil are made using a credit card, according to Vindi.

The study also indicates segments that were able to reduce defaults as services, education, subscription clubs and fitness centers. Companies achieved better returns through simple retry charging due payments (59%) and e-mail (27%). Regarding the recovered values, most came after e-mails (44.84%) or followed a simple retry (40.94%). Payments overdue are already counted as default by Vindi, whose platform automates processes of recovering them, whether through retries, e-mails, SMS and so on.

FlagsCielo (40.49%) was the most used card operator, followed by Stone (23.56%), Global Payments (19.39%), Rede (9.84%) and Getnet (6.72%), while Mastercard (58%), Visa (36.56%) and Elo (3.78%) were the main credit card flags.

This post was last modified on March 5, 2020 11:25 am