The amount transacted via remote card purchases and other non-face-to-face methods, such as digital wallets, grew 30.8% in 2021 in Brazil, to BRL 569.7 billion – 41.7% of this volume came from credit card operations, by far, still the most used method in e-commerce in the country and Latin America. The data was disclosed this Thursday (10) by Abecs, an association representing electronic payments in the country.
Currently, non-face-to-face payments account for 35% of all credit card expenses in Brazil.
Contactless payments also grew (a lot): 384.6%, generating a transactional volume of BRL 198.9 billion. Today, in Brazil, one in four credit card transactions is contactless.. Abecs expects half of the credit card transactions to be contactless by the end of 2022. The conditions for that are set: it is estimated that close to 90% of the POS terminals in operation today in the country already have NFC technology.
All this does not mean the end of POS terminals.
Despite recent announcements of solutions from giants such as Visa and Apple to transform smartphones into payment terminals, the end of POs machines is still far away.
According to Pedro Coutinho, president of Abecs until March, when he will leave the position of CEO of Getnet and, consequently, the entity’s board, the vast majority of contactless transactions in the country are carried out by bringing the plastic closer to a terminal – not through a smartphone.
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“I imagine something around ten years before the end of the POS terminals. I recall when they were introduced, in place of the old flatbed imprinting machines (aka “knuckle-busters”), and the distrust around something that depended on electricity. Then came the wireless machines, which depended on telecom operators. And now we have almost all the terminals with NFC technology. The truth is that smartphones were not born to be payment devices, and POS terminals still fulfill roles that smartphones cannot; they talk to systems for issuing tax receipts and CRM, for example,” evaluates Erika Daguani, director of B2B Product at EBANX (fintech that owns LABS).
