[WATCH] Challenges in Latam: the payments sector
Moderator of the SiGMA Americas Virtual Summit panel Oliver Debono and CEO at Condor Gaming invites veterans in the industry, namely Alfonso Maria Kast of Flod, Aria Celia of Pay4Fun Pagamentos AS and Matthew Harrod of Payments Company Ltd, to discuss one of the gaming industry’s primary challenges in LatAm; the payment sector.
The panel aims to break the myth that LatAm is a singular state with very similar behaviours, customers and payment methods to European markets. As Debono summarizes, “as we’ve developed into this market, realise there is far more diversity than meets the eye”.
Differences between payment methods in LatAm and Europe
When it comes to alternative payment methods prevalent in the region, LatAm faces some hurdles especially when it comes to regulation and how they are divided by each state.
Harrod explores the dichotomy between payment methods in LatAm and Europe, stressing the importance of treating LatAm as a diverse market with fragmented states:
“you need to be focussed on individual countries and understand in those individual countries, just because you do Spain and Portugal in Europe doesn’t mean that you can just turn up in Latam and get going with Visa or MasterCard and hope everything works”.
He continues, addressing the issues with payments such as Visa and Master Card:
There’s problems with obviously the Visa, MasterCard, cross-border relationships that does not exist. They don’t do cross-border in the same way as they do in Europe.
This leads to the issue of cross-border relationships synonymous with LatAm.
Cross-border payments
Europe allows you to cross customers between accounts, an example of simple banking, while LatAm has restrictions when it comes to cross-border payments. Debono believes that this notion should be tended to as soon as possible as it is hindering momentum within the sector.
Payments types across the Americas
In general, there are two concepts influencing payment types in the Americas:
Kast sates: ‘one is like the perception and preferences that people are in different countries asked about the online payments and then we have like their different regulator scenarios’.
He explores this concept further providing regional examples:
in Peru, it’s completely a cash market...In Chile so a little bit closer to grade cards, maybe more similar to Europe and I think Argentina as well... Colombia is regulated and the most advanced one.
He adds that in Brazil, the leading payment method is Boletos, a push payment system regulated by the Central Bank of Brazil. Today, Boletos generates 3.7 billion transactions per year; accounting for roughly 25% of online transitions in Brazil.
SiGMA Calendar:
SiGMA Americas and AIBC Digital Summit were launched with great success in the past week, pushing the shifting grounds of the gaming industry towards LatAm and discussing the current developments in digitalisation. In a first for SiGMA, both the gaming and the tech segments of the conference were offered in 3 languages, English, Spanish and Portuguese.
SiGMA will launch its next series of events in 2021, with SiGMA Europe headlining next year’s calendar. Inaugural summits in Asia and Americas are also set to dominate the year, with SiGMA Asia launching in May 2021 and SiGMA Africa in 2022! Explore the full agenda here and register now!
