French company owns Ticket, one pioneer in replacing paper meal vouchers with cards in the country
07/06/2022
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Cristiane Nogueira and Emmanuel Guinet — Foto: Divulgação
French company Edenred knows well the Brazilian card market and its users. It owns Ticket, one pioneer in replacing paper meal vouchers with cards, which has been operating in the country since the 1970s, and in other corporate benefits developed in the meantime. But, until now, their cards were used through third-party point-of-sale terminals. Now Punto wants to change this.
A year ago, the company started a card-acquiring pilot in Brazil, which is of considerable size – there are 6,000 stores using the POS terminal, which is now, officially, an Edenred business.
“For some years, the group has been thinking about complementary businesses to what it already has to improve our ecosystem of products and services with sellers,” Emmanuel Guinet, general manager of Punto Latam, told Pipeline, Valor’s business website. “We bought a company in Mexico years ago, but it took time to show the relevance of being acquirers and issuers.”
In Mexico, the POS terminals are in all the gas stations that take Edenred’s fuel cards. In Brazil, the proposal is similar. Punto wants to be the POS terminal for 500,000 businesses that take its cards in the country, including restaurants, markets, workshops and gas stations. The terminal also takes Visa, Master and Elo cards.
Edenred has picked Cristiane Nogueira to run the business as the general director of Punto Brasil. The executive was previously chief product officer at SafraPay and chief business and commercial officer at Getnet. In a market that became known for “the POS terminal war” due to the pressure to undercut rivals, Edenred defined one thing: Punto will not compete based on the final price.
“We are not joining the card-acquiring market to wage a price war, but with the proposal to be the best offer for a single terminal and an option for shopkeepers,” Ms. Nogueira said. According to Mr. Guinet, Punto wants to be competitive, but it does not mean that it will be the cheapest one. The company declined to unveil its fees.
In a difficult moment for card acquirers like Stone and PagSeguro, the executive argues that the market is still growing. Last year, card transactions increased 33% in Brazil and totaled R$2.65 trillion, according to the Brazilian Association of Credit Card Companies (Abecs). In the first quarter, the increase was 36%.
In the pilot project, the company tested its technology and how practical the POS terminal was, with adjustments according to customer demand – such as a larger screen and key tones. “We invested in technology, in the connectivity of the terminal, to have a fast system that does not cause queues in the stores. It runs on Android, which enables the use of several other solutions like Pix, QR code, wallet,” Mr. Nogueira said, citing the possibility of payments in cryptocurrencies in the future. Pix is Central Bank’s instant-payment system launched in late 2020.
Factoring of receivables for businesses started with the pilot project, with credit lines with financial partners. Edenred operates in 45 countries, but card acquiring services are only in Mexico and Brazil for now. Here, it also operates the Ticket Log, Repom and Edenred Pay brands.
*By Maria Luíza Filgueiras — São Paulo
Source: Valor International