This Thursday, September 1, would not be another day for Uruguayan businesses that use digital payment methods. Merchants and service providers will have the possibility of having all the debit and credit card payment options through a single provider of their choice.
The Central Bank of Uruguay (BCU) announced that as of September 1, the multiacquisition processwhich enablesMerchants have a single contract with all Mastercard and Visa debit, credit and electronic money cards.
Said contract is agreed with the acquiring companies, which are those authorized to offer businesses and services the mechanism to process the aforementioned means of payment. “In this new operating framework, businesses obtain the benefit of being able to choose between various options to achieve the best conditions adapted to their needs,” said the BCU.
The Central Bank of Uruguay “recommends businesses to evaluate the new conditions of the offers available in the market and hopes that this progress will allow moving towards greater competition and efficiency of the payment system, similar to the results obtained in other countries” .
To reach this instance of opening, the companies in the market were the protagonists of a process of dialogue and adaptation of their technology, which was promoted by the Central Bank. This milestone was reached after a long work process carried out from the implementation of the Roadmap for the Payment System in Uruguay that the Central Bank started in 2020.
The president of the BCU, Diego Labat, will receive the media this Wednesday 31 to explain more details about the operation of this new milestone in the Uruguayan payment system.
Millions of dollars and transactions
According to the Report of the Retail Payment System for the January-June semester of the BCU, in that period 151 million transactions were made with debit cards and another 108 million with credit plastics. In the first case, $168,886 million (about US$4,142 million) and $149,885 million (about US$3,676 million) were mobilized in the second.
At the end of the first semester, Uruguay had 3.4 million credit cards, almost 50 thousand more than those issued at the end of December.
Meanwhile, as of June this year, the country had 99,152 POS throughout the country, almost 30,000 more than there were two years ago.
