In a first stage, in September 2021, the opening of the Mastercard seal set the beginning of the multiacquisition in Uruguay. This process will have its second stage in September of this year when the opening of the Visa seal becomes effective. This will allow the operators to offer the different seals in the same payment gateway with a single contract and, at the same time, opens the door to intense competition between the different bidders.
In this frame, Coffee & Business spoke with representatives from three of the major players in the market: Fiserv, Scanntech and GetNet.
Today, Fiserv –in alliance with Geocom– is the administrator of the main network of POS terminals in the country with just over 40,000 devices.
For Alberto Varela, general manager of the firm in Uruguay, for those who are not working with cards it becomes much easier to hire a supplier when it can offer you all the stamps – and post-employment care – with a single contract. “They begin to see all the issues with a single company and that for small businesses that begin to make the decision is very important,” Varela said.
The manager of Fiserv projects that the greater inclusion of businesses that today are not operating with electronic means of payment will be given in the inside the country, “where the presence of card payments is not so strong”. In this sense, Varela pointed out that the increase in demand in these areas is already taking place, but it is gradual. “It is going to accelerate to the extent that multiacquisition is really becoming aware,” he reflected.
For his part, Scanntech’s New Business Manager, Diego Slinger, projects that with the opening of the acquisition of Visa “and the entry of all the players to penetrate those clients who today are monopolistically acquired by Visa Net, the client portfolio is going to grow quite a bit”. “It will depend a lot on how the 100% open market competition takes place,” said the executive.
For Scanntech, multiacquisition is a milestone that they feel they are promoting. Within this framework, the firm represented by Slinger signed in recent days a memorandum of understanding with Banco República and BBVA for Scanntech retail acquiring customers to receive benefits from both banks. “We believe that the agreement will empower us,” said the executive.
For Slinger, small merchants in the interior of the country will also be the ones to benefit from the competition. “One of the main objectives that we set for ourselves with our trade agreement is to financially include businesses that are not present today,” said the executive. In this sense, he stressed that “surely they are not because there is no economic interest behind the current purchasers due to the acquisition cost of this type of business” and stressed that Scanntech is especially focused on including and serving them.
getnet is a new payment platform and payments for businesses that will have its own network of terminals and is the new payment acquiring arm of the Santander Group.
Its general manager, Hernán Gómez, assured that being a company that enters the market with a differential proposal there are “tremendous opportunities”, mainly in those medium and large businessesIt’s that they’ve been operating with a provider for a long time and now they can choose new players. “The group has a strong presence with the financial companies Creditel and Crédito de la Casa,” revealed Gómez, for him this means that they can reach small businesses in cities that were previously not reached.
According to Gómez, initially the competition will take place in prices, services and new technologies. In this last aspect, the group acquired New Age Data, a POS provider company with more than 25 years in the country. “We aim to add comprehensiveness to the entire service,” concluded the executive.
