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Brazilians can now pay SMEs using WhatsApp

Friday 3 March 2023 11:09 CET | News

Brazil's central bank has approved Meta Platforms' (META.O) payments launch for SMEs in Brazil via its messaging application WhatsApp, building on the app's existing local peer-to-peer payment system.

 

The approval comes as Meta seeks to use the Brazilian market as a key test space for business messaging, an area that has assumed greater urgency as Meta's core advertising business has stalled.

WhatsApp users in Brazil have been able to make payments amongst them through the application since 2021, but the new development clears the way for merchants to receive payments. As Guilherme Horn, head of WhatsApp Latin America, says, WhatsApp users will be able to pay for products and services directly in a conversation with Mastercard and Visa debit and credit cards

Shortly after the central bank's greenlight, Meta's chief executive Mark Zuckerberg echoed the announcement, saying on his Instagram broadcast channel that customers will be able to pay small businesses on WhatsApp.

Brazil's central bank has approved Meta Platforms' (META.O) payments launch for SMEs in Brazil via its messaging application WhatsApp, building on the app's existing local peer-to-peer payment system.

Brazil embracing new payment opportunities

Recently, the South American country has been facing innovation after innovation. In February UK-based fintech Lanistar went live with Google Pay operability to its virtual payment card in Brazil. Lanistar was founded in 2019 with the ambition to build a fintech unicorn that challenges the status quo of old-fashioned, traditional banking services.

The company has been expanding rapidly in Brazil, having gone public in the country in mid-2022. The Lanistar mobile app allows customers to manage and control all of their financial products from one place, with a virtual card to allow purchases to be made online or now via Google Pay.

A couple of weeks following Lanistar’s announcement, Mercado Bitcoin successfully tested a tokenized version of the Brazilian digital real using the Stellar network. This is one of the first steps of the digital real project, which represents Brazil’s efforts to create a central bank digital currency. As such, local cryptocurrency exchange Mercado Bitcoin conducted a series of pilot tests that explored the interconnection of a tokenized version of the digital real.

Digital currency and Open Banking

Since the pilot testing phases were successful, they proved that the Stellar blockchain could act as a proxy for the operation of the digital real. Mercado Bitcoin says the plan was to prove the feasibility and safety of conducting transactions with digital assets using a representation of the real on public networks.

Brazil is also diving deeper into the depths of Open Banking and it has started the second phase of Open Insurance implementation, which will run until July 2023. This allows for the sharing of personal data such as customer registration and movement related to products if the customers provide their consent.

The General Coordinator of Projects at the Superintendence of Private Insurance (Susep) explains that this phase will begin with the sharing of registration data and home insurance data. The opening of customer data will reportedly enable the development of more assertive and customised products that cater to the customers' needs and risks. Companies will supposedly be able to develop new tools and offer more solutions to their customers.

Source: Link


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Keywords: mobile payments, SMEs, customer experience, m-commerce
Categories: Payments & Commerce
Companies: Meta, WhatsApp
Countries: Brazil
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Payments & Commerce

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