For this article we met with Luis Escamilla, Country Manager Mexico at PayRetailers, and asked some questions. He explains the reason behind the presence in Mexico and some intricacies of the business.
Q: Luis, why is it that PayRetailers chose to open an office in Mexico?
A: PayRetailers has been founded in 2017, and it’s the same year that PayRetailers Mexico has been formed as the spearhead of the company and its payment solutions that serve online businesses in Latin America. Due to the peculiarities of the Mexican economy and market, the company has to expand and reinvent itself over time. This lies in our DNA – a permanent change, since our vision harbors the firm idea and conviction to help the financial inclusion of businesses and end users alike. This can only be achieved with a local team that can listen to the slightest changes of the market and adapt accordingly.
Q: What is your goal for the Mexican market?
A: In Latin America and in the particular case of Mexico, cash transactions are the most used means of payment. On the one hand it’s important for us to maintain this cultural inheritance while adapting to the variants that electronic commerce of goods and services brings with it. On the other hand we search for new channels and new ways for enhancements of our product and service suite every day that in turn may change the culture of payments in itself.
Our strong local presence in the market led us to see that there is a struggle to change the perception that the collective imagination has about the institutions that provide some type of financial service. Our industry sector has been stigmatized so that in some way certain practices and the robustness of some services have slowed it down making it little reactive to the needs of the users as well as costly in terms of commissions.
PayRetailers is among the few companies that are seeking to change this situation and offers useful, simple and accessible alternatives to competitors and established forms of payment to improve the shopping experience on the websites of our affiliated businesses. We are even about to launch new alternatives to firstly extend our product suite to any commercial platform on the internet and secondly also for physical transactions in stores.
Q: What part does the team play in conducting business in Mexico?
A: With all our ambitious goals, we have confidence in our team of professionals and experts that we have formed for our office in Mexico City. We carefully select our people to get persons with strong experience yet being young which in turn provides us with the necessary intrinsic drive to tackle all the aspects that our work entails. This puts as in a strong position to understand all aspects of the payment service provider world and the needs that each technological advance brings with it.
After almost 4 years since our formation and being fully established in one of the best quarters of our beloved Mexico City, PayRetailers has become part of the Fintech Association. Together we are a motor of change, with helping through our experience and methodology and developing best practices for the sector. The growth of alternative payment services in the region are at all times protected and surveilled by the local regulator CNBV (National Banking and Securities Commission).
Our company culture is dynamic, and we can react efficiently to each of the challenges that are presented to us, not only in Mexico but in Latin America as a whole. It can be seen as a region that has more similarities than differences, and this has taught us the practice of promptness in reaction and a capacity for analyzing our very large areas of opportunity for the future.
Q: What are your personal thoughts about the future of PayRetailers?
A: Mexico is a country and a market with peculiarities that thanks to our adaptability we have managed to read and adapt to, so that our products are an option that offers real solutions. Our growth has been exponential from the first day of our existence; But I also believe that in the almost immediate future even bigger things are coming. I look forward to this as we have set up the company very well to implement new products and services. From our founder and CEO with four years to the very recent new team members in the company – all are striving to doing things well and in the same way contributing little by little to optimizing our processes for e-commerce and financial services to truly play a leading role against the much-cited issue of financial inclusion.
If your company wants to enter the Mexican or Latin American markets please contact us to get to know more about our solutions. PayRetailers runs brick-and-mortar offices with experts in each of its operative countries which allows for achieving the best product-market-fit.
