With the objective of growing five times the volume of operations that pass through its platform, Conekta, the fintech aggregate of payments, seeks to leave behind the scenes and approach the final consumer to become the intermediary between this and the businesses. This platform presumes to be the one who has accompanied e-commerce in Mexico, facing fraud and promoting financial inclusion.
The ambition of Conekta would mean that the monthly operations of its customers would grow five times, which would go from 250 million dollars per year in 2018 to 700 million dollars in 2019. To achieve this, the company has included Google and its customers among its clients. also plans to launch in the summer of this year an own application to make payments through mobile devices, with which it aims to take payments in cash to the cell phone.
“We can not wait for 100% of the population to the bank, so we want to take the cash payment to the next level,” said Héctor Cárdenas, CEO of Conekta, during the presentation of the re-launch of the brand logo that is now less corporate and is more linked to its startup character.
Conekta is the company that in early 2017 allied with the chain of convenience stores Oxxo, owned by Grupo Femsa, to launch the Oxxopay electronic payment service, which allowed electronic businesses to receive cash payments at the chain’s branches with notifications in real time. According to the company, around 7.9 million people in Mexico started buying online through the platform developed by Conekta.
Thanks to the alliance with Oxxo, in Conekta cash payments in electronic stores, reached 48% in just two years, three percentage points less than card payments, which are 51% of what was transacted in this period. According to the E-Commerce Study 2018 conducted by the Internet.mx Association, although only 7% of e-commerce users in Mexico prefer cash payment in convenience stores, 45% of businesses with e-commerce offer this service and for 61% this is the main form of offline payment. This is reflected in the fact that, according to Cárdenas, 1.5 million people have been able to pay with cash in Oxxo for some of their online purchases, with the growth of 800% year-on-year since 2017.
Currently, Conekta has 2,200 clients who process their payments through the company, including the Uber and Cabify transport platforms, the Bitso crypto exchange, the Gaia and Luuna specialized e-commerce, and the Facebook and Google technologies.
Fraud, the biggest challenge of the means of payment
In his own words, Héctor Cárdenas began to “fail” in 2010, when he launched with two Canadian partners a free online directory like Yelp or Foursquare. “Nobody used the 2000 lines of code that made up the application,” he said. It was there when he realized the opportunity in e-commerce that was in Mexico and started in 2012 to develop an online store creator.
Cárdenas failed again. Their customers launched their stores online, but they could not sell. One of the main reasons for this phenomenon was that the chargebacks made to these businesses for the risk of online fraud amounted to just over 30% of the transactions. “The most difficult challenge was not to give access to businesses so they could accept online payments, fraud was the biggest challenge, especially because in Mexico fraudsters are not persecuted on issues of electronic commerce,” he said.
At the end of 2012, the means of payment became the focus of the startup that was then converted into Conekta and whose objective was to develop a solution so that businesses could make online payments through a fast, simple integration that will solve the problem of fraud in Mexico.
Since then, the company has managed to reduce the chargeback on home delivery transactions that pass through its platform from 31 to 1%, and in the case of mobility companies such as Uber and Cabify, from 12 to 0.5 percent.
Although Conekta is not the only platform with which cash payments are made in Oxxo – other companies such as Amazon and Mercado Libre also offer this option – it is the only one that offers cash payment with real-time verification. “The others take a day, Conekta is the only one that offers the sending of the confirmation of payment in cash to the commerce. This helps retailers with inventory issues because you do not have to leave the product sitting one day to see if they paid you, “he said.
Also published on Medium.