China’s emerging markets ties are huge opportunity for B2B payments space: Ebanx

Ebanx, a Brazilian financial technology company focused on e-commerce, has identified demand for payment digitisation in the business-to-business (B2B) space in China and the increased adoption of the unified payments interface (UPI) in India as real time payments (RTP) become prevalent globally.

Amid rising demand for cheaper, faster and more efficient ways to pay, and with merchant acceptance on the rise, real-time transactions globally are forecast to grow at an annual rate of 21.3 per cent between 2022 and 2027, payments technology provider ACI Worldwide said in a report last year.

“There is a huge opportunity arising from increasing business ties between China and other emerging markets, and the same revolution that has happened to the digital consumer market is already happening to B2B payments in a scalable way,” said Paula Bellizia, president of global payments at Ebanx.

Ebanx is active in 29 countries across Latin America, Africa, and Asia and its backers include US private equity giant Advent International, which invested US$430 million in the company in 2021.

India accounted for 46 per cent of all global real-time transactions while Brazil with 15 per cent and China with 9 per cent were the second and third biggest, ACI Worldwide’s report said. It projected that RTPs could account for more than a quarter of all electronic payments globally by 2027.

The current digital payment infrastructure for cross-border B2B in emerging markets is still incomplete, with many participants complaining about the bureaucracy and unwieldiness of the system, Bellizia said. “This is where Ebanx is super well-positioned, as we are already working with many B2B platforms in China [that are connected to] businesses in other parts of the world,” she said.

Ebanx is focused on expanding its merchant-base in the region while continuing to improve the experience of digital transactions and payments, she added.

“We are really trying to digitise the whole flow … we’re hoping to see better approval rates out of the transactions, better experience in terms of using the platform, better user satisfaction, as well as faster, and more transparent processing,” said Bellizia.

Ebanx’s ties with China date back to 2013, when AliExpress, an online retail service provider in the Alibaba Group, joined the platform for payment processing in Brazil. Ebanx’s services allowed AliExpress, and later several other e-commerce companies including online fast-fashion retailer Shein, to integrate local electronic payment methods, such as domestic bank cards, cash vouchers and e-wallets into their payment ecosystems.

In China, Ebanx said it serves close to 100 enterprise clients including verticals such as online retail, digital games, social media, tourism and software as a service.

Duan Wei, vice-president for APAC at Ebanx, also identified India as an important market for expansion.

“The UPI technology revolution has already been adopted by 300 million people in the country, and that’s just a quarter of its population,” Duan said, referring to India’s real-time payments system that allows users to transfer money across banks. “If you think about how this payment method can move people into the digital commerce space, this is just one of the biggest [markets] in the world.”

Developed by the National Payments Corporation of India in 2016, UPI allows users to move funds using their phones without having to input bank details or other sensitive information.

Duan said India has become a priority market because of its size “the penetration of new payment methods, as well as regulatory support for digitisation”, adding that the company will continue to develop partnerships with the country’s domestic banks and fintechs or companies that use technology to automate financial services.

Ebanx filed for an initial public offering (IPO) in 2021, but has postponed the listing, with Bellizia saying there was no plan to launch the offering this year.