Credit cards, PayPal, checks, cash, cryptocurrencies... the world of payments is full of options. Although a priori so much variety seems good, the problem comes when a person who wants a service or product does not have the payment mechanism required by the provider. And the same happens when a small business that wants to expand does not have a compatible method with the rest of the world. This situation is accentuated in regions such as Latin America, Asia, and Africa, where local payment options prevail, which prevents the population from accessing digital commerce available globally. The small size of Uruguay, for example, caused foreign e-commerce companies to consider it unprofitable to invest resources in adapting to their particularities of payment.
To solve this problem, in 2016 Sebastián Kanovich, a native of this country, created dLocal, a platform that integrates more than 300 alternative payment methods in a single API. Available options include cash payment, for example, Bank Ticket in Brazil and RapiPago in Argentina, digital payment options such as UPI and NetBanking in India, and UnionPay in China, bank transfers in 13 countries as well as local cards. Thanks to this advancement, many citizens have been able to become clients of companies such as Sony PlayStation, Booking.com, Uber, among others and Kanovich has won the Innovators Under 35 Latin America 2018 from MIT Technology Review in Spanish.
"The world is increasingly linked to the level of consumption, but payment infrastructures are not the same everywhere, and large companies have too much to focus on," Kanovich summarizes. When he realized how generalizable this problem was to other countries around the world, he quickly saw a business opportunity: to act as an intermediary and offer large companies a payment gateway adapted to local needs in a single step.
This is Kanovich’s commercial vision: "We are building a road, the infrastructure that allows business opportunities to reach more people." The road built by dLocal is two-way. In addition to allowing customers to buy and pay with their usual method, companies can use this channel to make payments to suppliers and contractors. In this way, any company, large or small, can face its international expansion to new markets without having to worry about adapting its payment system to local needs.
The CEO of Hag Consulting & Ventures, Rodrigo de Alvarenga, considers that dLocal "solves local payment in a way that electronic stores can access a greater number of customers." As a measure of the success of Kanovich, this jury member of Innovators Under 35 Latin America 2018 highlights the figure of 2 billion dollars in transactions managed in 2017 by dLocal.
