Pierpaolo Barbieri: evaluation

Transcript context

…How do they handle a wallet? That’s the revolution. If you want to specifically talk about Mexico, it’s fantastic because it’s my first international market. We spent two years designing the product that we released there, and today we reached the first 100,000 accounts. It took us less than half the time it took us to reach that amount in Argentina. The real difference in Mexico is that 70 percent of people are, as you said, outside of the system. They don’t have a means of payment that isn’t cash, and that’s one of the real tragedies of Mexico because 86 percent to 87 percent of transactions, even after COVID, take place in cash. The first thing that you have to do is introduce these people to the idea that you can have a means of payment that allows you to buy something or get something that isn’t within your immediate 8-block or 10-block radius. When you have a card and an account, then you free yourself from that branch where your friends or your family members go to to get the cash. That’s the guy that has the racket. The real expensive fees are charged by the company that says, “I’m the only game in town. I’m the only place where you can send these people cash.” Why? Because cash is the only thing they know. However, if you have a card and a universal account, which 70 percent of Mexico doesn’t have, then you have the ability to use that account to receive the funds and cut out the person that has that little branch. That branch is unnecessary at this point because even if Mexican networks are not as good as US networks, you still have 4G in most of the country. The problem is that we cannot give people accounts. Across Latin America, the reason we started Ualá is that over 50 percent of adults are in that situation of never having had a payment mechanism. You need to make it super easy, but it turns out you can teach people how to use a MasterCard because everybody wants Netflix, and everybody wants to have the ability to have Spotify. Once people learn how to use the account on the card, then you can boost that and give them the ability to receive funds in those accounts. You don’t have to do the financial engineering at the personal level. You do it at the company level, but the person sees radically lower transaction fees. Okay, my friends — they’re comfortable with prepaid cards. What does Ualá offer them that a normal, plain old prepaid card does not?…

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