Conductor sees big opportunity in Latin America for payments and banking as a service

Embedded finance is powering the launch of all kinds of new companies and products around the world. Brazil-based Conductor is a digital banking and payments platform. It processes 1 billion payment transactions annually, totalling over $20 billion in payment volume, and serves over 250 clients with more than 85 million cards.

The company is expanding throughout Latin America after raising a $150 million investment round.

Chief Strategy Officer Marcelo Jacques joins me on the podcast to discuss the company’s expansion plans throughout the region, including how it will compete against foreign embedded finance platforms entering Latin America.

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The following excerpts were edited for clarity.

Latin American payments and banking

Conductor is a payments infrastructure provider in Brazil and Latin America. We started our business as an issue processor, processing from all types of cards from different networks: private label cards, prepaid debit, credit, you name it. We evolved our offering to expand and offer more solutions within the payments value chain.

So today, we offer payments processing, issuer and acquire processing. We offer banking as a service. Inside Conductor in Brazil, we have a regulated entity called Dock which is our subsidiary and is responsible for offering our banking as a service solution. On top of issuing cards, we enable our clients to offer payment accounts and digital wallets on a white label basis. We take care of the tech, the infrastructure, the regulatory, the network connections, and our clients just have to worry about doing their apps and focusing on CX and customer acquisition and the rest. They just plug into our APIs and go about their business.

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International expansion

We are originally from Brazil. This year, we started to expand outside to other Latin American geographies. We are already issue processors in Peru; we’re setting up in Colombia; and we’re setting up in Ecuador, as well. And we also have a transaction capturing platform that came with an acquisition that we did this year. It’s called Muxi. It’s already in Argentina, Mexico and Peru. So, we are in six different countries today — Brazil being the most relevant by far.

In Latin America, we’re seeing the increased digitalization of payments. Some markets are already quite digital. You have new use cases and new solutions, but people already have a lot of access to digital payments. But when you talk about them, there is still under penetration. Brazil itself is under penetrated. But if you compare it to other geographies, such as Mexico, we are actually higher penetrated in terms of digital payments than these countries.

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