- Company’s growth plan takes it to MENA
- Seeks to capitalise on fast-growing e-commerce business in the region
- Platform radically simplifies multiple local payments for online merchants in developed economies
dLocal, the business-oriented remittance services tech company that helps merchants from developed economies accept cross-border payments from customers who primarily live in emerging markets, is building on yet another year of solid growth with a major expansion of its international payments platform to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).
The company was originally created to solve a problem facing predominantly western merchants, like Airbnb, Facebook and Uber, who wanted to receive payments for services provided in Asia or Latin America. Before dLocal, receiving payments was bordering on the positively nightmarish because of major operational differences in each market. After dLocal, that all changed. Its platform effectively provides the back-end infrastructure to make all this possible, in the form of its single, integrated payment interface which links to more than 300 different local payment methods, including cash payouts, credit cards, debit cards, mobile wallets, online money transfers and SMS.
The startup’s offerings to the MENA region will begin in Egypt and Morocco, aiming to simplify merchant penetration of the e-commerce market via its local payment processing platform with its mass payout capabilities.
The reason the tech upstart has chosen MENA for its next expansion isn’t hard to discern: there has been burgeoning interest in the region from digital media and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) merchants who are hungry to capitalise on the area’s fast growing internet penetration and projected e-commerce growth, all oiled by enabling digital payment reforms.
Recent research from the company identified a range of strong growth trends in the MENA region, including a combination of regulatory reforms and technological innovations that signal the dawn of a new era of flourishing e-commerce market development.
Moroccan consumers are already eagerly embracing new online money transfer tools to purchase their goods and services, progressively dropping the conventional payments methods they’d previously relied on, such as cash payment and even wanting to see and touch goods before buying them.
Meanwhile, Egypt’s growing population of young, tech-savvy shoppers – half of whom are aged below 30 years – is inexorably advancing the trend towards online shopping and online international payments.
The company’s platform is already capable of enabling SaaS providers, online retailers, online marketplaces and internet travel agency merchants to receive local payment options and remit mass cross-border payments as payouts without having to control a local entity or find their way through the intricate, fragmented regional payments ecosystems that remain prevalent in these emerging growth markets.
Over the last 18 months, dLocal has more than doubled its team to over 120 employees internationally and opened a new office in Tel Aviv, Israel to grow its sales, R&D, security and other core departments. In 2017, it expanded into Turkey and India.
In a statement issued earlier this year, dLocal CEO Sebastián Kanovich, said: “The flexibility of our platform, and knowledge of local markets, has allowed us to customize the way each client enters emerging markets – whether they wish to launch in one country a year, or five countries in one quarter.”
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