- PayPal to work alongside MercadoLibre, in which it owns a partial stake
- The two firms will offer new payment options to customers in Brazil and Mexico, and will open up various payment pathways around the world
- “By working closely, we can jointly leverage our scale and platform capabilities to help drive inclusion and access to the global digital economy”, says PayPal CEO
Online money transfer firm PayPal has revealed that it is set to work alongside an e-commerce site based in Latin America.
The firm will work alongside MercadoLibre, which is one of Latin America’s biggest internet-based commercial payments systems.
MercadoLibre is partially owned by PayPal, but the new development is an official “commercial agreement” which will see PayPal offered as a payment option at the checkout on the MercadoLibre site.
At present, it is expected that the two markets which will receive the option will be Mexico and Brazil.
Unusually, the news about the new partnership came from the official LinkedIn page of Dan Schulman, who is the CEO of PayPal.
On his page, he went into more detail about how the new partnership would work – and explained that remittances in various directions would be enabled under the new partnership.
“As part of the agreement, PayPal will be made available as a payment option in the Mercado Pago online checkout for people in Brazil and Mexico, which opens the door for PayPal’s 300 million customers to shop at hundreds of thousands of new merchants”, he said.
“PayPal will also be accepted in the MercadoLibre marketplace in Brazil and Mexico for cross-border purchases.
“Similarly, we will offer Mercado Pago as a payment method at PayPal merchants around the world, allowing more than 48 million Mercado Pago users in Brazil and Mexico to pay with the method they love and trust”, he explained.
Schulman’s statement also went into some detail about the impact on Xoom, another PayPal product.
“Additionally, we will expand Xoom’s presence by allowing Mercado Pago users to receive remittances into their Mercado Pago wallet initially in Mexico and Brazil”, he said.
He also sounded a positive note about the prospects for the partnership in the future.
“This is just the beginning of the great things we can do together. By working closely, we can jointly leverage our scale and platform capabilities to help drive inclusion and access to the global digital economy”, he said.
MercadoLibre is a major player in the Latin American payments market, and it is based in almost 20 countries.
These include major markets such as Argentina and Peru.
On its website, it claims that there is a major e-commerce presence in the region which it is proud to support.
“…we provide our users with robust online commerce and payments tools that not only contribute to the development of a large and growing ecommerce community in Latin America (a region with a population of over 635 million people and one of the fastest-growing Internet penetration rates in the world), but also foster entrepreneurship and social mobility”, it says.
To discover more about what the key players in the remittances market are doing, check out our news pages over at our magazine.
