With more than 10,000 clients in Argentina, the Increase fintech is preparing to begin its expansion at a regional level while expanding its range of services for local businesses.The objective is clear: to become a service supermarket, to which establishments can go and not only to improve their card sales information but also when they need a credit, insurance or develop a digital marketing strategy.
This initiative will face the hand of those who capitalized last year, including Mercado Libre and Banco Supervielle. The strategy aims for everyone to win: Increase, from the expansion of products, and its partners, for the possibility of reaching other segments.
Fintech developed two solutions:
- Increase Card: that allows stores to have visible the sales they make with a credit card
- Increase Conciliation: that allows them to keep an efficient control of their transactions, based on data crossing
This information is consolidated and exhibited in a unified manner in order to have a better monitoring of your billing and operative
It is more efficient than "puncturing" the slips of paper issued by the POS in each of the operations or keeping them under the box so that, when closing the business, copy each of the amounts in an Excel spreadsheet and have the figure just a while after having closed the premises.
"With Increase Card we already offer solutions to more than 10,000 customers and more than 25,000 subscribers in the country, 80% of our users are businesses with less than five POS terminals, although we also serve large companies, such as LATAM or Shell, our focus is to empower small businesses, "says iProUP, Pablo Croci, marketing director of Increase.Increase Conciliation allows establishments to cross-check information about what they buy and sell. For example, card sales against bank liquidation or stock versus what is invoiced, among other possibilities. With this solution, mainly, the company will go out in search of more clients in Latin America.
Increase Card is almost a service tailored to the Argentine idiosyncrasy. Although now the credit cards pay at 10 days (before it was at 19), having all the billing information instantly takes value in these latitudes for that reason. Not so in the countries of the region in which this liquidation takes place in much less time.
The company claims that the advantage of these solutions for businesses is that the processing is done online and in just minutes, which results in greater profits from that business because there is no room for errors. This applies to both one and another service.
The process of regional expansion began to be faced a year ago. And the firm understands that the time has come to make the bags and leave them at destination.
Before the end of 2019, plans to land in Ecuador and the Dominican Republic, which will also represent a double win: the solution developed in Argentina will be achieved not only by the benefits of the current software promotion law but, later, by the of knowledge economy. The developed by Increase qualifies as export of services.Supermarket services
As they put chips in the region, the company will go one step further to become a multi-product platform. That is to say, a space in which to mount new services so that the stores can acquire them when they need it. And if in a moment they do not require more, they can unsubscribe on the same platform. It is the scheme that, in the industry, is known as Software as a Service (SaaS, its acronym in English).
What features could be mounted on the Increase platform? Insurance, credit, marketing services, among others. "The idea is to create an ecosystem of solutions that add value to the client with third-party services," Croci adds. The establishments have a lot to incorporate in technological matters.
To take this step, it will be supported by several of the companies that last year funded it with US $ 3 million. It is a group made up of several shareholders, among which are Mercado Libre Fund, Supervielle Group, Arfintech, Lucens Capital, Agrega Partners and Revolution's Ride of the Rest Seed Fund.
Mercado Libre and Supervielle, for example, could be those "third parties" that provide their services of credits or insurance in that "supermarket" for businesses in which Increase intends to be erected. A supermarket that, in addition, allows to consolidate the community created with the businesses that use their services.
Beyond the fintech is a company that sells technology, postulates other purposes. Among them, the creation of a community among businesses that offers them the possibility of training, access to program benefits and, even, upload their products and services in that space.
"There are clients who put together a group on WhatsApp and the other day one of them asked for help because the POS had stuck in. The other members of the group appeared explaining how to solve it, because it had already happened to them. we seek to help them in that, "says Croci.
This also allows them to detect the most frequent problems in the commerce sector. When it comes to enumerating the weaknesses, he mentions that they arise in terms of the organization of human resources, in marketing and sales, and also in matters related to electronic commerce. Access to credit and legal aspects complement the panorama of difficulties that the segment supports.
In return, the strengths are concentrated in the "entrepreneurial genre". "For good and for bad, the commerce puts soul and life to each project, and those that survive is thanks to that," he says. For that reason, it points out some of the advantages mentioned by customers once they started using these types of solutions:
- Reduction of time spent calculating card sales
- Management of rejections and chargebacks in a more efficient way
- Recovery of money in cases where it was deposited in other accounts
"We are a company B. That is, we generate triple impact: environmental, social and economic, this is because we reduce the use of paper, we serve a segment that nobody covered and we added technology with direct economic impact", underlines the head of marketing of the company."We know that there are shops that if it were not for Mercado Pago or Increase, they would not have technology," the executive completes.
The mention of Mercado Pago is not accidental, not only because Mercado Libre is one of those that injected capital in 2018, but also because less than a month ago Increase's platform incorporated Mercado Pago and, with it, its different alternatives.
The use of the QR code as an alternative to pay for various purchases - and which was launched just over a year ago - is being highly successful among businesses and for fintech. Adding it among the benefits to take control of sales was also beneficial for customers.