China’s growing business ties with emerging markets offer ‘huge opportunity’ in B2B payment space: Ebanx

Ebanx, a Brazilian financial technology company focused on e-commerce, has identified demand for payment digitisation in the business-to-business (B2B) space in China and the increased adoption of the unified payments interface (UPI) in India as real time payments (RTP) become prevalent globally.

Amid rising demand for cheaper, faster and more efficient ways to pay, and with merchant acceptance on the rise, real-time transactions globally are forecast to grow at an annual rate of 21.3 per cent between 2022 and 2027, payments technology provider ACI Worldwide said in a report last year.

“There is a huge opportunity arising from increasing business ties between China and other emerging markets, and the same revolution that has happened to the digital consumer market is already happening to B2B payments in a scalable way,” said Paula Bellizia, president of global payments at Ebanx.

Ebanx is active in 29 countries across Latin America, Africa, and Asia and its backers include US private equity giant Advent International, which invested US$430 million in the company in 2021.

India accounted for 46 per cent of all global real-time transactions while Brazil with 15 per cent and China with 9 per cent were the second and third biggest, ACI Worldwide’s report said. It projected that RTPs could account for more than a quarter of all electronic payments globally by 2027.

The current digital payment infrastructure for cross-border B2B in emerging markets is still incomplete, with many participants complaining about the bureaucracy and unwieldiness of the system, Bellizia said. “This is where Ebanx is super well-positioned, as we are already working with many B2B platforms in China [that are connected to] businesses in other parts of the world,” she said.

Ebanx is focused on expanding its merchant-base in the region while continuing to improve the experience of digital transactions and payments, she added.