PPRO acquires allpago to bridge a payments gap in Latin America

PPRO needed a quick fix to retain clients looking for a Latin American payments solution, acquiring local payments specialist allpago rather than embark on an IT project.

“The acquisition is filling an empty space in our global coverage. It was a make or buy decision. When we looked at allpago we saw that they had good technology and it was a cultural fit so it made sense. Latin America is important for our clients, so it made the decision to buy allpago easier,” stated Stefan Merz, chief operating officer at PPRO.

While PPRO did not disclose terms of the deal, which closed Wednesday, the company said the purchase was a mix of cash and stock.

PPRO has been increasing its presence in Latin American, working earlier this year with the OXXO convenience store chain in Mexico which operates a payment network to enable consumers to use cash payments in order to conduct e-commerce transactions.

“The allpago acquisition gives us a strong regional coverage of alternative payment networks for our clients to leverage. In Latin America the OXXO network [Mexico] and Boleto Bancario [Brazil] are the key ones companies need to be able to accept money from for e-commerce payments,” said Merz.

PPRO supports local payments for merchants selling to foreign consumers who don’t have or want to use a card network-based payment method.

Yapstone recently chose PPRO to expand its European vacation rentals business by allowing it to accept Sofort in Germany and iDeal in the Netherlands. In 2018 PayPal and Citigroup both invested in a $50 million fund raising round for PPRO. PayPal was the lead investor and was joined by Citi Ventures and HPE Growth Capital.

It's a model that payment companies in China, such as Alipay and WeChat Pay, have used to grow merchant networks outside of China.

And Klarna made a similar acquisition in Sofort, a local payment network for German consumers. Also, Ebay replaced PayPal as its payments provider in favor of Adyen to provide a local currency option.

“It’s hard to think about global e-commerce without Visa or Mastercard, especially in the U.S. market. The reality is that 77% of global e-commerce is transacted with local payment methods and not run on the card networks,” added Merz.

Asia is another area of focus for PPRO. For 2018, PPRO reported 48% global growth in its acquiring business and now works with 130 payment service providers (PSPs) to offer its clients access to more than 140 local payment methods. It recently opened a new office in Singapore to help support its growing global footprint.