Luca Napoli

3 results

Pagos Digitales - Foco en America Latina

Impulsado por las nuevas tecnologías y las tendencias globales, el mercado de pagos digitales está floreciendo en todo el mundo. Con una valoración de más de $ 68 mil millones en 2021 y expectativas de crecimiento de doble dígitos durante la próxima década, los mercados emergentes están liderando el camino en términos de expansión relativa. Un panorama que una vez fue dominado por grandes bancos y compañías de tarjetas de crédito ahora está siendo atacado por disruptores interesados en capturar una cuota de mercado. Según un estudio de McKinsey , hay cuatro factores principales en el núcleo de esta transformación: Adopción de pagos cashless inducidos por la pandemia E-commerce Impulso del gobierno a los pagos digitales Fintech Cabe destacar como la pandemia ha sido una gran catalizadora en el aumento de la inclusión financiera al fomentar medios de pago alternativos y nuevas formas de pedir préstamos y ahorrar. Estos nuevos servicios digitales son, de hecho, más fáciles de acceder y consumir. En América Latina y el Caribe (LAC), la Covid provocó un aumento dramático en los pagos sin efectivo, el 40% de los adultos realizó una compra en línea, el 14% de los cuales lo hizo por primera vez en su vida. El e-commerce ha visto un crecimiento estelar, con una penetración que probablemente superará el 70% de la población en 2022, los actores nacionales y globales, incluidos Mercado Libre y Falabella, están impulsando la innovación de pagos digitales para proporcionar una experiencia de cliente cada vez más fluida en sus plataformas. Los bancos centrales están promoviendo nuevas infraestructuras para pagos en tiempo real, con el objetivo de proporcionar una tecnología más económica y rápida para la transferencia de dinero tanto para ciudadanos como para empresas. PIX es probablemente el mayor caso de éxito. Una plataforma de pagos instantáneos desarrollada por el Banco Central do Brasil (Banco Central de Brasil), comenzó a operar en noviembre de 2020 y, en 18 meses, más del 75% de los brasileños adultos lo había utilizado al menos una vez. La red procesa alrededor de $250 mil millones en pagos anualizados, aproximadamente el 20 % del gasto total de los clientes. Los usuarios (incluidos los trabajadores autónomos) pueden enviar y recibir pagos en tiempo real a través de una interfaz sencilla, 24 horas al día, 7 días a la semana y de forma gratuita. Las empresas tienen que pagar una pequeña tasa. En Estados Unidos, la Federal Reserve ha anunciado que lanzará FedNow a mediados de 2023, una red de pagos con características similares a PIX. Estas iniciativas tienen como objetivo resolver problemas como los acuerdos lentos y la baja interoperabilidad entre las partes. Los bancos establecidos aún poseen la mayor parte del mercado de pagos digitales, sin embargo, las fintech han estado amenazando este dominio, aprovechando su agilidad para actuar rápidamente y satisfacer las necesidades de los clientes de formas más innovadoras y creativas. Sin el lastre de los sistemas legacy, o los modelos comerciales atados a las viejas redes de pago, las fintechs no han dudado en probar y adoptar nuevas tecnologías y sistemas de pago. Su estrategia enfocada a móvil y digital les está ayudando a capturar y retener al segmento más joven del mercado, que exige experiencias integradas en tiempo real con las que pueden interactuar tan sólo pulsando un botón. Un ejemplo es Paggo, una fintech guatemalteca que ayuda a las empresas a agilizar los pagos permitiéndoles compartir un simple código QR que los clientes pueden escanear para transferir dinero. El panorama de los pagos no solo se ve afectado por fuerzas externas, los cambios que provienen de la industria también están remodelando la experiencia del cliente y habilitando nuevos servicios. La norma ISO 20022 es un estándar flexible para el intercambio de datos que está siendo adoptado por la mayoría de las instituciones de la industria financiera para estandarizar la forma en que se comunican entre sí, optimizando así la interoperabilidad. Gracias a la adopción de ISO 20022, es más sencillo para los bancos leer y procesar mensajes, lo que se traduce en procesos internos más fluidos y una automatización más sencilla. Para los usuarios finales, esto significa pagos más rápidos y potencialmente más baratos, así como aplicaciones financieras más ricas e integradas. 3DS2 está siendo adoptado por el ecosistema de pagos con tarjeta de crédito y débito. Se trata, esencialmente, de una solución de autenticación de pagos que sirve para transacciones de compras en línea. De manera similar a ISO 20022, el usuario final ni siquiera conocerá la tecnología subyacente, sino que sólo percibirá un pago más fluido y sin fricciones. 3DS2 evita que el usuario sea redirigido a su aplicación bancaria para confirmar la compra de un artículo en línea, ahora todo sucede en el sitio web o la aplicación del vendedor. Todo esto se hace al mismo tiempo que se mejora la detección y prevención de fraude; esta nueva solución dificulta el uso de la tarjeta de crédito o débito sin autorización. El beneficio de la adopción de 3DS2 es doble: por un lado, el usuario tiene mayor confianza, por otro, los comerciantes están más contentos debido a una menor tasa de abandono de clientes; de hecho, el miedo al fraude en el proceso de pago suele ser una de las principales razones para abandonar una compra en línea. Esta solución es especialmente ventajosa para la región de LAC, donde, a pesar de la amplia adopción del comercio electrónico, las personas aún se muestran reacias a realizar transacciones online. Uno de los factores que contribuyen a esta incongruencia es el miedo al fraude. Cybersource informó que en 2019, una quinta parte de las transacciones de comercio electrónico se marcaron como potencialmente fraudulentas y el 20 % se bloquearon, es decir, más de 6 veces el promedio mundial. Es evidente que la adopción de 3DS2 por parte de las plataformas fomentará la confianza de los compradores online. Vale la pena mencionar también el papel que juegan la blockchain y las criptomonedas. Redes como Ethereum o Lightning son una alternativa descentralizada a las redes de pago más tradicionales. En los últimos años, más y más personas han comenzado a utilizar esta tecnología debido a sus características únicas: tarifas bajas, tiempo de procesamiento rápido y alcance global. América Latina ha visto una explosión en la adopción debido a varios factores, siendo muy prominentes las remesas y los pagos en stablecoins. Los proveedores de servicios de remesas tradicionales son, de hecho, más lentos y más caros que las redes de blockchain. Especialmente en Argentina, un número cada vez mayor de trabajadores autónomos exigen que se les pague en USDC o USDT, dos stablecoins vinculadas al valor del dólar, para así poder protegerse de la inflación. Está claro que el panorama de los pagos está evolucionando rápidamente, por un lado, los clientes esperan productos y servicios que se integren a la perfección con todos los aspectos de sus vidas digitales. Cada vez que una aplicación se percibe como lenta, mal diseñada o simplemente le faltan algunas funciones, el usuario puede cambiar fácilmente a la alternativa de un competidor. Por otro lado, la cantidad de actores que compiten por su participación en el mercado de pagos digitales está en auge, lo que reduce los márgenes de los productos tradicionales. La única forma de navegar con éxito en este entorno complejo es invertir en innovación y en la creación de nuevos modelos de negocio. No existe un planteamiento único para enfrentarse a tales desafíos, pero no hay duda de que toda empresa con éxito necesita aprovechar el poder de los datos y la tecnología para proporcionar a sus clientes la experiencia personalizada y en tiempo real que exigen. En MongoDB creemos que una base sólida para lograrlo está representada por una developer data platform altamente flexible y escalable, que permite a las empresas innovar más rápido y monetizar mejor sus datos de pago. ¡Visite la web de Servicios Financieros de MongoDB para obtener más información!

March 15, 2023

Digital Payments - Latin America Focus

Pushed by new technologies and global trends, the digital payments market is flourishing all around the world. With a valuation at over USD 68 billion in 2021 and expectations to grow to double digits over the next decade, emerging markets are leading the way in terms of relative expansion. A landscape once dominated by incumbents - big banks and credit card companies - is now being attacked by disruptors that are interested in capturing a market share. According to a McKinsey study , there are four major factors at the core of this transformation: Pandemic-induced cashless payments adoption E-commerce Government push for digital payments Fintechs Interestingly, the pandemic has been a big catalyst in the rise of financial inclusion by encouraging alternative means of payment and new ways of borrowing and saving. These new digital services are in fact easier to access and to consume. In Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), Covid spurred a dramatic increase in cashless payments, 40% of adults made an online purchase, 14% of which did it for the first time in their life. E-commerce has experienced a stellar growth, with a penetration that will likely exceed 70% of the population in 2022, domestic and global players including Mercado Libre and Falabella are pushing digital payment innovation to provide an ever smoother customer experience on their platforms. Central banks are promoting new infrastructure for near real-time payments, with the goal of providing a cheaper and faster technology for money transfer both for citizens and businesses. PIX is probably the biggest success story. An instant payment platform developed by Banco Central do Brasil (Brazil Central Bank), it began operating in November 2020, and within 18 months, over 75% of adult Brazilians had used it at least once. The network processes around $250 Billion in annualized payments, about 20% of total customer spend. Users (including self employed workers) can send and receive real-time payments through a simple interface, 24/7 and free of charge. Businesses have to pay a small fee. In the United States, the Federal Reserve has announced it will be launching FedNow in mid 2023, a payment network with characteristics similar to PIX. These initiatives aim to solve issues such as slow settlements and low interoperability between parties Incumbent banks still own the lion’s share of the digital payment market, however, fintechs have been threatening this dominance by leveraging their agility to execute fast and cater to customer needs in innovative and creative ways. Without the burden of legacy systems to weigh them down, or business models tied to old payment rails, fintechs have been enthusiastic testers and adopters of new technologies and payment networks. Their mobile and digital first approach is helping them capture and retain the younger segment of the market, which expect integrated real-time experiences they can consume at the touch of a button. An example is Paggo, a Guatemalan fintech that helps businesses streamline payments by enabling them to share a simple QR code that customers can scan to transfer money. The payment landscape is not only affected by external forces, changes coming from within the industry are also reshaping the customer experience and enabling new services: ISO 20022 is a flexible standard for data interchange that is being adopted by most financial industry institutions to standardize the way they communicate between each other, thus streamlining interoperability. Thanks to the adoption of ISO 20022, it’s more straightforward for banks to read and process messages, this translates into smoother internal processes and easier automatization. For end users this means faster and potentially cheaper payments, as well as richer and more integrated financial apps. 3DS2 is being embraced by the credit and debit card payments ecosystem. It essentially is a payment authentication solution that serves online shopping transactions. Similarly to ISO 20022, the end user won’t even be aware of the underlying technology, but will only experience a smoother and frictionless checkout. 3DS2 avoids the user being redirected to their banking app for confirmation when buying an item online, now it’s all happening on the website or app of the seller. This is all done while also enhancing fraud detection and prevention; this new solution makes it harder to use one’s credit or debit card without authorization. 3DS2 adoption benefit is twofold: on the one hand the user has increased confidence, on the other hand merchants are happier because of a lower customer abandonment rate, in fact fear of fraud at checkout is usually one of the main reasons for ditching an online purchase. This solution is especially beneficial for the LAC region, where, despite wide adoption of e-commerce, people are still reluctant to transact online. One of the factors contributing to this oddity is fear of fraud, Cybersource reported that in 2019, a fifth of e-commerce transactions were flagged as potentially fraudulent and 20% were blocked, that’s over 6 times the global average. It is evident how online shoppers’ trust will be encouraged by the platforms’ adoption of 3DS2. It is worth also mentioning the role played by blockchain and cryptocurrencies. Networks such as Ethereum or Lightning are effectively a decentralized alternative to the more traditional payment rails. Over the last few years more and more people have started to use this technology because of its unique features: low fees, fast processing time and global reach. Latin America has seen an explosion in adoption due to several factors, remittances and stablecoin payments being highly prominent. Traditional remittance service providers are in fact slower and more expensive than blockchain networks. Especially in Argentina, an increasing number of autonomous workers are demanding to be paid in USDC or USDT, two stablecoins pegged to the value of the dollar, thus being able to stave off inflation. It is clear that the payment landscape is rapidly evolving, on the one end customers expect products and services that integrate seamlessly with every aspect of their digital lives. Whenever an app is perceived as slow, poorly designed or simply missing some features, the user can easily switch to a competitor’s alternative. On the other hand, the number of players contending for their share in the digital payments market is expanding, driving down margins of traditional products. The only way to successfully navigate this complex environment is investing in innovation and in creating new business models. There’s no unique approach to face such challenges, but there’s no doubt that every successful business needs to harness the power of data and technology to provide its customers with the personalized and real-time experience they demand. We at MongoDB believe that a solid foundation to achieve that is represented by a highly flexible and scalable developer data platform, allowing companies to innovate faster and better monetize their payment data. Visit our Financial Services web page to learn more!

March 14, 2023

Build a ML-Powered Underwriting Engine in 20 Minutes with MongoDB and Databricks

The insurance industry is undergoing a significant shift from traditional to near-real-time data-driven models, driven by both strong consumer demand, and the urgent need for companies to process large amounts of data efficiently. Data from sources such as connected vehicles and wearables are utilized to calculate precise and personalized premium prices, while also creating new opportunities for innovative products and services. As insurance companies strive to provide personalized and real-time products, the move towards sophisticated and real-time data-driven underwriting models is inevitable. To process all of this information efficiently, software delivery teams will need to become experts at building and maintaining data processing pipelines. This blog will focus on how you can revolutionize the underwriting process within your organization, by demonstrating how easy it is to create a usage-based insurance model using MongoDB and Databricks. This blog is a companion to the solution demo in our Github repository . In the GitHub repo, you will find detailed step-by-step instructions on how to build the data upload and transformation pipeline leveraging MongoDB Atlas platform features, as well as how to generate, send, and process events to and from Databricks. Let’s get started. Part 1: the Use Case Data Model Part 2: the Data Pipeline Part 3: Automated Decision Support with Databricks Part 1: The use case data model Figure 1: Entity relationship diagram - Usage-based insurance example Imagine being able to offer your customers personalized usage-based premiums that take into account their driving habits and behavior. To do this, you'll need to gather data from connected vehicles, send it to a Machine Learning platform for analysis, and then use the results to create a personalized premium for your customers. You’ll also want to visualize the data to identify trends and gain insights. This unique, tailored approach will give your customers greater control over their insurance costs while helping you to provide more accurate and fair pricing. A basic example data model to support this use case would include customers, the trips they take, the policies they purchase, and the vehicles insured by those policies. This example builds out three MongoDB collections, as well two Materialized Views . The full Hackloade data model which defines all the MongoDB objects within this example can be found here . Part 2: The data pipeline Figure 2: The data pipeline - Usage-based insurance The data processing pipeline component of this example consists of sample data, a daily materialized view, and a monthly materialized view. A sample dataset of IoT vehicle telemetry data represents the motor vehicle trips taken by customers. It’s loaded into the collection named ‘customerTripRaw’ (1) . The dataset can be found here and can be loaded via MongoImport , or other methods. To create a materialized view, a scheduled Trigger executes a function that runs an Aggregation Pipeline. This then generates a daily summary of the raw IoT data, and lands that in a Materialized View collection named ‘customerTripDaily’ (2) . Similarly for a monthly materialized view, a scheduled Trigger executes a function that runs an Aggregation Pipeline that, on a monthly basis, summarizes the information in the ‘customerTripDaily’ collection, and lands that in a Materialized View collection named ‘customerTripMonthly’(3). For more info on these, and other MongoDB Platform Features: MongoDB Materialized Views Building Materialized View on TimeSeries Data MongoDB Scheduled Triggers Cron Expressions Part 3: Automated decisions with Databricks Figure 3: The data pipeline with Databricks - Usage-based insurance The decision-processing component of this example consists of a scheduled trigger and an Atlas Chart. The scheduled trigger collects the necessary data and posts the payload to a Databricks ML Flow API endpoint (the model was previously trained using the MongoDB Spark Connector on Databricks). It then waits for the model to respond with a calculated premium based on the miles driven by a given customer in a month. Then the scheduled trigger updates the ‘customerPolicy’ collection, to append a new monthly premium calculation as a new subdocument within the ‘monthlyPremium’ array. You can then visualize your newly calculated usage-based premiums with an Atlas Chart! In addition to the MongoDB Platform Features listed above, this section utilizes the following: MongoDB Atlas App Services MongoDB Functions MongoDB Charts Go hands on Automated digital underwriting is the future of insurance. In this blog, we introduced how you can build a sample usage-based insurance data model with MongoDB and Databricks. If you want to see how quickly you can build a usage-based insurance model, check out our GitHub repository and dive right in!

March 6, 2023