Latin American Companies Reap Benefits of Digitizing Business Payments

As companies in Latin America looked for ways to operate with more agility and flexibility during the pandemic, Clara saw an opportunity to provide them with an entire spend management solution. And as many of its customers operate across different countries in the region, the company is expanding its footprint, as well.

On Dec. 6, Clara announced that it had officially launched in Brazil and had closed a $70 million Series B investment round. The company was already in Mexico will soon expand into Colombia, too, Gerry Giacomán Colyer, Clara’s CEO and co-founder, told PYMNTS.

“Between those countries, we’re talking about a GDP that’s larger than India’s, for example,” Giacomán Colyer said.

Because many B2B companies in Latin America take a regional approach, there’s an opportunity for Clara to do the same, he added. In addition, the company has a principal member license with Mastercard, so it can issue credit cards itself, without having to find a sponsoring bank in every country.

“For us, this means that we are able to guarantee a very high-quality experience, consistency, and we can guarantee that our cards have the highest acceptance rate in the market,” Giacomán Colyer said. “We’re also able to innovate faster.”

Matching Invoices With the Corresponding Spend

As an example of the innovation, he said the company is introducing Apple Pay and other mobile payment functionality very quickly because Clara controls the end-to-end stack in a way that wouldn’t be possible in the U.S. or other regions.

As in other regions, both the consumer side and the business side in Latin America have seen massive growth in the acceptance of digital payments. This shift means businesses can use a solution like Clara’s to get real-time visibility over how they are spending, as well as perfect traceability of who spent what, when.

“In the local context, we can also do some really cool things,” Giacomán Colyer said. “There’s central invoicing in Mexico and in many countries across [Latin America]; what that means for the experience that we’re able to build is we can connect our customer’s account with the tax authority and automatically match any invoice with the corresponding spend on the cloud platform.”

Physical cards are still very important. In fact, Clara has seen that its customers often wait for their physical card to arrive before starting to use its platform. But virtual cards account for a meaningful and growing share as customers see value in creating virtual cards specific to different uses — one for marketing spend, for example, and another for travel.

Managing Spend in a Single Command Center

“We definitely believe in meeting our customers where they are,” Giacomán Colyer said. So Clara delivers both physical cards and virtual cards to companies that are concentrating most of their spend in a single card or a couple of cards, as well as companies that are creating hundreds of cards to enable a salesforce that’s distributed across the country.

“Clara is a way to access a corporate card in a good corporate card product, also one that’s very easy to acquire because you can do it all online, which is very rare, especially for a B2B service like ours,” Giacomán Colyer said.

In 2022, Clara plans to continue delivering its core card and spend management solution to the major economies in the region while also helping companies manage all their spend in one unified command center. In Mexico, for example, Clara also offers a bill-payment solution.

“What that means is that a company can consolidate today with Clara all their corporate spend because we have the different major digital forms of payment with cards, bank transfers and even some service payments that are unique there that we’ve included,” Giacomán Colyer said.