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Mercado Pago’s mission has been to ignite the ecosystem that MercadoLibre has built. The latest example of that ignition is the Mercado Pago Wallet, which according to reports, is favored by millennials and bridge millennials have adopted it en masse, using it at small merchants all over the nation in place of the cash once favored by everyone.
Mercado Pago Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Maria Paula Arregui told Karen Webster that it’s evidence of the company’s unconventional ignition strategy. Instead of attacking the “top of the pyramid” — the 15 percent of larger businesses that made up some 80 percent of the nation’s payment volume, they went after the problem from the other way around. “We went after the bottom of that pyramid, arriving at what we call the long tail and then doing our move up market, but only with small businesses,” she said. “It was a profound change in the dynamics of the way in which our business had to grow. We reconfigured how to reach these small sellers and individuals that never worked with credit or debit cards in the past.” MercadoLibre’s Q4 numbers show the extent of that reach. Total Payment Volume for the quarter ending Dec. 31, 2020, hit $15.9 billion, a year-over-year increase of 83.9 percent. Total payment transactions increased 131 percent year-over-year, totaling 659.3 million transactions for that same quarter.
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