By Aluisio Alves
SAO PAULO (Reuters) – Bemobi plans to strike deals in several countries in the coming months to provide payments and other financial services to utility customers, trying to capitalize on gains from digitizing users not yet reached by digital banks.
The plan goes public about a month after the company ‘entered’ the electricity sector, offering digital payment to Equatorial and Energisa customers in several regions of Brazil.
“We are going to take the experience we had in Brazil to other countries,” Bemobi co-founder and CEO Pedro Ripper told Reuters.
The plan marks a turnaround in Bemobi’s business, which debuted at B3 in early 2021, selling itself as a distributor of games and applications for telecom operators, services that accounted for about 80% of its total revenue.
With part of the 1.1 billion reais raised from the sale of new shares, months later it bought the Chilean fintech Tiaxa and repurchased Multidisplay from Cielo, reinforcing the ‘white label’ structure, when a company leases its operating structure, but the product appears to the end user with the customer’s brand.
Since then, the company has launched a recent initiative, offering digital banking services such as payments, purchase of recharge cards, microcredit and installment of bills for the so-called ‘utilities’, which it already does in Brazil and in 40 other countries. . This turnaround helped Bemobi’s revenue soar by 119% in the first half, confirming the preservation of cash, which currently stands at around 500 million reais.
It also partially protected its shares against the post-pandemic skepticism that has decimated the sector, with investors demanding evidence from fintechs that they can be profitable. Since its debut on the stock exchange, its share has lost 1/3 of its value. For comparison, StoneCo’s share is down 90%.
“We are a company in metamorphosis,” said Ripper, noting that fintech businesses already account for nearly half of Bemobi’s revenue.
It is not the first turn of the company, part of the Norwegian group Otello, which was created in 2009 to operate with mobile data. Six years later, he migrated to content production for the telecom sector.
The order now is to take advantage of the interest of utilities such as electricity, sanitation and gas to have a direct financial channel with their customers, in a potential market of more than 2.6 billion people in emerging countries, according to Bemobi’s accounts.
In addition, the company ended up setting up a credit risk assessment model specialized in lower-income families, based on the history of payments to concessionaires, a product it has sold to digital banks.
“In segments of the population with thinner credit data, we can compete with credit bureaus,” Ripper said.
ABROAD LISTING?
If the ability to perceive and move quickly to good business opportunities has been one of its strengths, on the other hand Bemobi complains of difficulties in explaining the nature of its business to investors.
“The market still hasn’t fully understood our business,” admits Ripper. “Actually, I can’t even get my mother to understand exactly what we do.”
The executive says that he is evaluating a possible future listing of Bemobi on exchanges abroad that already have a greater volume of technology-based companies, which would make it easier for the market to compare it with others with a similar profile and has already been probed in this regard by exchanges in the north. -American
“But first we have to do our homework with our investors,” he concluded.
(Paula Arend Laier Edition)
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