New technology makes card payments easier. And all from your cell phone!
Brazilian company CloudWalk launched InfiniteTap in late 2022. InfiniteTap is a product that turns any smartphone into a machine that accepts payments with credit, debit or Pix cards. Since then, the tool's customer base has grown every month.
Thus, according to exclusive data from EXAME, the technology shows an average monthly increase of 123%. This system is part of the so-called Tap to Pay (Press to pay, in Portuguese), a payment method logic that aims to facilitate transfers and transactions via cell phone. Continue reading and understand the technology better.
InfiniteTap
While creating something new, InfiniteTap spurred a new movement called CloudWalk. It was an effort to surpass or replace the company's existing card machines, launched in 2019. In an interview with EXAME, Luis Silva, CEO and Founder of CloudWalk, emphasized that InfinitePay “has gone from being a small brand to becoming a powerful financial services platform for small businesses.” Today, the company has its own InfiniteSmart system, in addition to digital banking solutions (InfiniteBank), credit service (InfiniteCash), card (InfiniteCard) and, of course, Tap to Pay.
All products and services are in a single app, and today it has over 1 million customers in 5,400 Brazilian cities. Using a strategy of not just selling card machines, the company generated record annual sales of US$138 million in its most recent quarter. “We are what the market calls a centaur company,” says the founder. He says the company raised US$350 million in its latest investment round in 2021 to achieve “unicorn company” status, with a valuation of US$2.15 billion.
The CEO says that in the future, the company's goal will be to become a global financial services platform that provides the most innovative way for customers to process their bank cards. And the brand goes further, promising to be the next technological revolution in payments.
From machine to mobile
Silva recalls that when InfinitePay was launched in 2019, the payments scenario in Brazil was completely different, as merchants had to pay high fees to operate card machines.
He says that after using blockchain and machine learning, the knowledge acquired was used to reduce transaction costs, and these savings were passed on to the machine owners.
In practice, this made it possible to offer prices below market value, which later became known as “machine wars.” This term refers to a dispute between several companies in Brazil to increase their market share. In 2020, things changed. Technological advances opened up a world of possibilities for payment methods, and one of the first steps in this direction was the launch of Pix.
Silva says the central bank’s fast payment system “paves the way for millions of small and medium-sized merchants to receive payments through their smartphones.” The CEO says that since 2019, the machines have been in transition and are a dying technology. For him, we will soon see something similar to what happened with digital cameras or the simplest GPS devices, which have been replaced by smartphones.
