Last month, PayPal found itself with a new competitor in Latin American mobile wallet startup Yepex. Now, Yellow Pepper, the company that started that mobile wallet, got some extra funding that could heat up the competition even more.
YellowPepper recently received $19 million in a Series C funding, bringing the total raised to $34 million, TechCrunch reported. Mexican venture capital firm LIV Capital led this most recent round of funding. Other funding was provided by Mexico Ventures, a Sun Mountain Capital U.S.-based venture fund, as well as Fondo de Fondos, International Finance Corporation, World Bank Group and an existing group of strategic investors.
Yepex, which has been coined by the company as “Latin America’s Mobile Smart Wallet” is still being developed on and brought into mass commercialization, which this new funding is slated for. The second-largest bank in Mexico, Banamex, is currently testing the app in a beta pilot with a handful of users and merchants. Yepex is compatible both for Android and iOS devices that allow consumers to store debit and credit cards without having to input any secure information. Like other mobile wallets, a transaction generates a unique token that can be sent to the merchant manually or using HCE or QR codes. This system eliminated the need for NFC-capable phones, which have not been widely adopted across the region.
Using tokenization “drastically reduces,” the chance for fraud to occur, Serge Elkiner, Yellow Pepper CEO told TechCrunch; the security features also extend to ATM transactions since consumers no longer need to rely on a PIN-enabled withdraw. The wallet can also be used with retailers where pre-ordering and express checkout is available. Yellow Pepper told TechCrunch that it has over 5 million customers and has made more than 30 million transactions/month in the Latin America Market that accounts for 85 percent of the market share.
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