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World Cards Intelligence (WCI) is a research report by the Lafferty Group on the payments market in over 65 countries. Below are some of the highlights about the Brazilian payment market.

• As the largest and most densely populated country in Latin America, Brazil should be a key market for any internationally ambitious credit card issuer, although competition is fierce and the market is dominated by five players. The combined share of the top-five bank issuers has grown consistently to 85 percent of all bank credit cards in issue. For international players to succeed in the market, they need a highly-focused strategy via joint ventures with a high-profile partner, or to conduct large-scale acquisitions.

• The Brazilian credit cards market continues to grow at a very healthy rate, with significant growth potential from the remaining u…

[Ese artigo está também disponivel em Português]

Regulatory measures by the Brazilian government top open up the credit card industry already seem to attract other big players to the market. Currently Cielo (formerly VisaNet) and Redecard still have a combined market share of over 90%, but the entrance of various new companies indicates that there is in fact money to be made.

Redecard and Cielo, Brazilian affiliates of respectively Mastercard and Visa are being pressured to separate their various business units such as their card processing and acquiring services. Besides increasing the competition in this market another objective of the government is to create more transparent tariffs. One of the results would be that the companies are forced to share networks and POS terminals.

One of the players that face the task of breaking this quasi-duopoly is First Data, the worlds largest cre…