Sergio Villarruel

What are the main areas of opportunities for growth in the Mexican market?

In Mexico, there are still areas yet to be explored. Here, only credit or debit cards are used, and they are expensive to produce and it can take quite some time to implement a card issuance strategy. We help to accelerate the time-to-market process for all kinds of financial institutions through leading-edge technological solutions. FirstVision is a global processing solution that incorporates an extensive range of products and services to fully support the management and processing of credit cards—including bank, co-branded, private label, as well as debit, commercial, prepaid, loyalty management, loan, and card acquiring. Thanks to FirstVision we can provide this through our platform via licensing. Depending on the customer and its size, we are able to create any type of card. Loyalty and communication between cards are both important factors. One of our lines of business is helping customers in their provision of money and card publishing and ensuring a great partnership. Another area of opportunity is the regulatory issue. When the fintech law came to Mexico, we had already been working on it for three years in the UK. Being aware of current legal trends enables Fiserv to focus on helping various countries and businesses to expand rapidly and we make sure that our card issuance product always complies with the legal standards established by institutions such as the National Banking and Securities Commission, which guarantees our customers that they will not have to worry about it.

What are your main business segments in Mexico?

In Mexico, we have two main types of customers and business lines. In the financial sector, on the issuing side, we have banks and fintechs. We provide software platform solutions for these large institutions. We provide services for more than 1 billion credit, debit, prepaid, corporate cards and so on. In terms of institutions, we have platforms where the behavior and operation of the product or card is designed. By having a global presence, we have many customers worldwide. In the same sector, we have another line of business called acquiring. Depending on the market, we analyze what is sold, how it is sold, and which is the target customer to provide strategies of the product to be charged. We can serve the smallest to the largest customers globally. We are in high demand because of our many global agreements and strong presence in Mexico

What are the biggest challenges facing the merchant and the financial sector?

One of the biggest challenges is fear of change. Every year, we are challenged to do something new. Mexicans are ingrained in the way they create things. There is a strong change coming to organizations forcing them to reinvent themselves. Another challenge is that companies do not turn to subject-matter experts, which results in investments in expensive developments that are not scalable and, in the long term, do not bring them closer to their goals. At Fiserv, we believe that change is positive. In recent years, we have encouraged our clients to adopt omnichannel as a change strategy that will benefit them. We provide core banking omnichannel access solutions such as DigitalAcces to omnichannel payment suites such as Fiserv Gateway, which allows merchants to implement different payment alternatives like payment links, virtual card terminals, payment forms, recurrent charges, among others, for their customers to acquire products or services by the method that suits them best. Financial institutions and companies need to listen and turn to companies that are experts to get a better level of certainty. Companies make the mistake of creating needs when customers already know what they want. As a company, we must have the ability to have all the solutions necessary for the consumer to choose the right one for them.