Partner Spotlight with Ebanx — Helping High-impact Entrepreneurs Create Jobs

Every month, we feature one of our partners that is working on exciting challenges and creating local jobs in the process. This month, we’re excited to highlight Ebanx, an award-winning, rapidly growing enterprise based in Curitiba, Brazil. It was founded in 2012 by its current CEO Alphonse Voigt and a small group of associates.  In 2013, we connected Ebanx to its first Experteer, Nicole Wickswat, when it was just 9 employees. Over the last 3 years, the company has seen explosive growth in both customers and employees. It now employs over 120 people, helps Brazilians access more products and services from around the world, and has an international client base.

To help other organizations learn from Ebanx’s fantastic growth — and use of international resources to do so — we asked the Ebanx team a few questions:

What problem does Ebanx solve?

Countries in Latin America are cash-based economies. Only one-third of the people have access to credit cards; therefore, the only way to pay for goods online for many consumers is to use cash payments. This restricts access to many products, and makes it difficult for global companies to create opportunities in Brazil.

Ebanx solved this problem by integrating the cash payments into its Ecommerce payment processing platform, allowing anyone to be able to purchase products online, even without a credit card.

How does Ebanx create a positive social impact?

Ebanx was founded to make it easier for Latin Americans to buy online, even if they don’t have credit cards or banks accounts. Through Ebanx, they can access goods that are not available in their local cities.

By providing an online payment platform, Ebanx is also facilitating entrepreneurship for Brazilian retailers and has created 120 direct jobs to date by growing its team.

But these are not just any ordinary jobs… they are high-value jobs that require new skills and provide international exposure. By tapping into international networks like Endeavor and MovingWorlds, they have found innovative ways to help develop the skills of their team to develop capacity and achieve opportunities.

In addition to using creative ways to recruit and develop talent, Ebanx also invests much more than salary into its employees as Ebanx also provides free language classes and other ongoing education opportunities to help create even more opportunities. For their work, Ebanx’s CFO Wagner Ruiz received the EY Entrepreneur of the Year Award for his work, and Ebanx received the judge’s choice award from Card Not Present.

Why did Ebanx choose to host an Experteer?

Three years ago, even though Ebanx had a great product and a good team that was ready to scale, they needed new skills to help build a sales strategy and business development processes that could help the company reach international clients. At the time, Ebanx didn’t have the funds to compete with international companies for the right skills, so instead, they turned to MovingWorlds to explore the idea of having someone come volunteer their skills with them.

How did the Experteer add value?

As a former Intel employee with experience in international business and sales, Nicole was the first non-Brazilian to support the founding team, just as they were attempting to scale up. She helped them build an international customer base, implement a business development strategy, and hone the sales process and skills of the local team. Since then, Ebanx has grown from 9 employees to over 120, creating jobs, with better pay, in an area that needed them.

Nicole extended her 3-month trip and has stayed with Ebanx as a full-time employee for the last two and half years. She is now Director of International Sales. She lived in Brazil for 18 months at the Ebanx headquarters and is now based in the USA.  Today, Nicole is a key member in their organization.

As for Ebanx, it is building new international partnerships, and expanding to other countries across Latin America, like Brazil and Peru.

For more about Nicole’s side of the story, you can watch her Experteering Story here.