When it comes to payment processing, many different factors must work perfectly for both customer and merchant to have a smooth and secure experience – especially considering global businesses selling to foreign consumers and offering them local payment methods. Aiming to make our solution ever more prepared to handle the changing, rising needs of digital customers, we have recently released our new Direct API for Latam Countries, which allows merchants to offer a frictionless and smooth experience for their users not only in Brazil, but also in Mexico, Colombia, Chile and Peru — thus covering Latin America’s top 5 markets.

The Direct API for our Payment Processing solution was already available for sales in Brazil, the region’s most important market. Now, we expand to merchants selling to other significant Latam audiences the possibility of creating the best experience during checkout, without any redirections or friction.

From a business perspective, the release represents a major milestone for our company and its endeavor to strengthen our presence as a one-stop local payments solution for the whole of Latin America. From a Product perspective, it boosts the smoothness and efficiency we strive to always offer our clients. In this article, I’ll discuss how and why our new Direct API makes a difference.

All local payments in one API

One of our priorities for new features and integrations for the Payment Processing solution is to make it easier and more seamless for merchants to start offering new payment methods in all the countries they sell to. So, from the start of our work in building the Direct API, we knew it should have multi-country payment capabilities, allowing companies to accept payments from multiple Latin American countries, with no need for separate integrations with individual payment providers.

This is a significant milestone for PagSeguro, since one of our major goals is to consolidate ourselves as a complete, integrated solution for Latin America. Besides offering the widest payments coverage for the whole region, we are now strengthening our connections and our processes with the biggest Latam markets, facilitating and improving the possibility of our merchants to reach this fast-rising region with us as their partner.

Trustworthy API design

To ensure the quality of our payment processing across Latin America, our system has 99.99% availability, with an average response time of 0.5 seconds for transactions, processing more than 200 transactions per second – merchants can sell all the time, customers can buy all the time, a need in the digital world.

And all that happens in a developer-friendly interface, with comprehensive documentation and a simplified integration process: it’s fast and easy to integrate with our payments API, allowing companies to start selling to Latin America with no complications, minimizing downtime, and expediting the time to market of our merchants.

Using the Direct API is also smooth, with a robust dashboard for reports and analytics, empowering merchants to make data-driven decisions and streamline their payment processes. 

Furthermore, with our Direct API, the merchant has complete control over their payment pages, being able to maintain the brand’s visual identity with a customized checkout.​ By keeping their own brand identity, the merchant offers a better, more personalized payment experience to the end-user. Besides, since they complete the purchase directly on the seller’s website, the process is quicker and failsafe.

Another one of our priorities when designing the Direct API was to make it very easy to migrate from the previous version of the API (V1) to this new one (V3). So be it a new merchant, be it an old merchant, all companies can quickly and smoothly get our latest API.

Reliable anti-risk analysis

Our Smart Fraud Prevention is one of the pillars of our solution – and, for the new Direct API, it’s even more robust. The API counts on up-to-date security protocols to ensure the integrity of the customers’ personal and financial data, and the reliability of our anti-risk analysis to stop fraud attempts before they happen.

These stronger security measures also reduce interruptions in the payment process and help boost our merchants' businesses, using expert statistics models that are tailored for digital goods – today’s fraudsters favorite target.

Besides using tools such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, scoring, false-positive measuring, external bureaus, and our anti-money laundering & combating the financing of terrorism (AML-CFT) analysis to help you increase your numbers securely, we can also create specific rules according to the needs of your company.

Operational efficiency

Using all the features from our Payment Processing solution is even simpler now with the Direct API. Merchants can use card tokenization to set up recurring payments, avoid chargeback and disputes by offering total and partial refunds directly via API, and have a high payment success rate of at least 75%, assured by us. This is possible because we are a card acquirer in Brazil and have local connections in Mexico, Colombia, Chile and Peru.

Besides payment method coverage, supporting the local consumers’ payment habits is also facilitated by the new Direct API, through which merchants can easily offer monthly installments – the customers pay monthly, the seller receives the money all at once with no extra fees, in Brazil, Colombia, Chile, and Peru.

We believe this expansion will allow us to better serve our customers, expand our market presence, and set our position as a leading provider of payment solutions in Latin America. It also makes it easier and more possible for our merchants to reach new countries, opening up the full potential of the most important Latin American markets to them, in only one API.

Check our documentation for the Direct API to learn all about how to integrate and use the release, and click below to talk to our team and get started now: