SMEs in Chile have just won a new ally when it comes to making it easier to accept mobile card payments. The country’s largest national bank, BancoEstado de Chile, has partnered with SumUp to launch a joint venture that will give Chilean businesses the ability to offer “anytime, anywhere” mobile card acceptance without fees or contracts.

The joint venture, branded Compraqui, will be based in Santiago de Chile and leverages SumUp’s success in developing mobile Point of Sale (mPOS) solutions for more than 30 markets in Europe and the Americas. The companies believe that the combination of SumUp’s technology and BancoEstado’s history of providing financial services to Chile’s SME community will boost the number of card acceptance points to 1.5 million in the next three years.

“This is a milestone for the small business sector in Chile,” SumUp CEO Daniel Klein said. “We truly disrupt the existing market for card acceptance through Compraqui’s unique offering. It represents each company’s strong commitment to provide business owners with easy access to card payment technology to ultimately increase their revenue.”

According to Gerente General of BancoEstado Jessica López Saffie, the need for card acceptance solutions in Chile for small businesses is significant. “Together we address more than 600,000 SMEs and 1.2 million sole proprietors who currently cannot accept card payments,” she said, adding that the bank chose SumUp as a partner after a careful examination of the competition.

“We ran a comprehensive selection process, evaluating many card acceptance solutions,” López Saffie said. “With a proven business model and a market-leading end-to-end card acceptance solution providing highest security standards, SumUp came out at the top of this process.”

Founded in 2011 and headquartered in the U.K., SumUp demonstrated its mPOS technology at FinovateEurope 2013. The company unveiled its new online payments suite this summer, which added the ability to accept payments via SMS; a Virtual Terminal to enable online, CNP transactions; as well as a set of APIs and SDKs for additional payment integrations.

SumUp has more than $100 million in annual revenue, processes more than 100,000 card transactions daily, and 2,000 new businesses joining its service every day. With more than $44 million in total funding, SumUp includes Life.SREDA and BBVA Ventures among its investors.

Payments company SumUp is announcing new payment functionalities today. The U.K.-based company has extended its flagship mPOS service beyond payment cards and the point-of-sale (POS).

The new payment suite offers three new solutions:

• The SMS feature enables merchants to accept payments made via SMS. The merchant enters the amount due in the SumUp app, which sends the customer an SMS text with a link to a basic online form to enter their payment credentials. There is no card reader required.
• The Virtual Terminal enables ecommerce merchants to accept card-not-present transactions online.
• The APIs and SDKs enable merchants to accept online payments via a SumUp integration in their ecommerce shop, and even leverage card-on-file information for recurring billing.

Marc-Alexander Christ, co-founder of SumUp, said that the new avenues open up market opportunities for merchants. “The ultimate challenge for businesses is to find a convenient solution for cross-channel payment acceptance. Traditional offerings focus either on online or offline payments – limited to one or few markets. Through our Omnichannel Payment Suite, we offer simple and secure access to all payment types under one roof,” Christ said.

SumUp works in 16 markets, including in Brazil, the U.S., and all of Europe. Earlier this month, the company appointed Ryan O’Connor as U.S. Managing Director. Last fall, the company launched its Air Register, an all-in-one payment terminal configuration that accepts chip & PIN, magstripe, and contactless payments, and comes with a thermal receipt printer. SumUp demonstrated its mPOS system at FinovateEurope 2013 in London.

One year after bringing its e-commerce technology to the U.S., SumUp is launching Air Register, giving mPOS software providers an all-in-one hardware solution to offer customers. Air Register enables merchants to accept chip and magnetic stripe cards as well as contactless payments from Apple Pay and Android Pay. SumUp’s all-on-one configuration comes with an iPad mini and a thermal receipt printer enclosed in a wood case made from sustainably forested oak.

Besides “enabling our partners to offer their apps in a stunning package,” SumUp CEO Daniel Klein says the solution makes it easier for tablet-based cash-register providers to connect apps to SumUp’s open-payments platform.

Founded in 2011, SumUp demonstrated its technology at FinovateEurope 2013. The company teamed up with fellow Finovate alum Holvi in August 2016 to provide greater payment options to small businesses in Germany. SumUp merged with Payleven this spring, creating a payment-processing powerhouse transacting more than €1 billion a year across 15 countries. Last month, SumUp announced it had reached profitability, nearing $100 million in annual revenue. “We are the world’s first company to prove that empowering small merchants with card acceptance can be a profitable business,” Klein said in a statement, “despite tight margins in the long tail.”