At Pagcorp, the founder of Dock wants to compete with Clara’s cards

Created by Roberto Josua, corporate card fintech already moves more than BRL 1.3 billion

Entrepreneur Roberto Josua sold his stake in Dock — the unicorn formerly known as Conductor, which he helped found — to Riverwood Capital nearly eight years ago, but has kept a small, prepaid fintech fintech family-owned. The idea is to compete with startups such as the Mexican Clara, the capitalized corporate card fintech that has been investing heavily in expansion in Brazil.

Born in 2011, Pagcorp started its business by offering a white label prepaid card to clients such as Ipiranga and Lojas Americanas, but the model did not take hold. The trajectory only began to change when the Josuas met the demand of a customer who needed a corporate card with real-time management mechanisms to provide to employees.

With a strategy that seems tailored to the dark winter of the venture capital industry, Pagcorp has always bet on cash generation to conduct the operation – a client is only integrated into the base if it is profitable, guarantees Liliane Josua, the partner and commercial director who joined the company. at fintech at the invitation of his father.

“We have been operating with positive Ebitda for some time. You cannot be profitable only when you hit 1 million cards”, said the executive. To monetize the base, Pagcorp takes a slice of the interchange fee for card transactions. For larger customers, this is enough to make the contract profitable for the fintech. For smaller customers, however, the company charges a subscription fee to close the account.

The company, which has never made an outside investment round and is financed by the founders’ money, has been gaining in size. Currently, more than 300,000 corporate cards have been issued, with 2,000 customers. The startup’s cards, controlled by the holding AGC Pagamentos, already handle an annual TPV of R$ 1.3 billion and the business continues to grow, on average, 150% per year.

With Pagcorp cards, corporate customers can manage spending limits for each employee and, if necessary, even dedicate the spending of a particular plastic to specific establishments, such as gas stations.

“Our differential is a system of hierarchies, with several levels of approval by managers. The employee can also do the rendering of accounts in real time and the manager is already able to integrate Pagcorp into the ERP software”, explains the commercial director.

The idea of ​​the Josua family is to make the business better known in order to maintain scale gains. Fintech does not open the billing, but says it is possible to continue growing. In addition to Pagcorp’s corporate cards, AGC also has a banking-as-a-service vertical, which helps clients develop white-label payment methods (such as little machines).

Pagcorp is betting on the family’s entrepreneurial acumen to leverage a type of business that has only become sexy in recent years, with the arrival of Clara in Brazil and the success of startups such as Brex, by young Brazilian billionaires Pedro Franceschi and Henrique Dubugras, in United States.

In the Josua family, Dock is not the only successful case. Ricardo, Liliana’s brother, is the founder and CEO of Pismo, which develops a range of vital products for the functioning of digital banks. Last year, Pismo raised $108 million in a highly competitive round, attracting investors such as Softbank, Amazon, Accel Partners and Brazil’s B3.

Source: Value Pipeline