Visa: Latin American commercial spending at $7.8T in ’11
Spending is up throughout the LatAm region, says Visa.
Puerto Rico’s participation in that total represented $90.2 million in 2011, up 3.4 percent from the $93.3 million reported for the prior year.
The greatest participation of the countries in the region was by: Brazil (51 percent), Mexico (17 percent), Argentina (7 percent), Chile (5 percent), Colombia (5 percent), Venezuela (4 percent) and Peru (3 percent). The region showed the world’s highest year-over-year growth rate, at 19.4 percent.
Puerto Rico’s participation rate was 1.2 percent, Visa revealed in its study.
“In line with the growth that Latin America has been showing in its economy, we see a healthy expansion in commercial consumption, which represents 7 percent of the total commercial consumption on a global scale,” said Diego Rodríguez, head of commercial solutions for Visa Inc. Latin America and the Caribbean.
“Underneath this growth lies a clear opportunity for financial institutions to facilitate payments between companies, capitalizing on their commercial card programs to meet the needs of their customers in the commercial and public sectors,” he said.
The CCE index is intended to allow the payment industry to more accurately and consistently monitor business and government expenditures. This edition of the CCE Index indicated that all the countries in the region increased their commercial consumption index in comparison with the previous year.
