Hash
Kick Starting a New Financial Frontier

There is something exceptionally unique about how the Brazilian and Latin American regions conduct their financial activities. Dating back to the 1950s, much before the popularization of credit cards, Brazilians developed the practice of splitting up their payment for any purchase into installments that allow consumers to own products while paying vendors a certain amount over a stipulated period. This trend provided individuals who did not have the opportunity or purchasing power to procure their product of choice without losing their financial stability. And paying in installments bode very well for retailers and vendors as well; they witnessed more foot traffic and were able to drive profitability with security. However, the downside to such a payment model, with the bigger picture in mind, revolves around the difficulty in managing the sheer magnitude of transaction information for every party involved. As a result, Brazilian financial service providers often find it challenging to develop a solution that streamlines the process of handling transaction data and is extremely easy to use for consumers and vendors alike. João Miranda, a budding, ambitious entrepreneur in the fintech arena, aims to solve this problem for the entirety of Brazil while moving the country’s economy toward a new, more robust technologically-abled ecosystem of buyers and sellers.

Miranda founded his company, Hash, in 2017 to support merchants throughout Brazil with an incredibly sophisticated yet simple-to-use online payment platform that enables companies to provide financial services to businesses. But before continuing to elaborate on how Hash is empowering the fast-growing Brazillian payments market today, the story of how it came to be starts with Miranda’s first-hand experience at a company called Pagar.me.

Creating a New Payment Infrastructure

In 2013, Miranda joined Pagar.me as its second employee and worked on building payment gateways, split payment, and other payment service provider (PSP) services from scratch. “We learned a lot about payments and how they work in Brazil. And in 2016, Pagar.me was acquired by StoneCo. At this point, the founders left the company to pursue higher education. They were my mentors and friends,” he recalls. With their departure, Miranda decided to pursue his calling and apply the immense experience he had gained to offer the marketplace a payment solution that genuinely resonated with the genuine needs of merchants throughout the nation. He began studying the matter more intricately and recognized a movement among small-medium B2B businesses. “I noticed that companies wanted to build their own financial products that they could offer to their clients. This became the thesis for Hash, truly believing that payments and financial services are going to be decentralized in Brazil within the next few years,” expresses Miranda. He then promptly established Hash, which focused on creating an online payments infrastructure that would allow B2B companies to offer better financial services and products to merchants in the country’s SMB ecosystem. It is also interesting to understand that since Miranda never attended college himself, Hash’s CEO considers Pagar.me as just an adequate substitute; Miranda says that he could learn everything he needed to know about payment infrastructure through his mentors at Pagar.me.

The Products of Hasher Ingenuity

With the help of Hash’s white-label, plug-and-play solutions, clients can completely circumvent the conventional challenges of downtime during integration, all the while saving on additional costs by a significant margin. Miranda and his team of ‘Hashers’ ensured to build the platform per all regulatory guidelines and various other licensing processes, enabling clients to leverage the benefits of this newly budding payment infrastructure. Hash ’s platform is tailored to suit the specific business needs of a company in its respective marketplace and customer network with a slew of intuitive functionalities. Clients are empowered to manage better their asset logistics, acquisitions, setup, and activation of payment terminals, among other highly customized payment services for each of their unique B2B needs. Through a comprehensive financial operation dashboard, Hash allows for seamless management of every monetary task within a business. If, for instance, a client was required to deliver a point of sale (POS) software to their customers, fully loaded with capabilities such as conciliation settlement and integrations with tied brands or large ecosystems, Hash’s holistic platform streamlines the entire process effortlessly.

The option of establishing customizable business rules, managing the prepayment of receivables, and offering digital wallets to customers in an economy that does not effectively cater to the needs of small-medium businesses (SMB) comes as an incredible advantage via Hash. “SMBs in Brazil are not well-served, concerning financial services or otherwise. And so, they are always trying to improve a customer’s life and build relationships within the ecosystem because a merchant’s success translates to their own,” adds Miranda. With the innovations flowing out of Hash, the impact of these solutions will be felt heavily on the financial health of the country at large.

A Uniquely Mixed Group of Professionals

For a vision as big as becoming a mainstay financial solutions and service provider throughout Brazil to come true very soon, Miranda had to ensure he hired the perfect set of people who shared the same passion as he did. This led to the hiring of experts from within the industry and few individuals who do not particularly have any experience in finance. “As the company began to scale and we raised more capital, it was time to grow the team. And I like to create a mix of people with and without experience in payments to gain new perspectives on different problems,” expresses Miranda. Hash and its Hashers of varied skill sets, work toward encouraging their industry contemporaries to study and genuinely understand how financial services work and, consequently, implement the best solutions that pave the way for each goal to be met.

The company’s head of legal is the perfect example of how someone who had never worked with payments before is currently a reliable reference point in the financial market of Brazil for those who want to learn the ins and outs of the ecosystem. This Hasher pursued a career in the media industry, focusing on delivering sports content on television.

After accepting the challenge Hash offered, the individual quickly learned about regulations, the central bank, and the operations of various popular card companies. Such creative initiatives help drive this startup’s progress in the field.

Sustainability and People First

Hash has been working to develop projects focused on sustainability, diversity, and inclusion. Earlier this year, it neutralized all carbon emissions that occurred in 2020 from the company and its employees. The company chose to neutralize the three scopes determined by the Greenhouse Gases Protocol (GHG), which resulted in 363 tons of carbon neutralized. The company believes that happy and healthy people build stronger and more integrated teams. Its culture is designed to put people first, thus Hash offers a range of benefits—from home office and therapy help to extended maternity/paternity leaves for everyone.

Hash has also created a program to welcome women who apply for any position in the company. They have the support of female Hashers and can request for several meetings to ask questions and understand Hash better.

Finally, Hash has created a Diversity Committee that, together with the recently hired Diversity and Inclusion Leader, will be responsible for elaborating a code of conduct that will value even more the individuality of each Hasher.

Leading by Example

To best elaborate on the platform’s capabilities, the case study of Leo Madeiras, one of Brazil’s largest lumber distributors, particularly stands out. “This company sells wood to woodworkers who usually compete with large-scale furniture stores,” explains Miranda. Leo Madeiras built a POS system for woodworkers to buy materials directly from the retailer and receive payments via credit and debit cards, which was previously not the norm. It was a new concept in the industry, but Hash’s intuitive and easy-to-use solutions smoothened the transition. Using the vast experience he had accumulated over the past few years, Miranda even worked toward lowering the payment fees levied upon woodworkers as it proved too expensive. With Leo Madeiras’ POS, customers were expected to pay a zero percent transaction processing fee. Such a new system has helped create a more competitive marketplace, enabling several new merchants and new woodworkers to accept payments they never had before.

With such nuanced features and a passion for driving a payments movement in the country, Hash is set to revolutionize the future of B2B transactions. The company is currently focusing on scaling and the outreach of its solution. “We have an internal goal to reach one percent of the market share in Brazil,” states Miranda. Moving forward, Hash expects to offer more financial services to SMBs while improving payment infrastructures to allow for a more competitive ecosystem, regardless of industry.