Pierpaolo Barbieri, CEO of the virtual wallet Ualá, played one of “spies” through a Twitter thread and targeted none other than Mercado Pago, the company of billionaire Marcos Galperin, with whom he competes for the same portion of the consumer and merchant market that -through the pandemic- began to use virtual means of payment en masse. Despite the noise generated, both companies pointed out that they are common practices and not secret.
Barbieri denounced on social networks that a high-ranking employee of Galperín’s company secretly joined the WhatsApp group of resellers of Ualá Bis, one of the products of the virtual wallet. The CEO of the fintech took advantage of the discovery to celebrate the good moment the company is going through: “Competition elevates us!”, he celebrated and summoned Galperin’s “spy”: “If you want to do like him (but seriously), you add here.”
“We send a big hug to the leader of Mercado Pago who secretly joined our WhatsApp group of Resellers of Ualá Bis. A capo, but we found him,” Pierpaolo Barbieri mocked the networks. The strategy of the young CEO of Ualá, with 92,300 followers, seeks to strengthen competition with the Galperín company, which competes in the market and is in better conditions with respect to its presence throughout Latin America, which is the place of dispute beyond the Argentina.
Ualá managed to extend its business to Mexico and Barbieri’s thread coincided with the launch of operations in Colombia. However, Galperin has spent years in a huge market such as Brazil, among other countries in the region. “Today in Ualá Argentina and Ualá Mexico we are proud to launch in Colombia. We have dreamed of Colombia for years — and it is launched today,” the CEO publicized, taking advantage of the noise generated by his thread.
However, hours later, it was the CEO himself who sought to tone down his messages: “As I always say, Mercado Libre is the best company in Latin America. It is an honor for us to compete with them, that’s why we had fun and did a joke when we saw that someone from his team joined our group of Ualá Bis resellers that we just launched,” he confessed to the media Infobae.
“It was not ‘secretly’: he did it with his real name, surname, telephone number and address, without the intention of deceiving anyone. In fact, he has contact with the executives of Ualá and yesterday morning they discussed it in those terms,” they settled. the alleged spy game from Galperin’s company.