US tech provider Stripe eyes growth in Asia’s fragmented digital payments market
- Stripe is expanding in Asia to meet the growing payment requirements of more internet-based companies across the region
Asia’s fragmented digital payments market might seem a daunting challenge for online companies to expand globally, but US firm Stripe considers that a huge opportunity to grow its business in the region.
“Asia is leading the way in payments, innovation – you’ve got this perfect storm of large and relatively developed markets, with enormous waves of new customers coming online and creative payment methods,” said William Gaybrick, chief financial officer at Stripe, a San Francisco-based payments processing services provider, on the sidelines of the RISE conference in Hong Kong on Tuesday.
“Stripe exists to navigate that … to tackle that problem of increasing complexity, whether regulatory or in a competitive landscape, with a lot of payment methods.”
Founded about seven years ago, Stripe enables companies to accept payments online by integrating its payments processing software directly into their websites. That way, these companies no longer have to deal directly with banks to set up merchant accounts and accept credit card payments – a process that can be cumbersome and expensive.
Privately held Stripe, which describes itself as a payments infrastructure company, has been expanding its presence in Asia, entering markets such as Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia. Last year, the firm established its Asia-Pacific engineering hub in Singapore, which joins its three other hubs in Dublin, Seattle and San Francisco.
That expansion has come as more internet-based businesses are being formed in the Asia-Pacific, where digital payments systems are also becoming more popular. The region already accounted for nearly half of the US$1.9 trillion global payments market in 2017, according to an industry report published last year by management consulting firm McKinsey & Co.