As Myanmar’s mobile, internet penetration soar, social payments could be next

The Myanmar market is getting online micropayments through social media, thanks to a deal between Singaporean social payments company Fastacash and MyPay, a Myanmar-focused payments provider. Fastacash will make a strategic investment into MyPay, powering the latter’s payments system with its paying-through-your-social-networks tech.

The aim is for Burmese users of MySquar, a widely used social network run by a local startup, to be able to pay through its Facebook Messenger-like feature, MyChat. MyPay announced today it’s partnering with MySquar to achieve this goal.

The agreement between MyPay and MySquar is for five years, according to the London Stock Exchange. MySquar will get US$500,000 to implement MyPay’s software into its system, and then it will bag 50 percent of net fees collected from transactions through MyChat.

See: These are the 15 most funded fintech startups in Southeast Asia (INFOGRAPHIC)MySquar also announced it has surpassed 1.5 million user accounts, although it’s not specified how many of those are active accounts. The social network launched in 2013. A year later it faced some controversy due to the apparent removal of co-founder and CEO Rita Nguyen.

Opportunity knocks

Fastacash specializes in giving companies the ability to transact with customers via social networks. It has worked with Singaporean bank DBS for its social micropayments app DBS Paylah, and with Indian bank Axis on the PinPay app, which allows users to make payments and mobile credit top-ups through their Facebook, WhatsApp, and Twitter accounts.

The Singaporean company has also been active in India, Indonesia, Russia, and Vietnam. It raised a series B round of US$15 million in July, and Myanmar is one of the new territories it’s looking to enter. And with good reason – the country is considered one of the great untapped opportunities of Southeast Asia.

Out of a population of approximately 51 million, 15 million people are expected to be able to go online in 2016, primarily through mobile devices such as smartphones. 47 percent of the populace is under the age of 24, driving mobile uptake, which is expected to reach 57 percent next year.

Coupled with the fact that only 4.8 percent of the population has access to a bank account, there are a lot of people who have skipped decades of credit cards, traditional banking, and personal computer usage to go straight to mobile. It’s a ripe opportunity for fintech players who are ready to innovate in this space.

See: Payments startups innovate where banks and telcos never willSoutheast Asian companies are already exploring the payments landscape in Myanmar, like Singapore’s 2C2P that helped create one of the first point-of-sale systems in the country, allowing merchants to accept payments with Visa and MasterCard credit cards.

Fastacash and MySquar share a common investor, Southeast Asian company Rising Dragon.