Standard Chartered, Australia’s Assembly form payments joint venture in Singapore

Standard Chartered, a multinational banking and financial services firm, announced it has set up a new joint venture with Australian fintech startup Assembly Payments to offer payment solutions to the global ecommerce industry.

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The new company, which will be based in Singapore, is set to run a digital platform that can manage transactions involving online, mobile, point-of-sale, e-wallet, debit and credit card, and real-time payments.

The service is already available to clients in Australia and New Zealand, and the partnership is targeting to roll it out to other markets starting mid-February, a spokesperson for Standard Chartered told Tech in Asia.

It seeks to help merchants worldwide to scale their business in the US$29 trillion global ecommerce industry and solve challenges in risk management, fraud, integration, reporting, and reconciliation.

According to a 2017 study by business analysis journal Knowledge@Wharton, ecommerce has been growing exponentially in emerging markets as internet adoption increases among the growing middle-class population.

“As the world moves towards platform-based ecommerce, the need for the next generation of tools to empower merchants and enable financial inclusion continues to grow. We identified payments as an area where we wanted to make a strategic investment,” said Alex Manson, head of Standard Chartered’s VC arm SC Ventures.

With the joint venture, Assembly co-CEO Simon Lee said the company is now in a position to make a play in the international payments market after creating a significant business in Australia.

The startup has raised a total of about US$32 million to date from investors such as Westpac, Carsales, Reinventure, and Cultivation Capital, according to data from Crunchbase. In 2017, almost a year after raising US$10 million in a series A round, Assembly rebranded its business from PromisePay.

Meanwhile, Standard Chartered has actively been experimenting with new business models to meet the changing needs of its international clients.

It was recently granted a virtual bank license in Hong Kong, together with its partners PCCW, telecom firm HKT, and Ctrip Finance. Last year, it also set up Solv, an open platform that provides a range of financial and business solutions for small and medium-sized enterprises in the country.