What’s next for Stripe in Southeast Asia

Payments infrastructure company Stripe is deepening its presence in Asia with its recent launch in Malaysia – the firm’s fourth Asian market after Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan. With the launch, which was announced on October 7, online businesses in the country will be able to access Stripe’s entire product stack across the spectrum of payments, billing, fraud detection, and analytics services, among other offerings.

The company had been testing its service in Malaysia since January this year and counts ecommerce solutions platform EasyStore, food delivery service Dahmakan, and fashion and retail platform FashionValet among its local clients.

Photo credit: Stripe

“Malaysia is really exciting to us [because of] the high smartphone penetration, the fact that Malaysians are already buying online in large numbers, and there’s a lot of room to grow – only 3% of economic activity is taking place online, ” Stripe co-founder John Collison told Tech in Asia in a phone interview.

As part of the launch, the firm announced that it is also making a financial process exchange (FPX) service available in beta through a partnership with local payments network PayNet. This allows businesses using Stripe to accept payments via online bank transfers, as well as Mastercard and Visa credit cards via the PayNet platform.

Within Asia Pacific, Stripe’s enterprise users include Grab, Deliveroo, Klook, Zilingo, and GoGoVan.

Competing on global reach and speed

With 14 offices worldwide, Stripe’s global reach makes it an enticing proposition for companies with global aspirations and those looking to grow beyond a domestic market, Collison says. “We’re live for business in 30 different countries, we let businesses accept credit card payments from 195 different countries.”

But the co-founder thinks the firm has a competitive advantage in speed as well.

“Internet businesses tend to move a lot more quickly than offline businesses. Compared to a lot of other offerings in the market, Stripe lets you get set up in just a few minutes. You fill up some details on the Stripe website and you’re ready to go,” he claims.

Southeast Asia is the home ground of Stripe’s Naspers-backed rival Red Dot Payment (RDP), which counts Singapore and Indonesia as key markets.

RDP CEO Randy Tan told Tech in Asia in August that it had a leg up over international counterparts like Stripe and Adyen because of its broader offering of local payment options, which its competitors – Tan claimed – can’t match. RDP currently offers DBS Paylah as a local payment mode, which Stripe doesn’t.

Terminal, Stripe’s point-of-sale card reader that is available in the US, could be another distinguishing feature from RDP if and when it launches in the region, as point-of-sale transactions isn’t an area that Singapore-headquartered RDP is focused on.

But there’s the question of when, and if Terminal might launch in the region. “We don’t just launch products because we want consistency across the globe. We launch them because we want them to be useful for our customers in that region,” Collison clarifies.

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