The world is moving towards cashless paymentand Asia is leader fees with corporations like Alibaba, Tencent and Grab and growing rapidly mobile payments utilization rates across the region. In China, greater than 600 million people already use mobile payments, and in Southeast Asia, users are quickly catching up.
“[Thailand] remains to be very cash-strapped [but] the world is changing, so e-wallets, contactless payments – all of these items are evolving significantly,” Wye-Shun Fong, chief technology officer at Bangkok Payment Solutions, said on Tuesday on the Infinity Ventures Summit in Bangkok.
Fortune is the sponsor of this 12 months’s summit.
Bryan Zhou, founder and CEO of Ksher, an e-payment solutions company backed by Sequoia Capital, said Southeast Asia, with a population of greater than 600 million, is “definitely” probably the most interesting marketplace for Ksher to work in.
Together, Southeast Asia’s 11 countries constitute the world’s fourth-largest economy, and the region is characterised by large numbers of cell phone and Internet users and rapid growth rates.
“[Southeast Asia] it needs lower costs and good user experience to support high growth,” Zhou said.
Tourism in Southeast Asia, in addition to the region’s large population of migrant employees who send money to their families in other countries, make cross-border payments a natural fit, Zhou said, adding that regulations in Southeast Asia still vary significantly 11 States.
“To be successful in this field, location is key,” Zhou said.
Ksher has partnered with LightNet, a Southeast Asia-focused financial services network, to work on a project that can enable users of super app Grab – the region’s largest unicorn valued at over $14 billion – to make use of Grab’s wallet feature in China. LightNet is supported by Chatchaval Jiaravanon, who owns it Fortune.
Zhou has partnered with Tencent’s WeChat Pay and Alibaba’s Alipay to tap China’s huge outbound tourism market, most of which is aimed toward Southeast Asian countries equivalent to Thailand. Currently, stores accepting WeChat Pay and Alipay are ubiquitous in lots of shopping malls and restaurants in Bangkok.
“Many years ago, at that time there were few wallets in the world, but now we see that there are a very large number of wallet players in the world, probably more than 100, especially in this region,” Zhou said, adding that Ksher has integrated nine services portfolios in Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia, and can reach over 50 by the top of next 12 months.
Source : Fortune
