Stripe's slow and steady approach to Southeast Asia's payments race

The US$36 billion online payments facilitator has only launched in two Southeast Asian markets since 2016. It’s a tough, fragmented region to penetrate, but Stripe is in no hurry

The San Francisco-headquartered company is live in more than 40 countries in the Americas, Europe, and Asia-Pacific

Its presence in Southeast Asia is, however, limited to Singapore and Malaysia. It led the Series A round of Filipino startup PayMongo recently

Stripe’s global template doesn’t work in Southeast Asia’s widely fragmented regulatory and payments culture

Stripe will find it especially hard to compete in the enterprise segment. But it has a bigger strategy beyond payments

In August this year, Stripe announced announced Financial Times Online payments group Stripe poaches GM's finance chief Read more that it had hired Dhivya Suryadevara as its new chief financial officer after an 18-month search. Suryadevara came from American automotive giant General Motors. It was a big hire, but by no means isolated. Suryadevara is one of 400 new employees that will join the San Francisco-headquartered online payments facilitator this year.

Then, in October, Stripe acquired acquired TechCrunch Stripe acquires Nigeria's Paystack for $200M to expand into Africa Read more Nigeria-based payments startup Paystack for over US$200 million.

AUTHOR

Jum Balea

Jum is a Manila-based reporter for The Ken, where she covers startups and business across Southeast Asia, with a focus on the Philippines. She previously was editor for Tech In Asia, and business editor for Philippine media companies Rappler and ABS-CBN.

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