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The
decade-old San Francisco-based startup, which set up regional
headquarters in Singapore a couple of years ago, has also
launched earlier in 2020 a pilot project in Indonesia enabling
interbank transfers for businesses.
Noah Pepper, the company's business head for Asia Pacific, said
Stripe, which counts Amazon as a client, was rapidly adding
engineers in the region. Based on job postings on Linkedin,
Stripe is seeking people with experience in Southeast Asia,
Japan, and China.
"APAC is not just the world's fastest growing market, but it's
such a fragmented market ... with different laws, languages,
currencies, and in some cases currency controls," said Pepper,
adding that Stripe was working to adapt to each country's laws
and preferred payment methods.
The company offers products that allow merchants to accept
digital payments from customers and a range of business banking
services. It raised money in April at a valuation of $36
billion, and may now be worth twice that, Bloomberg reported.
In Japan, Pepper said the company was winning over merchants by
cutting payments processing time from weeks to days.
Pepper declined to give details about the size of its business
in Japan, but said the company was preparing to launch a service
to enable "konbini" payments for merchants - a payment method
where shoppers buy online but pay cash at convenience stores.
Analysts pointed to the difficulties Stripe may face in terms of
varying regulations across Asia.
"Stripe's first challenge is that to be able to execute every
market (in Asia) they need to have a very localised strategy and
compete against strong local players" said Zennon Kapron,
director at consultancy Kapronasia.
(Reporting by Fanny Potkin; Editing by Sayantani Ghosh and Jane
Merriman)
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