KUALA LUMPURㄧToday, Stripe, a global technology company that builds economic infrastructure for the internet, announced its official launch in Malaysia. Valued at USD35 billion, Stripe also announced a partnership with Payments Network Malaysia Sdn Bhd (PayNet) to make FPX available to businesses in the country.

Malaysia is home to one of the world’s most connected populations ㄧ not only are smartphones nearly ubiquitous at 88 percent penetration, Malaysia’s internet users are also among the top 10 most engaged globally. However, despite this, the internet only represents around 3 percent of the country’s GDP.

“Even today, less than eight percent of commerce is online, largely because moving money on the internet remains complicated, cumbersome and slow,” said John Collison, cofounder and president, Stripe. “At Stripe, our goal is to remove these barriers and build the kind of infrastructure ambitious businesses need to run at internet speed and scale.”

With this launch in Malaysia, any online company in the country can now gain access to Stripe’s entire product stack, to launch, run and scale their business globally from day one ㄧ including Stripe Connect for running multi-sided marketplaces, Billing for subscriptions and recurring payments, Radar for fraud detection and prevention, Sigma for analytics, and more. From today, Stripe is also making FPX available in beta, allowing businesses on Stripe to accept payments via online bank transfers, along with major credit cards like Visa and Mastercard.

“We are extremely excited by the energy and determination of the Malaysian entrepreneurs we’ve been working with daily. Technology should not be holding them back,” said Piruze Sabuncu, head of Southeast Asia and Hong Kong, Stripe. “Stripe aims to empower more businesses in Malaysia to export their creativity to the rest of the world.”

Stripe has been testing its service in Malaysia since January this year, and already works with some of the country’s most innovative companies including: e-commerce solutions platform EasyStore, food delivery service dahmakan, and fashion and retail platform FashionValet.

What Stripe does:

• Allows businesses to set up and run instantly. Stripe enables businesses to receive payments in over 135 currencies and through payment methods like FPX and credit cards. Set up is fast, and merchants can get started in as little as 10 minutes.
  
• Equips online businesses with a full stack to launch, run and scale. In addition to accepting payments, companies can use Stripe to build new business models like marketplaces, crowdfunding and subscriptions, handle accounting and optimise checkout experiences for mobile devices ㄧ all from one centralised dashboard. Plus, there are hundreds of third-party services that are integrated with Stripe ㄧ everything from invoicing to email marketing and customer relationship management.
  
• Fights fraud. Stripe Radar, the technology company’s fraud detection and prevention tool leverages advanced algorithms and machine learning to actively protect businesses from fraud. This is especially useful for businesses operating internationally, since fraud patterns and threats can vary significantly from one country to the next.
  
• Delivers seamless security. Stripe is certified to PCI Service Provider Level 1, the most stringent level of certification. Stripe also provides 3D-Secure (3DS) support, creating one-time-use codes for businesses to charge their customers; these codes cannot be stolen and re-used.__
  

“Stripe’s speedy, seamless integration was only a precursor to the impact it has had on our business. Thanks to its high credit card acceptance rates, Stripe’s payments infrastructure has boosted our sales significantly ㄧ our mobile checkout conversion rates have gone up by nearly 40% since we integrated,” said Max Lotz, cofounder & CEO of Flower Chimp. “We’re looking forward to using Stripe as our premier payments partner across all the markets we operate in.”

“Our mission is to deliver the best food, at reasonable prices, in the most convenient way possible, especially through subscriptions. That said, building a subscriptions business is no mean feat. Cultivating a long-term relationship with our customers is crucial, and for that to happen we need to have robust technology with exceptional user experience from sign up to check out. Stripe has been critical to achieving these goals ㄧ not only has it helped us provide a seamless payment flow to our customers, we were also able to set up our subscription service instantly without any development work. With Stripe we can iterate and ship new products fast and friction free,” said Jessica Li, cofounder and COO, dahmakan.

“Stripe has been a game-changer for FashionValet. Instead of having to integrate with multiple providers for various payment methods, we’re now able to build everything we need on Stripe, right out of the box, saving both our engineering team and our finance team precious time and headcount resources. We’re looking forward to scaling with Stripe as we expand globally,” said Fadza Anuar, cofounder and CEO, FashionValet.

“At PayNet we think a lot about creating safer, more reliable and efficient ways of paying online. We’re delighted to be partnering with Stripe with its FPX integration to bring the convenience and benefits of paying with FPX to more Malaysians. We look forward to continued collaboration to bring more of Malaysia’s economy online,” said Peter Schiesser, CEO, PayNet.

Malaysia marks yet another step forward in Stripe’s global expansion, following from the company’s launch in Estonia, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia and Slovenia earlier this year. Globally, Stripe processes hundreds of billions of dollars a year for millions of businesses.