Fiuu, formerly known as Razer Merchant Services, has extensive offline and online payment networks and they were not built overnight. CEO, Eng Sheng Guan, attributes its comprehensiveness to R&D, analysis, and constant communication with the marketplace and the various payment channels.

To avoid confusion in the market and to acknowledge its payment solutions’ immense growth the past five years, it was timely for Fiuu to become a standalone subsidiary with its own culture and growth path to cultivate.

Fiuu’s CEO, Eng Sheng Guan explained, “Razer is very strong in gaming, and that is what the public relates to instead of payments, when they hear ‘Razer’. 

Eng Sheng Guan, Fiuu

Razer Fintech and Razer Merchant Services now combined under a new brand, Fiuu, expect to portray a unified front to the users and merchants whom they serve.

Besides e-wallets, Fiuu has identified food and beverage (F&B) and online marketplaces or ecommerce platforms, as their biggest sectors in terms of revenue or processed transactions. “We also have merchants across most of the ecommerce sectors like government services, retail like ticketing, insurance, property developers, and even online travel agents (OTAs).”

Channel development for convenient experiences

What does it mean to have the largest offline and online payment network? “There are no shortcuts in building these networks,” Sheng Guan emphasized. For the last decade at least, they have been building the network, channel by channel,  while simultaneously solving the payment friction issues that these channels faced.

Channels refer to the different payment methods and platforms (ie. internet banking, credit cards, ewallets and more) that Fiuu integrates with to enable digital transactions, and Sheng Guan shared, “We talk a lot with channels about how to improve their success rates, how to enhance their user interface and so on. All these took a substantial amount of time to build up to what it is today, especially in Southeast Asia. 

“The payment method is very fragmented. Different countries have different methods of payment and different behavior. So, these are things we need to consider and to unify the experiences for merchants and users.”

“We talk a lot with channels about how to improve their success rates, how to enhance their user interface and so on. All these took a substantial amount of time to build up to what it is today, especially in Southeast Asia.”

Besides this, Fiuu offers solutions that close the loop of buying online and paying offline via payment links. This was especially useful during lockdowns when ecommerce activity increased. “How do you collect payments though? We offer mechanisms for merchants to send payment links to users to make payment, before goods are delivered.

These solutions empower SMBs or micro merchants to collect payments for remote orders and grew in popularity just a few years ago.

Supporting a frictionless payment experience

A large network of channels means potential for higher availability and accessibility to payment services for its user base. But, there are more factors to take into consideration.

For over a decade, Fiuu helped to develop robust payment channels to ensure seamless transaction processing even during peak sale periods.

Sheng Guan talked about a pivotal decision the company made in 2017 to become a fully cloud platform. That involved moving the whole infrastructure backbone of the payment system into the cloud “That made a big difference for us as it enabled seamless connectivity between various payment channels and stakeholders.

And this layer created a very scalable system for Fiuu, which is crucial for it to be able to support 11.11 (Double 11) type of sales events that have had a lot of time, manpower and financial resources invested into them.

This leaves Fiuu with the uneviable task of ensuring the payments system enables quick and seamless transactions for merchants and users.

“We have to ensure there is no downtime and that every single transaction can be processed,” Eng said, adding that during these crucial sales periods, his team is usually on 24/7 standby, even to the point of being on-site at their clients’ premises.

He explained that thousands of transactions per second could be flowing in. “If your user interface (UI) or even your (webpage) loading does not distribute it properly, your system will just go down.

“These are some of the things we do besides R&D and analysis, to take away friction and make sure the channel is robust. “And we take pride in ourselves for being able to support the marketplace during these sales events.”

Navigating a fast-changing payments landscape

A notable trend has emerged in the region – governments are linking up national payment systems to enable seamless cross-border transactions. This is so that travellers can use their home e-wallet or bank apps abroad.

“So that creates a powerful use case for users and merchants as well.”

“If your user interface (UI) or even your (webpage) loading does not distribute it properly, your system will just go down.”

There is promising progress, for example the Malaysia-Thailand payment linkage which facilitates transactions between Malaysian and Thai merchants using QR codes.

But the experience is not yet seamless as central banks in different countries take different approaches to regulating and implementing cross-border payment initiatives and linkages.

Fiuu being a pilot acquirer, is involved in integrating with merchants that could generate meaningful cross-border transaction volumes and pass intensive testing, Sheng Guan explained. As a pilot acquirer, having a large merchant base and complying with integration windows set by central banks were important factors.

2024 plans

Being a Southeast Asia company currently, the next step for Fiuu is to step out of the region and expand in Asia and Europe. It is a lengthy process to acquire a license to operate in a country, but Fiuu is determined to grow.

“We are planning, starting this year, to expand to other regions,” Sheng Guan emphasized..

With digital payments booming across regions, it appears well-positioned for its next ambitious phase of growth. As it enables seamless transactions for more merchants and consumers around the world, the company is poised to become a global fintech player to watch in the years ahead.