Stripe’s Singapore Tour began and ended on the high note that the global payments infrastructure provider has helped businesses contribute a total of 1% to the GDP of the internet.

Sarita Singh, Stripe’s regional head and managing director in Southeast Asia, took a retrospective approach to introducing Stripe at the Singapore leg of its 7-city global Stripe Tour. “Fifteen years ago, Stripe helped companies mainly accept credit card payments in the United States. Today, we’ve grown into a global company available in more than 50 countries, with many more to come.”

Sarita Singh, Stripe

Stripe’s evolution from processing credit card payments to now processing over a hundred payment methods that “carry” more than a trillion US dollars annually, reflects its ambition to be a fundamental part of the digital economy’s infrastructure.

It focuses on removing friction for merchants and users, aligning its product development strategy to achieve exactly that, while helping its customers bridge legacy methods with digital ones.

Immediate conversions via embedded payment

Case in point is M1, a Singapore telecommunications service provider. Ong Thean Haw, M1’s head of Segments and Martech shared about the major digital transformation program it had undergone which involved replacing their OSS (operational support system) and BSS (business support system).

“This is a major, major exercise for us which required the whole organization to be involved.”

At the tail end of their transformation and customer migration (to cloud native stack platforms) last year, M1 had to brainstorm a way to launch a phone campaign for customers on the legacy as well as digital stack. “As a telco, helping our customers upgrade their phones is a major deal for us, too.” Thean Haw explained.

Finally, the telco landed upon the solution to use the Whatsapp messaging channel to handle pre-orders of mobile phones. Since then, there have been iterations to this capability to feature appointment bookings and payments enabled by Stripe (within Whatsapp). “We partnered with Stripe to translate engagements to conversions, and we have since integrated this for future phone launches,.” he said.

Make payment… with your wearable device or from within an app

Embedded payments is just one feature in a suite of solutions under the Stripe Connect portfolio which enables online marketplaces to buy and sell, as well as give it ability to offer financial solutions to their end users.

Eeke de Milliano, Stripe’s head of global product had described later during an interview, “So, if you are Shopify, you want your shops to be able to process payments, you might want to be give your shops loans, you might also want to give your shops debit cards or credit cards that they can issue. These are all embedded finance products that are really hard to build yourself as a business, and Stripe builds these for these businesses.”

Customer-centric mission

Stripe is helping large organizations like Tada, Jim Thompson, and M1 pivot their businesses to offer better customer experiences.

Eeke de Milliano, Stripe

A study by Stripe reflects the demand from merchants to sell globally and the demand from consumers to buy from other countries. Eeke shared that in response to this, Stripe is investing in more localized payment solutions, to be able to double the number of payment methods that they now support.

These are all embedded finance products that are really hard to build yourself as a business, and Stripe builds these for these businesses.

“We really do believe that building payments infrastructure is a team sport, so we are partnering with local payment providers like NICEPay in Korea to get our customers access to local processing and local pay methods in Korea, even faster,” Eeke said.  This partnership which involves agreements with over 20 card brands, four local wallets, and end-to-end settlement and reporting, means that without needing to set up an entity in Korea, US businesses can access Korea’s ecommerce market.

Sarita also quipped, “As we open up new markets and new payment methods, being able to do so in an easy, frictionless way becomes important to merchants.” She observed that there is a real appetite for merchant brands like Octopus, Tada, Jim Thompson, and more to “focus relentlessly on their customer experience, and they’re turning to Stripe in order to help them do that!”

Stripe’s product announcements in Singapore covered improvements in checkout experiences, fraud prevention, in-person payments, revenue management, and overall system reliability.

One of the notable advancements is the optimized checkout, which comes as a suite of comprehensive solutions designed to tackle common challenges in e-commerce, particularly for businesses operating across multiple countries, or looking to expand internationally.

AI-powered experiences and frictionless controls

Eeke said, “The optimized checkout uses AI that is trained on trillions of cumulative transaction data, to determine which payment method will be most optimal and present that (on the checkout page).”

To ensure the payment method presented will be the highest converting for merchants, Stripe uses hundreds of signals from device type, to currency to location, and even past buying behavior. For merchants who want to be really sure, they have the option to use no-code A/B Testing that measures the impact of offering a new payment method to a sample of buyers, before offering that payment method to all of their customers.

This partnership which involves agreements with over 20 card brands, four local wallets, and end-to-end settlement and reporting, means that without needing to set up an entity in Korea, US businesses can access Korea’s ecommerce market.

Eeke added, “We also launched adaptive pricing which allows our merchants to accept and present local currencies in 150 markets. ” This has contributed to approximately 17.8% in revenue from cross-border transactions.

By combining expanded payment options with AI-driven optimization and localized pricing, Stripe is aiming to significantly improve the checkout experience for consumers while boosting conversion rates and revenue for merchants. There is an estimated 11.9% potential increase in revenue, as a result.

Fraud is another use case where AI is used to detect and fight fraudulent transactions. Already trained on trillions of transaction data, Stripe’s AI works to detect fraudulent behavior patterns, while its Radar product utilizes machine learning to provide real-time fraud protection that can reduce credit card fraud.

Stripe Radar Assistant is an AI-powered feature that uses natural language to describe new rules for its fraud engine and then test them against previous payments to determine if they boost revenue and block fraud. Besides using technology, Stripe leverages partnerships, for example with organizations like Capital One, to share information about potential fraudsters.

Stripe is responding to the 30% growth in cross-border payment volume in Asia last year, by launching new tools to accelerate revenue growth for businesses while promoting peace of mind with much needed fraud controls during a time when online fraud is rampant.