• Stripe research finds that 84% of businesses in Singapore expect to expand into new countries over the next 24 months, significantly higher than the global average.
  
• The same research finds that Singapore consumers are more open to buying goods and services online than the global average.
  
• At Stripe Tour Singapore 2023, Stripe showcased recent innovations that enable Southeast Asian businesses to offer customers a frictionless checkout experience while expanding quickly into global markets.
  

SINGAPORE—Stripe, a financial infrastructure platform for businesses, today introduced its latest product innovations at Stripe Tour Singapore, its inaugural user event in Southeast Asia.

The event showcased Stripe products that are positioning businesses of all sizes in Southeast Asia to take advantage of surging consumer demand in the region for online goods and services. A recent Stripe report on global digital trade found that 84% of Singapore consumers were open to purchasing physical products online and 74% were open to purchasing digital services—significantly above the global average of 68%. The new Stripe features accelerate the checkout experience and provide businesses with tools for automatically managing core revenue and finance tasks.

“Southeast Asia’s rapidly expanding and dynamic digital economy holds tremendous global potential. The ingenuity and entrepreneurship emerging from this region will continue to have global impact,” said Sarita Singh, regional head and managing director for Southeast Asia, India, and Greater China at Stripe.

Providing businesses with a best-in-class checkout to meet consumer demand

Southeast Asian consumers expect a frictionless digital commerce experience. However, Stripe research finds that the majority of leading ecommerce sites still have subpar checkouts that cause customers to abandon their carts and businesses to lose revenue.

To help businesses respond, Stripe Tour Singapore showcased Stripe’s newly updated optimized checkout suite, which allows businesses to offer their customers an effortless checkout experience, without having to build or maintain it themselves. Recent additions to the optimized checkout suite include access to more than 100 payment methods and an A/B testing tool that allows businesses to rigorously identify the best-performing payment methods in their checkout. Businesses can also integrate Link, Stripe’s accelerated checkout experience that autofills saved payment details to help customers complete their transactions faster. Stripe research found that businesses that migrated from an older Stripe integration (the Card Element) to the optimized checkout suite saw a 10.5% increase in revenue.

Stripe also shared product launches that help unify online and offline commerce. These include Stripe Reader S700, Stripe’s newest point-of-sale device that will soon be available in 23 countries, including Singapore.

“These latest solutions are timely for us. Stripe helped us create a streamlined experience that supported omnichannel ordering, payment, and reconciliation to deliver just what our customers were looking for—at a reduced cost. Now, as we plan to expand to more countries in Asia, we plan on scaling together with Stripe,” said Jude Kumar, founder and CEO of fast-growing startup EatMe Global.

Enabling global expansion

Recent Stripe research found that 84% of businesses in Singapore expect to expand into new countries over the next 24 months. However, a new Stripe study of finance leaders reveals that progress is being hampered by manual back office processes that don’t scale with the complexity of global expansion. According to the study, 65% of finance leaders in Singapore think that expanding into new markets is hard because of the potential disruption to their existing financial systems.

In response, Stripe is expanding its revenue and finance automation product suite, which facilitates rapid business growth by automating revenue and finance workflows. New features in the revenue and finance automation suite include expanded support for Stripe Tax in 10 countries including Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, in addition to Singapore, which is already supported.

“We partnered with Stripe earlier this year to pioneer a completely new business model called Levande, our all-in-one appliance subscription platform for our customers. Working together allowed us to create a great, seamless experience for our customers and earn their trust continually,” said Gaurav Julka, head of appliance as a service for APAC and MEA at Electrolux. “We are excited to see how all these new product innovations can add to our offerings so that we can offer even more choice, flexibility, and reliability for our customers.”