Expansion into Asia Pacific — recipe for fintech success

Asia Pacific is one of the most crucial “ingredients” for success, especially if a fintech wants to scale successfully. Here is why and how.

Asia Pacific is the world’s consumption growth engine. Research has estimated that the embedded finance opportunity in APAC is worth US$32 billion. Interestingly, it is predicted that in Asia, it will be a $10 trillion consumption growth opportunity over the next decade. Now, let that sink in — that is equivalent to half of global consumption growth by 2030 and this means that for every two consumption of products and services, one will come from the APAC region.

Asia-Pacific’s Digital-first consumers and consumption

The Asia Pacific is home to half of the world’s internet users, with a median age of only 30 years old. The way of consumption in which these digital-first consumers pay for products and services is critical to their whole digital experience. As a result, the region has become an exploration ground for embedded finance and the finance experiences arising from it.

Coupled with the fact that APAC’s consumers’ incomes rise, this translates to an exponential increase in fulfilment of financial needs through personalised and relevant financial products and services. Driven and accelerated by the pandemic, and technology, consumption patterns are changing, going more digital than ever before, which means higher expectations and less patience towards a less than optimal customer journey.

A study by EY revealed that 35% of Asia-Pacific consumers already have relationships with fintech neobanks — it is recognised as the highest rate of adoption in any region in the world. If fintechs can provide that specific value exchange of personalisation, for example, helping consumers to maximise functional benefits linked to products, such as loyalty programmes, or even taking that further step to even provide hyper-personalised communications, offering the right/customised products and services at the most relevant time, APAC consumers will be even more motivated to engage fintechs as their preferred financial providers.

Pace over perfection

As consumer consumption patterns are dynamic and always evolving, fintechs are well equipped. Being free from legacy systems, they should therefore be focused on innovating, prototyping and launching amazing new products and services at speed. Even better if a fintech is already at the scale up stage — where there is already a flourishing business and proven product built. The logical next stage is the extension of products and services offerings, or even launching into new markets, such as the APAC region. There is one commonality though — whether it is to launch, or scale, the last thing for fintechs to be worried about is to be slowed down by the boring, arduous technical and operational matters. All their efforts should be on the “fun stuff”, so that quality and speed is not compromised.

Working with a global embedded finance experience platform like Railsr, the high costs and operational complexity traditionally imposed by many middlemen is removed, because the platform is a fully vertically integrated stack, all the way from customer into a central bank, or payment scheme.

As such, the Railsr platform brings together new capabilities so that fintechs can launch and scale new lines of business at speed. Combined with that, fintechs can use Railsr’s regulatory licences and financial operational capabilities to start their journey of scaling into the APAC region.

Embedded finance experiences — delivered seamlessly for the Asia Pacific region

Railsr offers a new approach for any fintechs wishing to harness the power of embedded finance experiences for consumer engagement, rewards, data and revenue. Finance capabilities, such as digital wallets, payments, rewards, loyalty points, or cards, are simple for us to create and combine into an embedded finance experience that integrates directly and seamlessly into one’s digital journey.

By adopting the Railsr platform, fintechs will only need to integrate a single API and manage a single commercial agreement, which will free founders up to focus on customers, value proposition and customer experience. More importantly, we have a dedicated RailsrAPAC expert team who will ensure that requirements and needs are met and also help fintechs to create amazing moments that matter for APAC customers using embedded finance experiences. Visit our website to find out more.