Joint Venture Delivers Payments To Singapore

British bank Standard Chartered and payments firm Assembly Payments have established a joint venture in Singapore to bring payment solutions to its $29 trillion global eCommerce market, the companies announced on Tuesday (Feb. 11).

“Payments is a critical pillar of banking services. Enabling real-time faster payments and high-volume transactions has been a core area of investment for Standard Chartered, in line with the evolving needs of clients, particularly with the growth of eCommerce platforms and wallet apps. Our venture with Assembly Payments complements these capabilities, giving our corporate clients a complete offering for high throughput inward and outward payments,” said Michael Gorriz, group chief information officer at Standard Chartered.

The new company will be headquartered in Singapore, with plans to expand globally, and will offer a digital payment platform. The platform will have the ability to manage transactions across multiple payment types — online, mobile, point-of-sale, digital wallets, debit and credit cards, and real-time payments — and countries.

“As the world moves [toward] platform-based eCommerce, the need for the next generation of tools to empower merchants and enable financial inclusion continues to grow. We identified payments as an area where we wanted to make a strategic investment. Assembly Payments shares our vision, and we are pleased to partner them based on the strength of their core technology and talented team,” said Alex Manson, head of SC Ventures — the innovation, FinTech investment and ventures arm of Standard Chartered.

The new venture will introduce the payment services to global merchants, as well as help them scale and figure out problems, manage risk and more.

“This deal creates a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Assembly. We have created a significant business in Australia, and now, together with Standard Chartered, we are well placed to crack the international payments market and exponentially grow the business. We are also proud that this is one of the first major global FinTech deals between a global bank and a major Australian FinTech company,” said Simon Lee, Co-CEO of Assembly Payments.

Westpac-backed FinTech Assembly Payments was founded in 2013 in Melbourne, Australia.

Manson told the Financial Review that, before choosing Assembly as its partner, Standard Chartered looked at more than 10 similar companies worldwide, dating back to 2014.

Last month, Standard Chartered announced that it was investing an undisclosed amount in China’s supply chain platform Linklogis, earning an equity stake, and further enhancing its ongoing partnership.