MatchMove buys strategic stake in Shopmatic to build SME offering

Written by Ruby Hinchliffe
1st April 2020

MatchMove, the Singapore-headquartered fintech which revealed last week it had applied for a full digital banking licence, has announced it will be acquiring a strategic stake in fellow Singapore-based international ecommerce store Shopmatic.

Shopmatic serves more than 435,000 SMEs through its platform

Calling itself a Banking as a Service platform, MatchMove has slowly been building up its armoury to morph into a full digital bank.

Last September, it acquired local lender MoolahSense to create its small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) banking offering.

And now its acquisition of a stake in Shopmatic will see it build out this SME offering further, helping MatchMove acquire more business customers by integrating its software with an international merchant platform which helps SMEs get their online shops up and running.

By leveraging its banking service through Shopmatic, MatchMove hopes that it can serve more SMEs, and Shopmatic can attract more customers with a greater array of features.

“We can seamlessly integrate iFinancial offerings and provide our customers with [the] rich banking-in-an-app experience that MatchMove offers,” Shopmatic’s co-founder and CEO Anurag Avula said in a statement.

MatchMove’s partnerships hinge on its yet-to-be-issued banking licence application

“We will [also] leverage the MatchMove reach and network to originate new customers as well as accelerate our platform growth across the region.”

Shopmatic serves more than 435,000 SMEs through its platform currently, which means the stake translates as a big customer win for the banking software service.

MatchMove says it will help these SMEs, spread across Singapore, India, Hong Kong, China, Malaysia, the Philippines and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), to receive and make payments “seamlessly”.

“Overtime, these SMEs can build a credit score against which they can access loans for their capital requirements,” the firm adds.

Across Southeast Asia, ecommerce sales in its six largest economies are estimated to grow to $79 billion in 2022, from $41 billion in 2019, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence research.

But the lucrativeness of MatchMove’s partnerships hinge on its yet-to-be-issued banking licence application, which is one of more than 20 bidding for just two spots.