$6b ride-hailing company Grab, with a strong presence in seven markets across Southeast Asia has announced a payments platform similar to Alipay. GrabPay will be accepting payments for merchants across Grab's markets.
| less than a minute read
Grab, the Uber rival in Southeast Asia, is now officially also a digital payments company
This won’t change the game overnight for the company’s 60 million-plus users, but it is a sign of where Grab is headed since it announced plans to develop a payments platform last year. It takes GrabPay from being merely the system that enables you pay for a taxi using your credit (or pre-bought Grab credit) to one that could be used more widely as a digital payments app. “For merchants in Singapore, the moment they sign up they get access to four million customers,” she said. “Telcos and banks haven’t been able to move to mobile wallets is because it requires them to adopt new customer behavior. [But] we’ve already shifted a significant portion of customer behavior.”
