Southeast Asia has 700 million people and most of them cannot pay for things online. That is not a payments problem. That is an infrastructure problem. We are building the infrastructure.
In Indonesia, there are over 70 different payment methods. Credit cards are maybe 5 percent of transactions. If you only accept Visa and Mastercard, you have already lost 95 percent of the market.
We started at Y Combinator as two guys who did not know anything about payments. We just knew that every business in Southeast Asia was struggling to get paid online.
Stripe does not work in Indonesia. PayPal barely works in the Philippines. The best payments companies in the world do not serve the fastest-growing internet economies. That is our opening.
We process billions of dollars a year and most Americans have never heard of us. That is fine. Our customers are in Jakarta, Manila, and Ho Chi Minh City. That is where the growth is.
The hardest part of fintech in Southeast Asia is not the technology. It is regulation. Every country has different rules, different licenses, different banking systems. You have to go country by country.