Grab Financial Group expands merchant services, offerings

GRAB Financial Group (GFG), the financial services arm of Grab, is expanding its merchant services, including offering more "buy now pay later" (BNPL) options.

It has inked new partnerships with payment gateways, 2C2P, Razer Merchant Services and iPay88 among others to increase merchant adoption of its BNPL service, PayLater.

"In the 5 months after enabling PayLater, we have had a 3X increase in our monthly average TPV and monthly transactions on GrabPay," said Toh Teck Oon, director, Megafurniture.

The BNPL space is highly competitive, with GFG pitting itself against other pure-play BNPL players such as Atome, Hoolah, Pace and Rely. These players haven't been idle either, with Atome inking a US$500 million financing deal earlier in October.

Regionally, BNPL has enabled players like Finaccel to hit unicorn valuation and also go public via a special purpose acquisition company deal that values the combined companies at US$2.5 billion.

BNPL has been under scrutiny by the Monetary Authority of Singapore since Feb this year, as worries mount over increasing consumer debt risk. Consumers globally, though, appear to still be keen on BNPL, according to a Capgemini report.

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"Merchants find PayLater compelling given the scale of Grab's ecosystem with over 25 million monthly transacting users, and many of our PayLater merchants have reported increased basket sizes and check-out rates," said Chris Yeo, managing director and head of GrabPay, GFG.

GFG has also signed up more payment gateways to boost acceptance and adoption of its GrabPay wallet among merchants regionally. AsiaPay, Fomopay and Revenue Group are among the new payment gateways providing GrabPay to merchants.

GFG launched GrabMerchant Commerce on Thursday (Oct 21), a platform that aids businesses in building websites for e-commerce. A pilot programme in May saw over 500 merchants across industries sign up.

The platform will offer support in areas such as marketing and branding, automation, customer relationship management among others. Selected merchants on the platform will soon be accessible on the Grab app across South-east Asia by Oct 2021.

"We are enabling more of our customers who love using GrabPay and PayLater to use both within and outside of the Grab app," said Reuben Lai, senior managing director, GFG.