Stripe officially launches in Japan with a new investor

From left: Stripe CEO Patrick Collison, SMCC chairman Hideo Shimada, and head of Stripe Japan Daniel Heffernan.

Stripe continued its Asian expansion today with its official launch in Japan. The launch comes after a year of beta testing and a few weeks after it opened shop in Singapore.

According to co-founder and CEO Patrick Collison, 40 percent of Americans who made an online purchase in the last 12 months bought from a Stripe-supported business. Although he did not disclose total transaction volume, Patrick says it’s in the billions of dollars for hundreds-of-thousands of companies per year.

In addition to battling international rivals like PayPal-owned Braintree, the Asian expansion will now pit Stripe against local rivals like Omise, Pay.jp, and Spike.

Cash is king

86.8 percent of the eligible population owns at least one credit card in Japan. But the country’s twenty-somethings have much lower rates at 73.8 percent for men and 79.3 percent for women.

Although there is plastic aplenty, a study by FairCard shows that credit and debit cards are still only used for 18 percent of purchases in Japan compared to 54 percent in America and 58 percent in neighboring South Korea.

Research by Accenture (PDF) shows that although Japan has the second largest ecommerce market in Asia, 32 percent of people still choose to pay by cash upon delivery. But Patrick confirmed after the event that companies didn’t seem to have problems not accepting non-credit card payments during beta testing. “If it turns out our users really need it, we are open to it,” he says.

Japan to the world

“Technology infrastructure should not be holding them back,” says Patrick. He hopes that Stripe can be a bridge to connect Japanese entrepreneurs and businesses with the global economy and rising demand for Japanese products.

Stripe co-founder and CEO Patrick Collison announcing the official launch of Stripe in Japan today.

Stripe will launch with multi-currency support in Japan which means businesses will be able to accept over 130 different currencies and receive the money in yen. Patrick sees this as one of the strongest differentiators between Stripe and other competitors in the country.

Japan ranks fourth behind China, the US, and the UK in total ecommerce sales even though it has roughly twice the population of the UK. Stripe sees this as a huge opportunity – until now, “only the best capitalized companies have been able to afford the complexity and costs of the infrastructure that are needed to expand globally.”

Stripe’s partnership with Sumitomo Mitsui Credit Card (SMCC), the company that helped bring Visa into Japan, is also a seal of approval for Japanese companies. SMCC strengthened that alliance today with the announcement of an undisclosed amount of funding into Stripe.

SMCC chairman Hideo Shimada.

Chairman of the SMCC board Hideo Shimada had great praise for Patrick during the event and is most impressed with the simple interface Stripe provides with access to global markets. He hopes Stripe can help smaller companies better manage cash flow by turning credit card payments from what was previously a weekly process into something as speedy as a cash transaction.

Trust from the partnership has helped Stripe bag major players like All Nippon Airways and startups like online human resources management service SmartHR. When Stripe originally launched over five years ago, the payments market was already said to be crowded – but it continues to make its way through the dungeon.

This post Stripe officially launches in Japan with a new investor appeared first on Tech in Asia.

from Tech in Asia https://www.techinasia.com/stripe-official-japan-launch
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