Enabling thoughtful connectivity beyond payments

As countries slowly reopen their physical borders and travel restrictions are lifted, what can brands do to connect with their increasingly mobile-savvy consumers worldwide? Are we ready, as an industry, to serve the penned up demand? What more can we do to help small and medium-sized local merchants recover as they adjust to a more digital world post pandemic? 

What role does fintech play? 

Perhaps we can look at the announcement by the Singapore Tourism Board (STB) for clues. Recently, Ant Group launched the SingapoReimagine with Alipay+ campaign with STB, enabling seamless cross-border cashless transactions for travelers to Singapore through mobile wallets that they are already familiar with from their home markets, including GCash from the Philippines, TrueMoney from Thailand, and AlipayHK from Hong Kong, as well as Kakao Pay from South Korea, Touch ’n Go eWallet from Malaysia, and Alipay from the Chinese Mainland.

More importantly, beyond facilitating payments between overseas mobile wallets and local businesses, such partnerships can provide unique opportunities for local merchants to market exclusive incentives to visitors in different online and brick-and-mortar scenarios. Imagine a coffee shop being able to offer rewards for free coffee via Alipay+ Rewards mini app inside an e-wallet app, as part of digital incentives offered under the collaborative efforts by Alipay+ and their global partners. 

Alternatively, online merchants, such as streaming services or cloud storage providers, can leverage the same marketing solution to offer different membership benefits through Alipay+ Rewards, instantly extending the reach of the businesses large and small to hundreds of millions of mobile wallet users across the world. 

For example, SHEIN, a global online retailer, recently launched their first-ever popup store in the Philippines. The event featured Alipay+ and their mobile wallet partner GCash (from the Philippines), where GCash users who visited the offline popup store and completed online payment through Alipay+ on SHEIN’s website or app were eligible for a special discount at checkout. Additional exclusive incentives were also available for those with larger purchases. 

For businesses such as online travel agencies, this can be a competitive feature to have at a time as economies in Asia slowly open up and consumers are once again looking for deals and rewards when booking travel.

But the power of such connected solutions extend well beyond incentivizing shopping experience. For local merchants, this provides them with an opportunity to monitor the redemption of special offers and drive insights to better understand consumer habits and purchase decisions. Ultimately, this can help brands make timely adjustments to their offers in order to optimize customer experience, and be present wherever their customers are.

As commented by Angel Zhao, president of Ant’s International business group, in a recent interview with The Business Times: the stickiness of mobile wallets can provide for a valuable and effective channel for digital marketing, driving online to offline conversions in ways not possible before.

Showing up in new ways

Gone are the days when we needed to visit the currency exchange in the airport or go to a bank branch to withdraw local currencies before we travel. And instead of browsing through physical pamphlets to look for deals, everything is now pushed to our mobile devices on demand. 

As tourists, we can now enjoy the comfort and convenience of paying with our own local currency when we travel to a different country, and choose from a variety of rewards or redeem special vouchers, with a few clicks on our smartphone, all delivered seamlessly via a brand that we know and trust.

And this is just the beginning. Remember how we used to have special travel packages catered for family travel? What if we can create something similar for different segments of the market, such as for ESG conscientious travelers, who may seek a curated list of local shops and attractions at the destination country? 

Consider how payment has evolved through the past decades and the various roles the industry plays in connecting different economies and cultures. Beyond transfer of value between entities, how can we expand beyond the physical boundaries of our countries and of our traditional industry, into a broader ecosystem to meet the changing needs of our society? 

Through creative applications of technology and re-thinking beyond silos, we now have a chance to create more customer-centric experiences across our digital and physical worlds, and drive new growth in a broader ecosystem. 

As I eagerly await for new developments at the upcoming Singapore FinTech Festival and Hong Kong FinTech Week, I am once again reminded that the sky, as it turns out, is no longer the limit.