• Deal unites two Singapore-based leaders in their respective fields, with a joint mission to enable businesses thrive online with an end-to-end offering for digitalisation.

• Combined entity targets revenue of USD 400 million and four million customers across 15 countries by 2026, taking advantage of exponential growth in demand for ecommerce and embedded finance tools.

• Asia Pacific’s e-commerce revenues are predicted to double to USD 2 trillion by 2025. Embedded Finance revenues forecast to reach USD 140.8 billion.

• Deal is first in series of planned acquisitions for MatchMove to create an end-to-end service for companies aiming to fully digitalise their entire business. 

LONDON / NEW YORK / SINGAPORE, 23 May 2022 – MatchMove, the global embedded finance firm, has acquired e-commerce specialist Shopmatic in a USD 200 million deal, creating an end-to-end embedded finance and ecommerce powerhouse.

MatchMove’s platform provides customisable, fast, secure and regulated embedded financial services, such as banking-in-an-app, powered by APIs, to help enterprise firms offer richer services to their SME customers. Shopmatic offers small businesses an e-commerce presence, complete with chat, social media, a webstore and automated access to the world’s largest e-marketplaces.

The combined company will enable MatchMove to provide its Banking-as-a-Service capabilities to Shopmatic’s ecosystem of over a million e-commerce SME customers. 

This deal is the first in a series of planned acquisitions for MatchMove to create an end-to-end service for companies in Southeast Asia aiming to digitalise their offerings.

MatchMove has grown its presence rapidly across Southeast Asia in recent times and has customers across Singapore, India, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Philippines and Vietnam.

The combined entity will operate under the MatchMove Group name, while retaining their individual customer-facing brands for the immediate period. Shopmatic CEO, Anurag Avula, will continue to lead the Shopmatic business while Shailesh Naik, MatchMove CEO, will helm the Singapore-headquartered group as it seeks to add further complementary acquisitions to its stable of SaaS infrastructure solutions.

The combination of the two businesses creates a fintech powerhouse with over a million business customers and their many users. It further positions MatchMove as a unique B2B platform meeting the real and growing need in the market for end-to-end fintech and ecommerce.

Shailesh Naik, CEO, MatchMove, said: “Demand for embedded finance and e-commerce is growing extremely fast.” 

“Shopmatic has built an amazing business and team with proven ecommerce tools which support SMEs to trade online. The acquisition provides a large user base to deploy our financial services, reaching a huge sector of the economy at scale.”

“Enterprise customers can now completely digitalise their supply chains – providing services like supply chain lending and vendor payments through a single platform to Shopmatic’s ecosystem of SME customers.”

Anurag Avula, CEO, Shopmatic, said: “This is about driving the digital economy by combining embedded finance with ecommerce. 

“We are building a scalable, business-friendly platform-as-a-service with intelligent tools and data, so every business has the ability to create amazing products to address their markets and while addressing the challenges of moving digital money securely.”

MatchMove plans to provide modular services, so customers can select and tailor the digital services they need to deliver their commercial objectives.

In addition to their existing e-commerce services, Shopmatic merchants will now be able to access embedded banking-as-a-service through MatchMove, enabling their buyers to make and collect payments seamlessly and at a lower cost.”

MatchMove provides enterprise customers with a set of customisable APIs which can be integrated into their app to offer own-brand digital wallets, in addition to both virtual and physical cards through Visa, Mastercard and WePay.

The platform comes with a virtual account, ensuring they receive their daily sales funds. This solution also helps Shopmatic and its merchants improve their receivables and reduce their cost of managing payments.

The growth of SME e-commerce is exponential, as customer expectations continue to shift towards digital services. Post pandemic, more businesses are going online with a corresponding increase in the number of customers using online payments instead of cash.  

Both SME and enterprise firms are often forced to rely on a complex multitude of providers and services to enable their online businesses.

Meanwhile, enterprise firms want to offer basic financial products digitally to their customers without relying on banks and other traditional finance firms. 

The Singapore Government is moving ahead at speed with the digitalisation of its economy. In February 2022, Finance Minister Lawrence Wong revealed that the Government will be setting aside SGD 200 million to support the development of the sector.

By providing a one stop shop of digital services to meet the digitalisation challenges of SMEs, MatchMove’s acquisition of Shopmatic complements the growth of Singapore’s digital economy as well as others in the region.

Euromonitor’s 2022 Report on the growth of the digital economy predicts that e-commerce sales across the Asia Pacific region will double by 2025 to USD 2 trillion.

Report author, Quan Yao Peh, said: “Post-pandemic, more business is going online with a corresponding increase in the number of customers using online payments instead of cash. If you are selling online, you increasingly need integrated financial services capabilities as well as an ecommerce store.

“Both SME and enterprise firms are currently forced to rely on a complex multitude of providers and services to deliver their online business. Enterprise firms are unable to offer basic financial products digitally to their customers without relying on banks and other traditional finance firms, which have many legacy systems and processes which make speed to market a big challenge. 

“There is a significant appetite and opportunity here for digital transformation and bringing together embedded finance and ecommerce makes a lot of sense.”

In 2021, retail e-commerce sales amounted to approximately USD 4.9 trillion worldwide. This figure is forecasted to grow by 50 percent over the next four years, reaching about USD 7.4 trillion by 2025.

Both MatchMove and Shopmatic were founded and have grown in Southeast Asia.

“I am delighted to see the coming together of both companies as there are substantial and complementary capabilities that they bring to each other and the broader  market.  MatchMove and Shopmatic will expand each other’s reach and networks to originate new enterprise and SME customers and accelerate platform growth across the region,” Naveen Kumar, Chairman and Board Director of  MatchMove Group, said.