Gaming company Razer to expand payments network to 54 million merchants via tie-up with Visa

Southeast Asia has seen its mobile payments landscape grow rapidly in recent years, driven by high mobile penetration rates

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Min-Liang Tan, co-founder and CEO of gaming hardware company Razer. Photo: SCMP

Published: 9:13am, 24 Jun 2019Updated: 9:36pm, 24 Jun 2019

Gaming hardware company Razer is expanding its payments network through a partnership with Visa, which will allow Razer’s e-wallet users to pay at 54 million Visa merchants globally.

Without the need for a bank account or a credit card, up to 60 million users of Razer’s online payments service, Razer Pay, will be able to use the newly-developed virtual prepaid solution by Visa in their e-wallet to make payments wherever Visa is accepted, according to an announcement by Razer’s fintech arm and Visa on Monday.

The partnership is tapping into the under-banked, tech-savvy population in Southeast Asia that is undergoing a shift to digital payments. Only 27 per cent of Southeast Asia’s 600 million people have a bank account, according to KPMG. Yet, 51 per cent of them are monthly active internet users, according to a report by Google and Temasek in 2017.

“We want to make sure that we are able to introduce the benefits of mobile and digital payments to [the under-banked and under-served population in Southeast Asia], in order to bring them up to the formal financial system,” Chris Clark, regional president of Visa Asia Pacific, said in a phone interview.

The new Visa prepaid service will roll out in the coming month in Southeast Asia, starting from Malaysia and Singapore where Razer Pay is already available, before expanding to other countries including the Philippines where the launch of Razer’s e-wallet is in the pipeline, according to Limeng Lee, the company’s chief strategy officer.

“Fintech is the extension of what we have been doing. We’re currently focusing on Southeast Asia where we see massive opportunity. There’s a huge youth demographic and a lot of them are gamers... and these are usually the early adopters of new technology,” Lee said.