Commerce Platforms

Payments are integrated into the acquisition of goods and services, promoting high transaction volumes and active user accounts

Commerce platforms are springing up around the globe. Each commerce platform may have a particular focus, be it to:

  • Connect individuals or businesses with one another socially
  • Connect buyers and sellers of a particular good (e-commerce)
  • Connect buyers and sellers of a particular service, for example, driver or delivery services.

Many aspects of these platforms are worth pointing out:

Approach to payments: Payments are often embedded into the acquisition of goods and services. Payments enablement is secondary to the primary goal. This is particularly interesting given that many standard wallets struggle with usage while these platforms often experience overwhelming transaction volumes.

Expansion of use cases: To continue driving demand of their payments application, commerce platforms often quickly expand the use cases beyond the platform. Common use cases include P2P transfers and merchant payments at the POS leveraging QR codes.

Grab is a transportation network operating in many Southeast Asian countries offering ride hailing and delivery services.

To support its network, Grab introduced GrabPay, which allows users to pay for Grab services digitally through the Grab wallet.

Implementations vary by country, but in general, users can link an account or card to their GrabPay wallet to fund transactions or load funds into their wallet by ‘cashing in’ with agents (drivers).

GrabPay has expanded and now serves as a closed-loop payment method, funding other use cases,  most notably person to business payments using QR codes.

Rappi is a young, on-demand product and services delivery platform operating in South America.

To support its platform, Rappi launched RappiPay for payment within the Rappi platform but rapidly expanded to support additional use cases, including P2P and in-store merchant payments, leveraging QR codes.

RappiPay currently has 5 million active users making ~12 million P2P transactions per month, and ~7 million in-store payments per month.

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