E-payment service aims |to spread through SE Asia
E-COMMERCE START-UP FOUND NEED FOR |SEAMLESS SYSTEM
OMISE, a Thailand-based start-up founded by a Thai, Ezra Harinsut, and a Japanese national, Jun Hasegawa, aims to be the primary payment platform bridging online businesses around the world with Southeast Asia within the next 18 to 24 months.
Omise, meaning "store" in Japanese, plans to provide a payment gateway for online merchants of all sizes.
Omise launched its payment platform last year, and has been operating it in Thailand and Japan. It will be expanded into Indonesia next month, and Singapore and Malaysia by the end of this year and early in 2017. After that, it will enter the Philippines, Vietnam and Myanmar.
Ezra, chief operating officer and co-founder of Omise, said the opportunities for the payment-gateway business were huge, not only in Thailand but across Southeast Asia, where governments are promoting a cashless society, while a lot more online shops are opening up.
"Online shops are rapidly increasing, and they need payment gateways," Ezra said.
Omise received Series B funding of US$17.5 million (more the Bt600 million) late last month.
"We will have more executives, especially high-profile people in the payment industry, joining us. Since we are are [new] in this industry, we need these people to help secure confidence in Omise," Ezra said.
He added that having strategic partners would help Omise rapidly acquire large merchants as clients.
"We do not just need investors' money, we need the value they build for us. We are not afraid of banks; to the contrary, banks now fear us, since we are coming to take their lunch. However, we need to be partners with banks rather than rivals," Ezra said.
Omise's infrastructure is built on a cloud-based system that can support a wide range of online merchants, from small shops to large enterprises.
"Our system can be scaled to support high-traffic transactions, while it can also support a small number of transactions by small merchants. There is no upfront cost to merchants," Ezra said.
Around 3,000 merchants have signed on as customers of Omise, mostly medium-size merchants. Omise is gearing up to grab large enterprises such as True Corp, Miner Minor Group and Nok Air as clients.
Omise has received seed funding from East Ventures, Series A funding led by Sinar Mas Digital Ventures, Ascend Group, a subsidiary of True Corp, and 500 TukTuks, and Series B funding led by SBI Holdings.
"We had six people in August 2014, and now we have 75 people in the team," Ezra said.
Omise says it offers ease of use, security (PCIPSS 3.0 compliance), and an attractive price model, on a pay-per-use basis. It charges 3.65 per cent of transaction value.
Founded in 2013, Omise was first set up to be an e-commerce platform, but once the founders faced trouble finding a seamless online payment system, Omise was pivoted to become a payment gateway service provider.
"We founded Omise because we wanted to help improve Thailand's e-commerce industry," Ezra said.
The turning point for pivoting Omise's core business from e-commerce to a payment gateway was the need for a seamless and reliable system.
"We did not find the right system we needed, so we [decided to create one]. Once Omise's payment gateway platform was developed, we thought it would be great if it benefited all e-commerce businesses, not only us," Ezra said.
