Malaysia’s payment firm StoreHub receives strategic investment from ShardLab
ShardLab, a fintech venture studio supported by international investment firm Hashed, has strategically invested in StoreHub, a payments and commerce network located in Malaysia.
According to a statement released by the two businesses on Monday, they will also establish a joint venture to investigate novel consumer payment and rewards experiences for merchants and customers throughout the region.
The joint venture provides the two businesses with a framework to test new ideas with actual retailers and customers and to scale only those that are clearly successful.
As and when they launch, specific items and projects will be made public.
StoreHub serves more than 20,000 merchant locations in Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Japan.
Every year, the platform handles over 200 million transactions, with a total transaction value of about $3.5 billion.
In order to develop and market products at the nexus of cutting-edge technologies and financial services, Hashed and SCBX, one of Thailand’s biggest financial organizations, strategically partnered to form ShardLab.
For the first time, that work is connected to a massive, real-world commerce network through the partnership with StoreHub.
The statement claims that Southeast Asia provides an especially favorable setting for the collaboration.
The area has a huge population that is underserved by traditional financial services, a youthful population, and a high rate of mobile usage.
“StoreHub has spent over a decade building the commerce and payments infrastructure that merchants across Asia use to run their businesses every day. ShardLab and Hashed have spent years at the forefront of payments and rewards technology, and this partnership is about bringing that work to real merchants at scale,
“Anything we build together must pass the same test that everything at StoreHub passes: does it help merchants sell more? The larger shift within StoreHub continues alongside this: we are rebuilding our product around artificial intelligence (AI), so that a three-person restaurant can operate with the capability of a thirty-person one,” said Wai Hong Fong, Chief Executive Officer of StoreHub.
ShardLab’s CEO, Hojin Kim, stated that the company has been experimenting over the past few years to see how new payment and incentives systems may enhance regular customer experiences.
“StoreHub gives us something fundamentally different: a distribution network of more than 20,000 real-world merchant locations. This partnership is about moving from pilots to scale and building products that create measurable value for both consumers and merchants,” he added.
