“At Stripe we’re particularly strong at making sure our users are our first priority.” A proud statement of intent from Sarita Singh, the fast-growing digital payment gateway’s Regional Head & Managing Director for Southeast Asia. “I feel incredibly grateful to work for an organisation where everybody aligns around that principle. Many companies talk the talk and others truly put that user-centric focus into action.”
Celebrating a year with Stripe, Singh has been impressed by the way the personal metrics of respective teams within the company are put to one side by one forcing function, what is best for the user. “It’s a fantastic way to align people’s agendas,” she says. “We have operating principles that will guide almost every interaction we have on a daily basis, internally with our partners, with our users, and across the entire ecosystem. It’s about making sure we’re translating our values and beliefs into concrete actions. These principles are deeply rooted in the core expectation that Stripe functions with high integrity, maturity, and respect, not just for each other, but within the entire user and partner ecosystem in which we operate.”
The digital journey with Stripe
Across a fast-changing commercial landscape, Stripe is helping businesses to increase their adoption rate of digital solutions and payment systems. Following a global shift in the way business is done, triggered by the pandemic and ongoing geopolitical conflict adding to economic uncertainties, companies are feeling the pressure when it comes to operational overheads. Despite these challenges and the rapid digital progress made over the past two years, Singh points out that online spending only amounted to around 12% of total global spending in 2021.
“There’s still a huge upside and a big opportunity, particularly with e-commerce,” she adds. “We’re building products and the financial infrastructure to really put our users first to help them go cross-border, beyond their domestic boundaries, to widen their markets and drive efficiencies within their financial services infrastructure.”
Stripe solutions
“We’re now seeing more and more APAC and Southeast Asia businesses wanting to go global, and we can help them do that,” assures Singh. “There are complexities associated with going cross-border, such as fraudsters who are now getting more sophisticated with their attacks, which means the larger businesses become, the more their attack surface broadens.”
Helping companies mitigate against the risks associated with expansion, Stripe Radar is a solution built on machine learning that helps to prevent fraud. “Thousands of businesses around the world are using Stripe Radar to spot patterns of risk,” says Singh. “It protects users from the moment that they make the first charge. It’s essentially like a caller ID for incoming charges.”
