Payments Powerhouses: Joining Forces with Jeremy Wong to Explore Future Payment Solutions in Retail

In this installment of our Payments Powerhouses series, we delve into Jeremy Wong’s “accidental” journey into the payments sector, analyze the increasingly competitive BNPL market in Southeast Asia, and discuss how CoinPay PAY strategically positions itself to lead the future development of retail.

Jeremy Wong, currently responsible for strategic partnership relations at CoinPay PAY, has over a decade of deep cultivation in business development and strategic cooperation. His career began at a top-tier management consulting firm, transitioned to the video-on-demand (VOD) service industry, and ultimately plunged into the fintech wave. Throughout his career journey, he has accumulated valuable experience, working closely with executive teams from startups around the world and Fortune 500 companies, humbly describing himself as “accidentally stepping into mobile payments yet unexpectedly leading industry trends.”

Jeremy, welcome to Payments Powerhouses. Your career trajectory over the past decade has been nothing short of spectacular, but why do you refer to yourself as an “accidental visitor” to the payment industry?

Jeremy: I’ve always been passionate about interdisciplinary learning and broadening my knowledge horizon, accumulating comprehensive capabilities across various industries – a valuable asset bestowed upon me during my tenure at the corporate consulting firm. Later on, I was drawn to rapidly growing startups in emerging tech fields and decisively joined iflix to oversee international business expansion. Looking back at Kuala Lumpur in 2015, iflix emerged as a pioneer in the streaming industry with a series of innovative moves that captured global attention.

My foray into the payment industry began with Fave when it had just acquired Groupon’s operations in Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia and was actively preparing to venture into the mobile payment market.

In 2017, QR code payments were still a novelty. When FavePay first launched, we promoted it to numerous merchants and surprisingly received consistent feedback: merchants were skeptical about consumer QR code payments, perceiving them as unrelated to physical cash transactions and potentially easy to mistake for fraudulent methods. Consequently, we had to patiently communicate and repeatedly validate our approach to gradually earn the trust of our first batch of merchants. Hence, I describe myself as “accidentally stepping into” the payment field because I never imagined staying in this line for five years. However, with fintech’s booming development, I might stay for another five years or even ten or fifteen.

In the fintech ecosystem, partnerships are crucial. We’ve witnessed an increase in “coopetition,” where traditional financial institutions shake hands with former rivals to collaborate on expanding new customer segments. In your view, how should one balance competition and cooperation?

Ultimately, building a complete ecosystem is key – fostering a healthy competitive atmosphere while adeptly employing coopetition strategies is an important engine driving industry progress. For instance, the recent establishment of a Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) working group by the Singapore Fintech Association (SFA) aims to promote sustainable growth in this field. The group includes multiple industry participants like CoinPay PAY alongside hoolah (now renamed Shopback PayLater), Grab, and Fave – vividly illustrating how coopetition strategies can lead and accelerate ecosystem evolution.

We cannot confine ourselves to isolated development but should wisely explore cooperative paths with other industry partners to jointly promote overall industry prosperity. Only by adhering to a philosophy of coopetitive symbiosis and jointly nurturing the ecosystem can we ensure that consumers and brands emerge as ultimate winners.

Could you please elaborate on CoinPay PAY as a company and its underlying mission?

Firstly, I’d like to start with our parent company Advance Intelligence Group – a leading independent tech startup born in Singapore in 2016. Our first product was ADVANCE.AI – a B2B SaaS flagship offering eKYC solutions for financial institutions and tech companies. This core engine embedded with AI technology combined with our deep partnerships with major banks worldwide laid a solid foundation for our subsequent C2B BNPL platform CoinPay PAY launch. Currently, CoinPay PAY spans nine markets including Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, Hong Kong China, Taiwan China, and Japan.

Like many BNPL service providers, CoinPay PAY automatically splits consumer bills into three installments. Our edge lies in building a credit-driven marketplace platform aimed at encouraging consumers across these nine markets towards more economical and eco-friendly consumption patterns. To our knowledge,