Choco Up seeks to revolutionise payment processing and unlock seamless funding for digital merchants

SINGAPORE - Media OutReach - 17 June 2022 - Choco Up, a global technology and financial services platform offering revenue-based financing for digital merchants and startups, today announced the launch of Choco Payment. Embedded with Choco Up's flagship underwriting capabilities and powered by global financial infrastructure platform Stripe, Choco Payment is an integrated payment solution that provides revenue-based financing of up to US$10 million to businesses with recurring revenues in verticals such as eCommerce and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), among others. With Choco Payment, business owners can access flexible working capital in as quickly as 24 hours to accelerate business growth, while using Stripe Connect to increase payment processing volumes.

A significant impediment for digital merchants in APAC is that they face financial challenges in their quest to build a global presence, often finding themselves facing a substantial funding gap to capture revenue opportunities. Furthermore, many e-commerce businesses lack the tangible assets required to secure loans from banks, who often deem their profiles too risky. Many digital merchants cannot turn to private equity or venture capital either, which tend to invest in disruptive tech sectors - leaving many digital merchants in the lurch. As a result, the success rate of securing private equity funding can be as low as 0.7%.

Additionally, the APAC region has an enormous yet fragmented digital payment market where banking systems, financial regulations, and available payment options are highly localized. Managing cross-border payments has become frustratingly complex, expensive, and time-consuming, with numerous systemic and monetary variances. The abundance of different payment options and lack of cross-usability and prohibitive costs of payment gateways have also played a significant role in hindering the cross-border expansion of digital merchants.

Powered by Stripe Connect, Choco Up now offers Choco Payment, a global payments processing solution embedded with growth funding, helping digital merchants overcome barriers to business growth. The Choco Payment platform integrates Stripe's multi-currency payment processing capability with a single embedded payment gateway, allows digital merchants to accept online payments in more than 135 currencies across 180+ countries, and manage funds through over 10 different payment methods including credit cards, digital wallets, bank transfers, etc.

"Asia is leading the way in payments and financial infrastructure innovation. We are excited to work with companies like Choco Up who are redefining the future of finance, making funding more easily available for merchants in the region and helping them keep pace with digital transformation trends," said Paul Harapin, Head of Asia Pacific & Japan, Revenue & Growth at Stripe. "The embedded financing solution from Choco Up will help remove barriers to growth that have stymied Asian digital merchants and open up new opportunities for them to scale their business faster."

Seamless and efficient growth financing

Choco Payment's integrated solution provides smooth and accelerated growth funding and analytics; its simple zero-equity funding enables brands and start-ups to unlock market opportunities and growth potential. Clients can quickly onboard Choco Up's platform and receive funding in as little as 48 hours by directly integrating with companies' sales and marketing accounts via APIs. With its proprietary database, Choco Up is also offering its smart-growth analytics solution, helping companies aggregate all their data in one place to better identify growth opportunities and business pain points via a seamless, omnichannel experience.

"This partnership platform allows Choco Up to perform best-in-class risk management that troubles many payment processing solutions, such as client onboarding, managing payouts, handling refunds, and reducing chargebacks. The rigorous merchant screening and verification processes will also enhance Choco Up's current capabilities. Stripe's machine learning infrastructure for fraud detection and prevention is a valuable addition to Choco Up's artificial intelligence-driven credit assessment, enabling Choco Payment with enhanced visibility into digital merchants' finances. With reduced credit risk, we'll be able to offer digital merchants even better terms," said Brian Tsang, Co-founder and COO of Choco Up.

About Choco Up

Choco Up is a global technology and financial services platform offering revenue-based financing and global payment solutions for digital merchants and startups. With offices in Hong Kong and Singapore, Choco Up leverages data analytics and machine learning via vast integrations to automate growth fund deployment, providing fast-growing companies with zero equity dilution funding to fuel their growth.

For more information, visit: https://choco-up.com/.

#ChocoUp

About Stripe

Stripe is a financial infrastructure platform for businesses. Millions of companies�from the world's largest enterprises to the most ambitious startups�use Stripe to accept payments, grow their revenue, and accelerate new business opportunities. Headquartered in San Francisco and Dublin, the company aims to increase the GDP of the internet.

For more information, visit: https://stripe.com/en-sg