Fave and Alipay Teams Up To Help Restaurants and Offline Retailers Grow with The Mobile Payments Industry in Southeast Asia

SINGAPORE, August 1, 2017: Southeast Asia's online-to-offline (O2O) mobile platform Fave is partnering with Ant Financial, the financial affiliate of Alibaba Group, to provide customers in Southeast Asia (SEA) a seamless cross-border payment experience with Alipay, starting with Singapore.

Alipay is one of the world's largest online and mobile payment platforms, with 520 million users worldwide. With over 3 million Chinese tourists expected to visit Singapore this year, the ability to accept Alipay will greatly benefit restaurants and retailers in Singapore and SEA as a whole, helping them provide a better service to tourists from China as well as to Alipay users from around the world.

Through this partnership with Fave, Alipay users will be able to make payments via the Alipay app at restaurants and offline retailers that are part of the Fave ecosystem and gain special access to offers and rewards.

"Restaurants and offline retailers are the backbone of the economy in Singapore and we aim to help them succeed. While more than 90% of retail spend is done offline, retailers are always looking for ways to reach out to mobile-savvy customers," said Joel Neoh, Founder of Fave.

"Currently, millions of users across Southeast Asia use Fave to discover and transact at restaurants and lifestyle retailers. This win-win partnership with Alipay will give our retail partners in Singapore more revenue and more customers," said Neoh.

Regionally, Fave has more than 10,000 restaurants and offline retailers and has over 1 million active users. Fave users are able to enjoy rewards through a seamless mobile-first experience for a wide variety of services in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. Fave is the leading F&B platform in the iOS App Store and Google Play.

"By partnering with innovators like Fave, we are giving Chinese travellers the safe, efficient and convenient payment services that they are used to at home," said Dayong Zhang, Head of Southeast Asia, Alipay.

"Along with the launch of this strategic partnership with Fave, restaurants and offline retailers across SEA will be able to benefit from the development of technology. They will be able to easily reach out to new customers that will ultimately help them grow their business," said Zhang.

According to the preliminary estimates by the Singapore Tourism Board (STB), more than 2.8 million Chinese travellers visited Singapore in 2016, when they were the largest source of tourism receipts, spending more than S$3 billion to end-September alone. The STB is actively promoting the city-state in Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities in China, which is the tourism sector's top growth market, with visitor arrivals up 36% in 2016.