MatchMove Pay's Shailesh Naik talks of his company's enterprise payment solutions

Naik’s goal is to put banking as a service inside every phone.

MatchMove Pay is a financial technology company that provides innovative end-to-end enterprise payment solutions to help startups and large enterprises increase revenue and boost user engagement through its patented technologies. The company was founded by CEO Shailesh Naik, and it is based in Singapore with offices in Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, India, The Philippines and the US.

Before establishing Matchmove, 55-year-old Naik, who was born in South Africa, set up the Asian operations of CryptoLogic Ltd. He also previously worked as the Asia Pacific managing director at Cisco Systems Inc.

"Our proprietary cloud-based MatchMove Wallet OS enables any company to easily offer their customers a fully branded, secure mobile wallet solution that includes P2P transfer, remittance, top up channels, virtual payment cards, loyalty points & rewards, and promotions & offers amongst many other features," he says.

Naik started the company upon observing that Southeast Asia, with a population of more than 600 million people, has many people who do not have a bank account or a credit card to keep pace with the changing times and trends.

"The key focus is on 'Spend.Send.Lend,' which is really about putting banking as a service inside every phone and every app inside," he shares. "Today the experience for people who want to spend their money, or send or receive money or lend or borrow, is very fragmented and incumbents are not focussed on unifying and simplifying the experience."

MatchMove's model is based on an innovative B2B model that enables their technology and services to be deployed to customers in a matter of weeks, which typically takes months or years for current incumbents to achieve, says Naik.

The complexity in the payment and financial industry created new challenges for MatchMove, shares Naik. "With payments at the heart of global commerce, MatchMove needed to understand these financial regulations that differ in every country and market," he says.

Additionally, MatchMove had to develop a platform and technical infrastructure to operate based on this complex payment environment from scratch. The company grew rapidly, expanding from 25 employees in early 2016 to 150 employees by year end. The company also expanded further and set up two new offices in India and Miami.

This created another challenge in scaling the operations and creating structure, Naik notes. "With the initial customer successes, the global awards and recognition for innovation that MatchMove garnered and the overall interest in FinTech and the vibrant startup system that the Singapore government has created, we were able to attract high-quality talent from other startups and also majors like Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, Google. This has further fuelled our growth," he says.

MatchMove has consistently been recognised internationally for its outstanding innovation. In 2016, MatchMove was recognised as Most Promising Solution Provider – Banking and Software by APAC CIO Outlook and Most Innovative Financial Technology Provider in Singapore by Global Business Awards.

MatchMove’s long-term goal is to go global. The company recently set up an office in Miami and plans to open more in Africa, Dubai, and Scandinavia. The company already has five million users and expects to grow to 30 to 40 million users by the end of 2017.