SMBs Aspire for simplified payment processes

Aspire has partnered with Stripe to offer SMBs a mobile-first business account, with services available through a single platform for managing finances, making payments, and handling international transactions.

As an all-in-one finance operating platform for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in Southeast Asia, Aspire provides digital banking, corporate cards, global payments, and expense and receivables management. With the goal of reinventing the SMB finance platform, the Singapore based startup aims to give business owners fast, simple access to the funding they need, including revolving credit lines to solve working capital needs and make payments.

In order to deliver this, Aspire has partnered with Stripe to offer users a mobile-first business account, with services available through a single platform for managing finances, making payments, and handling international transactions.

“We put them together into a single platform to simplify the process for SMBs. That means we need to cover as many jobs as possible to cover closing the loops. Typically, an SMB client doesn't want 10 providers. They want a provider that can take care of everything. For Aspire, we need to make sure that we have good coverage. And one of the things that we wanted to do better was the topic payments. And Stripe has been running payments, basically, acceptance for a long time,” said Andrea Baronchelli, Co-founder and CEO of Aspire.

“They are basically experts in this field. And we thought, if we partner with them, we go to the market much faster. We do it much more flexibly because they give us modules we can just implement. And then we can see how it works and then figure out the next step. So, we decided to partner instead of rebuilding in order to enable payment acceptance for our client base,” added Baronchelli.

For Baronchelli, as a startup being able to leverage Stripe’s capabilities enables them to reach out to clients beyond Singapore. While customers are excited with the capabilities of Aspire and Stripe, it's also providing incremental usage for Aspire, especially as the startup is looking to grow beyond Asia Pacific.

“For us, we need to make sure we don't spend a lot of energy and money on launching something and then we basically don't have enough time to iterate and learn. We want to go fast with an existing solution and then fine-tune the product based on the feedback from the client. And so, we are trying to anticipate the go-to-market. It becomes a key priority for us if we want to be better in the competition, move a bit faster for SMBs to find all the solutions, especially because we want to focus on all-in-one and means that we need to have a lot of products,” he said.

Baronchelli explained that SMBs are a big segment because they focus on professional businesses. It starts with a private limited company to an organization with up to 500 employees.

“We prefer to be focused on this segment because when we move to a more enterprise segment, we find less need for an integrated solution and much more need for a very deep, specialized entry point,” he said.

According to Baronchelli, the biggest challenge for SMBs is that they usually run banking and accounting, payable management, and responsible management in a completely siloed and inefficient way. Some SMBs usually run on a couple of bank platforms that are completely disconnected with different OTP, different logins and such.

Apart from that, there are also SMBs that run between excel sheets or have scattered tools or accounting software. Yet, they still send the email for the invoice separately. The challenge is the time needed, just in terms of every week, to understand what's going on between these two.

Baronchelli believes that this is a very painful, potentially complex and boring process which can take SMBs around 30 to 40 hours a month basically just to put these information together.

“We just put it together and we tell them here is everything you need in terms of the amount of money you want to spend, the revenue that you're receiving, we reconcile it immediately with your records and payments. I guess that saves a lot of time in the end. You can save literally a few accounts of people that you don't have to hire as well,” he said.

Stablecoins with Stripe

Given that Stripe is now enabling payments via stablecoins, Baronchelli is optimistic about the opportunities it brings. Not only does he feel that stablecoins is becoming a bit of a rival to the card market, the idea that the money remains in the bank and is not going to move around with the stablecoin being used to move it, is something customers are also finding a lot more trust and excitement in.

“We are seeing that happening more in the business world and we want to be there among the first to develop something. And so, what it means for us is that we will have basically Stablecoin rails to pay and receive as a first sort of product. And then from there, we will see how the industry develops because it is very early stage,” he said.

During the Stripe Tour in Singapore, Mai Leduc, Head of Product, Bridge said stablecoins are becoming impossible for businesses to ignore. She highlighted their potential to reduce costs and speed up cross-border payments, while reinforcing that Stripe is building the tools to help companies adopt them safely and compliantly.

Stripe is currently processing stablecoin payments from over 120 countries. Within one week of turning on stablecoins as a payment method last year, Stripe saw transactions pour in from over 70 countries.