Singapore-headquartered fintech company AsiaKredit on Tuesday announced its strategic partnership with Lazada Philippines. The partnership will allow customers of the Alibaba-backed Lazada e-commerce firm to buy products on fixed monthly installments, powered by AsiaKredit’s payment option eShopaLoan.
Lazada’s buyers can start using the monthly payment on installments starting this September.
The payment option is aimed to enable middle-class customers in the Philippines to shop on Lazada’s online marketplace and LazMall–that offers branded products and premium services–through installment-based credit. According to the partnership deal, AsiaKredit will lend Lazada Philippines’ users anywhere between PHP 4,000 (USD 76) to PHP 20,000 (USD 382) to be repaid over a period of six months.
AsiaKredit CEO Michael Singh said that with this collaboration the company hopes to “to improve access to finance for millions of under-banked Filipinos left out of the traditional financial system.”
The company with operations limited to the Philippines has till now raised USD 2.5 million from SIG Asia Investments, FORUM, Fintonia Group, Reliance Indonesia Group, and Space Ventures.
“It is a privilege to collaborate with companies like AsiaKredit as we work towards a common goal in creating a secure and inclusive digital economy in the Philippines. Besides driving growth in the digital consumer finance landscape, Lazada Philippines is always looking for opportunities to pass on these benefits to our Filipino customers,” Ray Alimurung, CEO of Lazada Philippines, said in an official statement.
According to iPrice, an online shopping aggregator, Lazada is the leader in terms of monthly active users in four of the six major e-commerce markets in Southeast Asia including Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and the Philippines. Tokopedia took the lead in Indonesia, while Shopee was No 1 in Vietnam.
AsiaKredit claims the market penetration of e-commerce in the Philippines is currently among the lowest in Southeast Asia, and is projected to hit 34% average annual 10-year growth. The fintech company runs three products, named AffordaLoan, ShopaLoan, and InstaLoan on its app ‘pera247’, of which eShopaLoan was launched in the second quarter of this year.
eShopaLoan, according to AsiaKredit, is driven by its “proprietary algorithmic credit scoring tool” that analyses users behavioral data on their smartphone including other alternative data sources to determine an applicant’s creditworthiness.
