Fave, Southeast Asia's fast growing fintech platform providing QR payments & Loyalty Cashback to restaurant & retailers, has announced a strategic partnership and investment from Pine Labs, Asia's leading digital payments & merchant commerce platform.

Under the terms of the partnership, Fave’s QR code will become interoperable and integrated with Pine Lab’s terminals, enabling a single, safe, and seamless platform for digital payments and loyalty solutions in Southeast Asia. Fave’s merchant payment acceptance & loyalty cashback solutions will expand into both debit and credit cards platforms via Pine Labs payment terminals. Merchants working with Pine Labs in Southeast Asia will also gain access to Fave’s loyalty solutions and reward their customers with cashback. They will also be able to enjoy consolidation of payments and gain access to transparent reporting, payment reconciliation, customer insights and demographic data via access to Fave’s digital dashboard, Favebiz.

Nearly 50,000 of Fave’s and Pine Labs’ merchants in Southeast Asia will benefit immediately from the partnership. The collaboration aims to scale and grow more businesses digitally in the coming months. Fave will also be receiving funding from Pine Labs as part of the partnership.

Fave’s Co-Founder and CEO, Joel Neoh, said, “The partnership brings together great understanding and expertise in technology development to help support merchants through successful business transformations,” said Neoh. “With digitalisation playing an increasingly critical role in the recovery of Southeast Asia’s economy, merchants recognise that they need to accelerate the development of digital solutions to ensure they remain competitive. We will work with Pine Labs to further strengthen Fave’s mission of helping merchants adapt to and digitalise in the new normal.”

Fave’s collaboration Pine Labs is an extension of its ongoing focus on working with major banks, fintech firms and e-wallets in Singapore and Malaysia via SGQR, Paynet and DuitNow QR to bring about customer loyalty solutions to the broader payments ecosystem. The collaboration is also crucial in furthering each company’s market positioning and value proposition in Southeast Asia. Fave has a long working history with merchants in the SME space, while Pine Labs’ merchants hail from enterprise and larger merchant organisations.

B Amrish Rau, CEO, Pine Labs, said, “We’re excited to invest in Fave and partner with their leadership to provide integrated merchant commerce in Southeast Asia. Fave’s expertise in operating merchant loyalty programmes and the QR space and our own expertise in providing payments, loyalty and gift solutions will help merchants in the region navigate expansion in the post Covid-19 world.”

Southeast Asia’s post-pandemic recovery has started with promising signs that it is underway with specific sectors such as automotive sales and F&B reporting business recovery and pent-up demand from customers. According to a research by Mastercard’s Impact Studies, there has been a notable decrease in cash usage since the start of the pandemic. The Asia Pacific region is leading the surge in digital payments with majority of consumers believing it is the cleaner, safer way to pay. 91% of those surveyed reported that they are now using tap-and-go payments.

As cashless payment adoption is accelerating exponentially amongst consumers, Fave is at the forefront of enabling thousands of restaurants and retailers to easily accept multiple forms of cashless payments, making every transaction convenient and safe for both consumers and merchants. The commercial partnership between Fave and Pine Labs seeks to support this recovery, by harnessing the strength of their fintech capabilities in providing holistic QR and card payment solutions to merchants. Both companies have strong synergy in building digital platforms for merchants to grow digitally providing safe and trustable payment and loyalty solutions.