Online payment processing company Stripe has officially announced its launch in Malaysia.

Furthmore, the San Francisco-headquartered firm confirmed a new partnership with Payments Network Malaysia Sdn Bhd (PayNet) enabling real-time FPX available to businesses in the country.

Despite high levels of smartphone penetration (88%) and being ranked in the top 10 for most engaged internet users, internet and ecommerce in Malaysia only represents around 3% of the country’s GDP, according to the supplier.

“Even today, less than eight percent of commerce is online, largely because moving money on the internet remains complicated, cumbersome and slow,” said John Collison, co-founder and president, Stripe. 

“At Stripe, our goal is to remove these barriers and build the kind of infrastructure ambitious businesses need to run at internet speed and scale.”

The firm’s entire payments product stack will now be available to “any online company” in the country plus, through the partnership with PayNet, the firm has made FPX gateway available in a beta version, enabling businesses on Stripe to accept payments via online bank transfers, along with major credit cards like Visa and Mastercard.

“We are extremely excited by the energy and determination of the Malaysian entrepreneurs we’ve been working with daily. Technology should not be holding them back,” stated Piruze Sabuncu, head of Southeast Asia and Hong Kong, Stripe.

“Stripe aims to empower more businesses in Malaysia to export their creativity to the rest of the world.”

Having been testing its services and products in Malaysia since January this year, the company already possess noticeable clientele including e-commerce solutions platform EasyStore, food delivery service dahmakan, and fashion and retail platform FashionValet.

“Stripe has been a game-changer for FashionValet. Instead of having to integrate with multiple providers for various payment methods, we’re now able to build everything we need on Stripe, right out of the box, saving both our engineering team and our finance team precious time and headcount resources. We’re looking forward to scaling with Stripe as we expand globally,” commented Fadza Anuar, co-founder and CEO, FashionValet.

“At PayNet we think a lot about creating safer, more reliable and efficient ways of paying online,” added Peter Schiesser, CEO, PayNet.

“We’re delighted to be partnering with Stripe with its FPX integration to bring the convenience and benefits of paying with FPX to more Malaysians. We look forward to continued collaboration to bring more of Malaysia’s economy online.” 

This year alone the company reached a staggering $35bn valuation and Malaysia acts as another step forward in its global expansion, following launches in Estonia, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia and Slovenia earlier this year.