Deal focus: Fastacash brings payments everywhere

Singapore's Fastacash believes that money transfers can be handled as casually as communication. The company, which recently raised $15 million in Series B funding from Rising Dragon Singapore, Life.SREDA and UVM 2 Venture Investments, develops platforms to transfer money through social networks. For example, Ping Pay, developed with India's Axis Bank, allows users to request or send payments over Facebook, Whatsapp, Twitter, SMS and email.

Vince Tallent, Fastacash's chairman and CEO, says that it made sense to work with existing financial institutions rather than trying to compete with them. "The quickest way to scale was to partner with the right people across the globe, and become a technology partner to them, rather than launching a C2C service to take on the existing financial players," says Tallent.

The company's partners include Visa Europe and DBS Bank. It wants to have 15 by the end of this year and 50 within 2-3 years.

Fastacash hopes to take advantage of the booming trade in remittance payments from expatriates living abroad to their home countries. The World Bank estimates that $685 billion will be transferred across borders this year, with 50% of the traffic directed at Asia. That represents a major opportunity for Fastacash. "Our bet is, do we believe that any piece of that $685 billion is going to move through social?" says Tallent. "And our financial plan is based on assuming that if half a percent of that moves through social, we will get to profitability."

Volume is critical for Fastacash to become profitable, since it generates revenue through transaction fees. Currently the company handles more than one million transactions per day.

Though Fastacash currently focuses on person-to-person transactions, it is considering adding merchant payment capabilities. There is some precedent for adding the service - it already supports mobile phone recharge through Ping Pay - and the new funding provides the company the financial support to develop it.

"When people use messaging channels and social networks, we want to bring them transaction capability over that communication channel," says Tallent. "That can take the form of a person-to-person payment, or a person-to-merchant payment."

That universal payment application is the end goal. Rather than forcing customers to deal with complicated online payment systems, the company wants to make payments as easy and commonplace as answering a phone. "We're building a platform that sits strategically between the financial world and the social world," says Tallent. "We're trying to help bridge those two worlds, to help the end users to transact exactly where they are, where they're living and breathing every day."

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