FinTech startup YouTrip announces 300 percent increase in transactions

By Edil Corneille

YouTrip, Singapore’s multi-currency mobile wallet, has announced its second year anniversary today. The startup launched in 2018 and closed its pre-Series A funding of US$26m in May 2019. YouTrip apprised that it has tripled its growth in app downloads and continues to be a hit among users for its ‘Truly No Fees’ proposition.

Dedicated to solving the cross border payment problem, YouTrip has established itself as the multi-currency wallet for travellers, with users covering 186 out of 195 countries (95 percent) in the world, as reported by the FinTech company. In a span of 1.5 years before travel restrictions were placed in February 2020, YouTrip users have transacted in over 110 currencies during their travels.

By uncovering ways to buy popular items at cheaper prices from overseas e-retailers, YouTrip mentioned that it swiftly pivoted the use case from travel payment into overseas e-commerce payment when the travel bans came in place. With the unique edge of being the cheapest way to pay online through best exchange rates and no additional mark-ups for over 150 currencies, the startup has observed a 300 percent increase in transactions compared to the same period in 2019.

Caecilia Chu, Co-founder and CEO of YouTrip shares, “Offering the best foreign currency payment experience, be it offline or online, remains a core focus for YouTrip. By providing the best exchange rates, we’ve seen strong interest from our community to shop from foreign currency merchants like Taobao, ASOS, and many others. Knowing that our users enjoy shopping from overseas sites motivates us to curate interesting product features and marketing campaigns for them!”

YouTrip has taken this time to also enhance existing features, especially to cater to the increased usage of YouTrip for overseas e-commerce payment. Apart from enhancing data analytic capabilities to identify potential new patterns of fraudulent activities, the FinTech has also introduced the latest 3 Domain-Secure 2.0 technology for added security and a seamless payment experience when transacting online.

Also in the pipeline, is a new product feature to allow peer-to-peer transfer among YouTrip users and a new top-up method directly from a user’s bank account via PayNow, which is to be released in the upcoming months.