Payment services platform Statrys secures USD 5 million

By Edil Corneille

Hong Kong-based digital payment services platform, Statrys, has recently accepted a USD $5M funding round to help kick off its newest products. This round was led via a closed-door funding arrangement with an angel investor in the region with the expectation for Statrys to carve out its market share in the growing digital payment and remittance space.

Statrys is a payments solution alternative geared towards SMEs, startups, and entrepreneurs who require flexible banking and advanced forex solutions. The new funding round is a part of Statry’s global growth strategy, starting with a big push into Asia to help support SMEs and entrepreneurs with business accounts, forex needs, and other payments solutions that larger payment processors charge higher fees for, or banks simply won’t provide.

“After a few months of operations, our business has already reached upwards of HKD500mil remittance and HKD200mil FX dealings. This clearly validates our original assumption that there is a big demand for the services we provide at STATRYS. This new financing will help us to accelerate the development of the company both in terms of products, with the addition of local currency accounts, payment card, integration with accounting software, and geographically, as we will target new markets in South-East Asia,” said Bertrand Theaud, Founder & CEO of Statrys.

The first project the new funding has been used for was the recent September website overhaul that moved to reinforce Statrys’s branding and deliver a better user experience when it comes to site navigation and usability.

The main value that Statrys will bring to SMEs specifically in Asia is the ease of setting up a business account. By offering a payment platform that can operate with the same functions of a traditional bank, the company can fill gaps for SMEs and startups.

Among other platform features, integrations are the next big goal post for the company to cross for clients with other tools at the heart of their operations. The Statrys-Xero integration which is currently in development is one of many other integrations planned that will help synchronise payments to their Xero account, bridging a gap between payments and accounting software.

Statrys’s Forex trading features offer payments and trades in 11 different currencies with plans for more to come in the future. The new funding round is intended to also expand the company’s presence, or ability to serve clients, in other ASEAN countries like Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia.

“Flow of business, and therefore flow of payments, between China, Hong Kong and South-East Asia is rapidly growing. We anticipate that this trend will accelerate with the combined effect of the China-US trade war and the changes in global supply chain that will result from the Covid-19 pandemic. We want to position STATRYS to answer the needs of companies present in these regions as they are looking for better solutions to deal with payments and FX,” says Theaud.

Statrys will also be launching its own Statrys Debit Payment MasterCard for Hong Kong for local entrepreneurs so that they can make payments from their Statrys business accounts at all MasterCard participating retailers and vendors, currently in HKD only.