As Southeast Asian startups keep growing and racing in the rodeo, some go into head-to-head contests while others join hands to co-develop the booming market.
Grab, the ride-hailer-turned-everyday-app, and Fave, the on-demand life services platform rebranded from formerly Groupon Singapore, announced today to have signed a strategic partnership to “accelerate growth for both platforms across the region” by tapping into each other’s strengths – broad merchant network in Fave’s case and large user base for Grab – the two companies said in a joint press release.
Essentially, the partnership will be seeing Fave mobilizing its large merchant sales team to onboard merchants for GrabFood and GrabPay, the food delivery and mobile payment arm of Grab, in both Singapore and Malaysia.
On the other hand, GrabPay will be integrated into Fave so that the latter’s customers, will be able to spend GrabPay balance in addition to bank cards at restaurants and retailers across Fave’s merchant network.
The integration was done through GrabPlatform, which Grab announced in July as a way to allow third-party partners to tap on to its user base and distribution channels, through a suite of APIs.
Grab is most well-known for its roots in ride-hailing, but in its bid to become the region’s “everyday super app”, it has expanded into other verticals including food delivery, payments, and advertising. Fave is an online group buying platform with an e-wallet FavePay. Joel Neoh, Founder of Fave, told KrASIA that users of FavePay will be able to make payments at GrabPay merchants as well, and payments can be made via a single QR code.
Reuben Lai, senior managing director, Grab Financial, said in a statement that the company has always believed that in order for the region to go cashless, it will need a collaborative approach.
Fave will start to deploy its team to onboard merchants for GrabFood and GrabPay in Singapore and Malaysia from this week. And the two companies will also be collaborating further on integrating more services, including FaveDeals, Fave’s deals, and cashback platform, GrabPay’s QR code payments service and GrabRewards’ loyalty programme, they said.
Fave has just raised US$20 million in its Series B round of funding in September 2018.
(Update) 4/10 – This article was updated to add Fave’s comment on how FavePay and GrabPay will co-exist, going forward.
Editor: Ben Jiang