In March 2021, U.S. start-up stripe closed its last funding round from a host of existing investors including Allianz, Baillie Gifford, Sequoia Capital and the National Treasury Authority of Ireland (NTMA) With a financing of 600 million U.S. dollars, the valuation is close to 100 billion U.S. dollars, becoming the most valuable financial technology company in Silicon Valley.
Now the Chinese version of Stripe, a model of Silicon Valley, has finally appeared. The MallBook team located in Xiamen is introducing Stripe's product model into the country with trading accounts as the entry point. Founded in 2012, MallBook is a financial technology company from China that provides leading payment and billing solutions in China. As a company whose main business is a payment + account sharing platform, Mr. Xie Fengjian, the founder of MallBook, once publicly stated that "MallBook is the Chinese version of Stripe".
In fact, what Stripe and MallBook do is easy to understand. The rise of mobile payment has created an era of cashless transactions. Both online and offline businesses are inseparable from payment. Especially affected by the new crown epidemic, more and more people live, work and pay online. Digital tools and services The surge in the number of applications has also driven many large and medium-sized enterprises to try to accelerate transformation and upgrading through self-built e-commerce platforms. However, if an Internet platform or application wants to run transactions smoothly, it must access payment and account sharing, which will face multiple payment channels and perform cumbersome and lengthy procedures. Even after access, there is still a lot of transaction management work that comes with it. If a third-party service can simply connect payment and transaction management functions to the background through API, it can not only reduce the cost for developers to build payment system modules, but also improve business efficiency based on transaction management capabilities and greatly reduce financial operations. work.
01 Similar genes, deep cultivation of financial infrastructure
Both are Internet financial infrastructure companies, Stripe and MallBook provide financial products and services for enterprise merchants to manage the financial situation of their own businesses. In May 2021, Stripe launched Stripe Treasury-banking as a service, the entry point is transaction payment; in September of the same year, MallBook launched MallBook Plus-simple account split, the entry point is transaction account, the two are very similar.
Stripe develops its bank partner network, including Goldman Sachs Bank, Citibank, and Barclays Bank as its global expansion partners, and realizes one-stop payment access to global banks through API. MallBook is closely connected with China Merchants Bank, Postal Savings Bank, Industrial Bank (banking department), Lakala, Huifu Tianxia, Tonglian Payment (payment institutions) and other partners to meet compliance and regulatory requirements, allowing MallBook Plus platform of customers can easily use and embed the bank payment and payment experience into their products. Through MallBook, these banks are also able to extend their reach to tens of thousands of businesses.
It's a textbook example of the power of a platform, like the Windows operating system, where any number of applications can run on any number of computers thanks to an abstraction layer in the middle.
This is similar to the banking and payment institution business layer provided by MallBook/Stripe:
This explains the reason for the above API call: Many business users have the need to pay for split accounts, but they do not have sufficient conditions and resources to open bank core clearing accounts, and banks do not provide solutions for small and medium-sized start-ups with bank-related account systems. However, this is exactly what the MallBook platform aims to solve: an API-based interface provides an abstraction layer that connects different players in the market together, even if these different players have completely different needs and capabilities.
02 The efficiency revolution belongs to the new era of the Saas market
Stripe built a $95 billion business empire with "7 lines of code". This is not just a Slogan, but also a unique feature of the Saas industry: efficiency.
Although the domestic cloud computing market started late, it has grown rapidly, and advanced SaaS services have gradually become the mainstream of the market.
As a typical Saas service platform for payment sharing, MallBook is very attractive to both the supply and demand sides, and can reduce costs and increase efficiency on the demand side; on the supply side, the products can directly face customers and realize the standardization of transaction management, which is more vital. At the beginning of 2015, MallBook started to digitize transactions. At the beginning of the project, the company first investigated the status quo of fund receipt and payment applications of platform companies in the market, and found that it mainly faced the following problems:
(1) Receipt: The payment interface is uneven
When APP or website developers want to develop payment products and need to access third-party payment, they will face cumbersome application process, troublesome development process, and complicated development technology. At that time, payment was not a standardized thing. channels are not the same. And the payment needs long-term operation. For example, if a payment is made today and a refund needs to be processed after 2 weeks, it needs to be reconciled, a report needs to be issued, and data analysis needs to be done. This requires a lot of manpower for companies, especially small and medium-sized start-up companies. and time overhead.
(2) Pay: severe fragmentation of transaction information
Regardless of online platforms (e-commerce) or traditional offline formats (commercial complexes, scenic spots, brand chains, etc.), as long as they have the attributes of an "intermediary" platform and involve sharing benefits with partners, transaction information and capital information are easy to form Fragmentation requires manual verification, and the amount of manual operations for account sharing and profit distribution is large, which makes it difficult for operators to make effective transaction management decisions.
The significance of the existence of MallBook is to optimize these tedious tasks, help enterprises to easily get through the payment process, and transform enterprise transaction management from manual operations in the past to automation, effectively improving the operating efficiency of enterprises by 30%-60%; in this race against time In the efficiency revolution, MallBook's Saas application is accelerating the era of digital finance for enterprises in an all-round way.
03 Not only account sharing, MallBook is also building an ecology
Stripe has gone from providing seven lines of code for simple payment gateway access to now building an ecosystem around merchants, from online payment to offline payment, business tools to help merchants, issuing virtual cards, providing lending services for small and medium-sized enterprises and individuals, etc. . In addition to online payment solutions, Stripe can also provide data analysis tool Sigma, company registration platform Atlas, risk control tool Radar and many other products. These products and business coverage are the key to Stripe's story after payment. This model and development process are not unfamiliar to everyone. Since Stripe originally originated from aggregation, and achieved overall access by packaging different payment methods into a set of SDK interfaces, many practitioners in China also call it an aggregation payment company.
On the other hand, MallBook is the same as Stripe. Starting from online, the goal is to enable companies with payment needs to better complete transactions, but there are some differences. This is why MallBook has always been considered different from most domestic aggregation payment companies. . That is to say, MallBook does not use payment to connect enterprises, but connects enterprises from the account as an entry point. It pays more attention to the transaction management of the middle and back ends, rather than the front-end payment collection actions. Because MallBook is well aware that what Saas enterprise services should do is to empower value after connection, and dig deeper user needs through transactions, so as to realize "making finance better serve enterprises". In the future, MallBook will also rely on the underlying transaction account foundation. Like Stripe, it will extend more services such as supply chain finance, micro-loans, factoring, insurance, and industrial funds to realize a multi-application ecosystem that is not limited to account sharing. .
04 Customer commonality, using technology to empower the platform trading market
Both Stripe and MallBook expand their product and service systems for enterprise customers, helping enterprises simplify the deployment and maintenance of payment infrastructure. The two parties focus on the B-end market, focusing on SME customers in the early stage. With the digital payment platform as the core, enterprises can easily realize online and offline collection and payment, improve the efficiency of payment and settlement, and solve corporate compliance and risk through multiple products and services. control, business development and analysis, etc., and improve the efficiency of enterprise operations.
It can be seen that MallBook's customer base is very similar to Stripe's, and even overlaps. In 2019, Airbnb China, a global travel and housing rental platform, conducted in-depth communication with MallBook on payment system solutions. Prior to this, Airbnb had also had relevant contacts with Stripe.
Yes, both Stripe and MallBook are riding the e-commerce growth wave.
Since the outbreak of the epidemic, the enthusiasm of traditional enterprises to build e-commerce business has been high. In 2020 alone, hundreds of thousands of e-commerce enterprises have sprung up. In the second quarter of the same year, Stripe earned US$20 billion in revenue. In contrast, MallBook also reached strategic cooperation with industry unicorns such as Hikvision, Yanghe, Qumei Home, and Marubi.
For MallBook, the development speed of e-commerce has exceeded the development speed of the underlying payment technology. If a company wants to move its business online, it must find a bank/payment institution to process the payment and establish a gateway to connect the two. Generally speaking, this process takes a few weeks, and several people have to be handled in the middle, and a large service fee must be paid. The whole process is long and cumbersome.
In this context, traditional banks based on offline services have been unable to meet the needs of the development of the digital economy. Many e-commerce companies hope to directly embed financial services in their own websites, which accelerates MallBook’s entry into the Internet to a certain extent. The speed of financial markets.
MallBook is also studying how to seize this huge opportunity, how to subvert the industry with an open, interconnected, and rapidly expanding platform business model, so that small and medium-sized enterprises everywhere can create a more complete trading ecosystem.
write at the end
The penetration rate of e-commerce in the global market continues to rise, and the payment track has a very high ceiling. The outbreak of the epidemic has accelerated the transfer of offline sales to online. Consumers are becoming more and more accustomed to online consumption. As a general trend, more merchants have accepted software-embedded payment methods, and the online payment generated by this demand will continue to develop rapidly.
MallBook has become the utility of e-commerce, and its trading infrastructure role has a strong network effect, forming a deep moat. MallBook has attracted tens of thousands of corporate users, whether it is based on its early integrated simple API payment interface or the MallBook Plus code-free accounting technology launched in September last year. Transaction data is deposited on the platform, and MallBook can better help regulators detect fraudulent and risky behaviors of enterprises. In addition, through the fund depository capabilities of licensed institutions, it can ensure transaction security and provide enterprises with the compliance of second-clear transaction behavior. Require. Based on this, more enterprises will be attracted by the convenience and security of MallBook payment splitting, forming a flywheel effect, thus building MallBook's data moat and leading a new era of transaction splitting.