Moses Lo, CEO and Co-Founder, Xendit

Xendit’s origin story started at Y-Combinator in 2015. We believe in solving meaningful, real-world challenges – not chasing trendy, glamorous ideas – and in uplifting the business community by doing business the right way.

Southeast Asia’s business and payment landscape 10 years ago: dynamic, complex, fragmented. The region was looking at a juncture of cash vs digital payments and businesses, big and small, may not necessarily have the infrastructure to support digital payments. That’s what we set out to solve. Today we look at further enabling businesses through reliable payment acceptance, payouts and platform payments – serving businesses at every stage of growth.

Our own background of East-meets-West (we are from the region so we are not solving this complexity as outsiders) is a perfect meeting point and representation of the diverse ways people pay – cards, local payment methods, real-time payments, QR payments. Rather than a polarized card-first or wallet-first payment perspective.

Southeast Asia is arguably the hardest possible proving ground – different currencies, regulators, payment rails, and consumer habits within a single region.

A company that can operate Indonesia’s e-wallet/QRIS-heavy market, the Philippines’ OTC and instant-transfer habits, and Malaysia’s DuitNow-centric behavior under one platform has already solved the harder version of the problem other fragmented regions face.

It’s not the specific rails that export – it’s the muscle: local licensing, local banking relationships, and local payment-method depth, all abstracted behind one global API and one merchant experience.

As we expand our global roadmap, merchants appreciate that we have the depth and breadth. Xendit already operates across Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, and Greater China, and partnering with some of the largest brands in Latin America such as Farmacias del Ahorro. And this says a lot about Xendit’s approach to complexity as a transferable playbook for global enterprises.

What made it hard was understanding that Indonesia is a very different world from any other country, even within Southeast Asia — it’s the biggest by population. So we realized we had to adapt and make sure the products we built met local nuances.

What does that teach us about how we expand? Because we have that humility and willingness to adapt — because we’re willing to be curious when others aren’t — I think we have the highest-quality product in Indonesia. If you pull up the numbers versus competitors, time and again customers will say Xendit has the highest conversion rates, the highest success rates on payouts. Now we take that high-quality product and expand it across Asia, and now into LATAM.

The other way it’s shaped us: because we’ve done the hard yards in Indonesia, regional companies trust us — they’ve seen what we can do in one market. Take Traveloka, one of our big travel customers — they started with us in Indonesia, and now we serve them across 180 countries around the world, because of what we did right in one market. That’s what Indonesia taught us.

The “typical” merchant is no longer a single profile as Xendit has grown into a platform that has to serve an individual seller and a regional enterprise with the same reliability, which is itself a signal of infrastructure maturity.

We now serve a growing base of large regional and global enterprises – e-commerce/retail, travel, hospitality, digital, SaaS, ride-hailing, logistics – for whom payments complexity is now mission-critical infrastructure, not a checkout feature.

Enterprise merchants and partners like Traveloka, XL Smart, and fintechs represent the high-volume, complex-API end of the base; on the institutional side, partnerships with banks like BRI, and hospitality groups like Archipelago International (100+ hotel properties), show the same infrastructure being trusted by large, brand-name operators.

The merchant base has also widened beyond e-commerce into travel and hospitality, education, and increasingly “traditional corporate” sectors like insurance and utilities that need automation more than growth-stage flexibility.

I think one of the biggest decisions where we chose the harder path internally was building our own local payments infrastructure. If you look at some of the big global names, they’ve just built a layer of APIs on top of others. We’ve actually gone bottoms-up and said: we’re going to build our own bank connections, our own e-wallet integrations directly with them, get our own licenses, build into the central bank systems — market by market — instead of reselling or wrapping someone else’s infrastructure.

It’s way slower and more capital-intensive, but it’s what drives reliability in the long run, the right pricing, and features no one else has. I gave the example of QR payments in Thailand — we have native refunds when others don’t. It also provides reliability, because between Bank A and Bank B in Indonesia we may have seven different ways of moving money, not just one. If one fails, we can fail over to another — that’s why our reliability is higher than anyone else’s.

Choosing to own local payment infrastructure directly — bank connections, e-wallet integrations, regulatory licenses — market by market, rather than reselling or wrapping someone else’s rails, is slower and more capital-intensive than a lighter-weight aggregator model, but it’s what lets Xendit guarantee reliability and pricing that resellers can’t match.

Processing means anyone can plug into someone else’s rails and resell access. Infrastructure means owning the actual connections to banks, e-wallets, and regulators in each market — controlling uptime, settlement speed, and pricing rather than inheriting someone else’s limitations.

I think “processing” — someone said this to me — a lot of companies do payments processing, but what they actually are is a wrapper on top of others. They process the payment in the sense that they touch it and move it along the chain, but someone else actually owns the rails, and they’re just reselling access.

We use the word “infrastructure” because we’re actually building the pipes — we’re building connections to the central bank systems, we’re integrated deep into the infrastructure. You can tell very simply: do our competitors have licenses in these markets? Without licenses, you can’t get deep into the infrastructure. Owning the infrastructure means we can control uptime, settlement, pricing, product nuance, doing refunds well, higher conversion rates, and so on.

Why does that distinction matter to global enterprises? Three things stand out for me. One, product completeness — native refunds, all the payment methods. Two, high conversion rates — if you control the underlying payment rails, when something goes wrong you can go solve it, or provide better error reporting. And three, we can actually do customer support when something goes wrong, which a lot of our competitors can’t, because they don’t own the rails — all they can do is pass a message to a bank and wait. We can actually diagnose the problem.

I think that’s kind of “before the sale,” and then the product is the proof in the pudding. But when we talk about building trust, one thing is service. For many companies coming into Southeast Asia, they’ll talk to us first because they’ve heard, “you want someone to translate Southeast Asia,” whether that’s to a European audience, or to a Chinese, Japanese, or American one. You want to actually understand not just the language but the cultural context of what you’re walking into. Xendit can explain how Southeast Asia works — we’re often that service, that business enabler, when people are first coming into the region.

Unlike a lot of our competitors, we’re pretty open and transparent about the realities of what we can and can’t do. I think that builds trust, because people realize we’re not just selling to them all the time — we’re actually telling them what’s possible and what’s not. There are things that are genuinely bad about payment methods in our part of the world, and we can explain that and we’re happy to, versus others who pretend everything is fine.

We actually have the product to match the sales. We’ve had customers come to us who were promised certain things elsewhere, and once they went live, they realized reliability wasn’t there, or there were a ton of errors and they weren’t getting service. My favorite example: someone told me they talked to a competitor who had 24/7 customer support, but when you called them, they couldn’t actually solve the problem. Versus when you call our support, our support staff are often technical — they have university degrees when others don’t — so we can actually solve your problem.

Another example of product quality is reliability — we have five nines, 99.999% uptime, which puts us among the best in the world. Our competitors just don’t have that. So that’s another example of trust.

As for what builds successful partnerships over time: a lot of people start with us when they’re small — as startups, or as new launches into a country. Then they grow with us — they start with one country, and now they use us in five, six, seven, a hundred countries. In the new world it’s multi-PSP — no one uses just one provider — so we have to earn the right, and every time we work with an enterprise, we seem to earn the right to expand that relationship over time. That’s longevity.

The other part is depth. I’ll give the example of a telco partner in Indonesia — we started with them on one project, and now we’ve been with them for eight-plus years. We started with them on one product, and now we’re in something like fifty different sub-businesses with them. So the depth has really grown, and also across countries. That’s one of our best partnerships.

There are three themes for me that stand out. One: we’ve had this theme for a long time that real-time, account-to-account payments are coming and displacing cards, especially in Asia. In the US, everything is a card transaction. In Asia, so much more is real-time account-to-account — whether that’s e-wallets, or banks and QR codes. That’s a big trend we’re very excited about. I think we have one of the most comprehensive sets of QR and real-time payment integrations across Southeast Asia, with features other people don’t have, like native refunds.

The second theme, which is becoming real, is stablecoins as an important set of rails — especially settlement rails — for us on the enterprise side. We’re diving into that, and we have customers bringing hundreds of millions in volume as stablecoins into our network.

The last one — I know it’s a buzzword right now — is AI, which changes a lot of how payments work. We’ll have to see how far agentic goes. But even for our merchants, with AI now, integrations are much easier to build, and the switching cost of moving from one payment facilitator to another is much lower. That means merchants and companies can run multi-PSP setups from a much smaller size — they don’t have to rely on just one payments player; they can have two or three.

Because of that trend, I think people are more willing to add more payments companies to their stack, in which case, over the long run, regional and local nuances in payment methods will matter more. Because if I can integrate with any number of payment companies, I want to integrate with the one that actually owns the infrastructure over time, not just builds on top of others. Call it a “farm to table” thing — if you’re actually the farm, and it’s easy to access the farm, you want to do that.

So that’s why I’m excited about where we sit: on real-time payments we have the most integrations and the highest quality; on stablecoins, where our regulators allow it, we’re able to use them for settlement and for moving funds; and on AI making integrations easier, we’re well-placed versus competitors who are just abstractions or wrappers on top of others — I think they’ll be displaced over time by companies like us.

I also think Asia lives in the future. I lived in the US ten years ago, and I’ve lived in Asia too, in China. Ten years ago we had QR in China but not in the US.

Consolidation of fragmented local rails into a few global standards is already underway — QR code interoperability initiatives across ASEAN are an early example of what might eventually happen in other emerging regions too. And rising expectations around uptime, security, and fraud resilience as transaction volumes scale are why infrastructure-grade reliability, not just feature breadth, becomes the actual competitive line.

We are one of the founding partners of the Open Transaction Layer, an open industry initiative and protocol stack launched on May 28, 2026, to standardize how on-chain financial transactions are coordinated. How we’re preparing overall: continuing to invest in owning infrastructure rather than renting it, expanding direct rail coverage market by market, and building the regulatory, technical, and commercial muscle to evaluate new rails quickly without over-committing to any single one prematurely.

I think of it as a function with a few variables — probably four that matter in our framework for whether to do something.

First: where is end-user behavior going? For example, when will agentic payments actually happen — when will people start using them to buy things, and in what use cases would they work? I think that’s a bit further out. Historically for us, it’s been about watching end-user behavior. We saw how Asia uses QR codes and figured QR would take over Southeast Asia too, so we made sure we had the most advanced QR and cross-border QR capabilities, versus competitors who are global players focused on cards. That’s how we decide: we see where end-user behavior is going, and we make a bet there.

Second: what are merchants asking for? A lot of our expansion across countries has been led by merchants asking us to go somewhere new. That’s how we left Indonesia — a few merchants said, “the problems you’ve fixed in Indonesia, can you fix them in the Philippines?”

Third: where are governments moving? This is obviously important in Asia, where governments have a lot of influence on the business world. The theme here is real-time payments (RTP) across all our countries. Governments saw what China did, saw what India did, and everyone is now trying to create their own version of real-time payments — making sure there isn’t monopolistic behavior, but also that the new rails benefit their populations. Because of that, we’ve been invited to comment on policy, to speak with central banks about how payments work, how to deal with fraud and chargebacks, and how to design APIs. We’ve done consulting projects for governments on what a real-time payments API should look like.

And the fourth part: what do we think is better for the world? Real-time payments are great for consumers and cheaper — that’s good. But sometimes different bodies have pushed clunky UX payment methods that lock you into an ecosystem, and we’ve decided to stay less involved in those situations. It also means we’ll avoid certain industries. I really don’t like things that take advantage of people, so we never got into NFTs when they were popular, and we never took on those kinds of players or helped them.

So that’s our framework: where end users are going, what merchants are asking for, where governments are heading, and what’s good for the world.

Asia will lead a lot of these innovations. Asia never had a “desktop computer” phase; it went straight from no tech to mobile phones. So it gets to leapfrog some of that technology.

I think if the community is looking to do business in Southeast Asia or Latin America, and you’re looking for a genuine partner that will enable your business to grow with a global-quality product, we’re the folks to talk to.