Grab starts mobile wallet service in Singapore

Bloomberg

Grab, Southeast Asia’s largest ride-hailing app, is kicking off a new digital wallet service in Singapore as it stakes a claim to the region’s burgeoning mobile payments sector.
Grab will enable its 4 million users in the city-state to scan a quick response, or QR, code to pay for local dishes such as chicken rice and prawn noodles at hawker stands around the country.
Grab plans to increase the number of small merchants accepting GrabPay from 25 to 1,000 by the end of December.
Grab, which is bigger than Uber Technologies Inc. in Southeast Asia, wants to build on its success in ride-hailing by adding new services in the more lucrative payments market. The company has expanded from taxi booking to private vehicles, rental cars and shuttle bus services. The five-year-old startup plans to roll out mobile wallet services across the region next year, according to co-founder Tan Hooi Ling. “It’s just like Grab for transport; when we first started, people didn’t know about it and they needed to try it,” Tan said. “That’s the same transition we can bring with GrabPay, in fact at a faster pace because we already have the user base, trust and technology.”
Grab is among companies racing to be the top mobile payments platform in Singapore, where there is no dominant player. Preference for cash in the country remains higher than the average across the Asia Pacific region, according to a report from Paypal Holdings Inc.