During a recent trip to China, Yuno Co-founder and CEO Juan Pablo Ortega ordered his go-to Starbucks drink – a Venti Cold Brew –and reached for his credit card.
This routine transaction turned into an awkward exchange, when he was met with surprise—and even a hint of annoyance—from the cashier.
The reason? Credit cards are practically a relic of the past in China, with QR code payments via AliPay and WeChat Pay now already accounting for a collective 92% share in China’s massive payments market.
It’s clear that APAC isn’t just embracing the future of digital payments – it’s defining it.
With over half of global digital payment spending and the highest digital wallet adoption rates worldwide, the region is rewriting the playbook on how the world pays.
While this is exciting for consumers, who enjoy greater convenience, it also translates into growing complexity for merchants, who must navigate an increasingly complex and fragmented landscape in which payment preferences vary widely from country to country – from Alipay in China to UPI in India and e-wallets like DANA and GoPay in Indonesia.
Yuno Empowers Businesses in a Fragmented Payments Market
Yuno, the leading global payment orchestrator, helps merchants navigate this minefield by helping them to easily access over 300 global payment methods through a single, user-friendly interface and quickly offer their customers the most popular options in each market.
This leading B2B tech company also offers other innovative tools that help businesses handle unexpected disruptions, increase transaction security and drive growth overall.
Juan Pablo Ortega and Julian Nuñez co-founded Yuno after experiencing firsthand the challenges of digital payments while scaling their previous venture, Rappi—now reportedly valued at over US$5 billion.
Supported by top-tier global investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global, and DST Global Partners, Yuno currently partners with renowned global brands such as McDonald’s, Viva, and inDrive.
The company’s operations are supported by a powerhouse international leadership team that includes Chief Business Officer Carol Grunberg, a veteran of AliPay and Google, and SheueChee Beh, formerly Uber’s Head of Payments for APAC.
Beyond deep industry expertise, however, it is Yuno’s technical offering and ability to provide tailor-made solutions that really sets it apart from other fintechs in the region.
SheueChee Beh, Yuno’s Head of Partnerships for APAC, emphasised this transformative potential,
“In a region as diverse as Asia-Pacific, payment preferences change from market to market. Yuno’s flexible, integrated approach empowers businesses to adapt effortlessly, offering customers the right payment method at the right time, which is essential for scaling efficiently.
Yuno’s features were informed by firsthand experience with the challenges large enterprises face with global payments and developed to address them in the most user-friendly way. If you’re looking for an end-to-end solution to make payments easy to navigate, ensuring security and convenience for you and your customers, Yuno is the platform for you.”
Yuno’s ability to connect merchants to such a wide array of global payment methods through a single integration is a real game-changer.
It not only helps businesses unlock new customer segments like the younger underbanked, who prefer using alternative payment methods, but also saves costs, improves efficiency, and helps scale faster across geographies.
Without Yuno, manually integrating even a single extra payment method can be a significant challenge, since the onboarding process can take up to six months, involve high costs and be fraught with complexities that burden internal development teams.
Case Studies: Yuno’s Impact on Global Expansion and Efficiency
inDrive, the world’s second most-downloaded mobility app, has already reaped the benefits of Yuno’s services, which helped inDrive successfully expand into 10 new markets in under eight months.
Other clients like Rappi, Latin America’s most important delivery app, have leveraged Monitors, Yuno’s recent addition, which helps merchants prevent lost sales by detecting issues at their payment providers.
With Monitors, Rappi benefited from custom alerts that notified them whenever one of their 20 payment providers experienced disruptions.
Once an alert was triggered, Yuno would use cutting-edge Smart Routing technology to automatically redirect transactions to the next available payment pathway, prioritising routes with the highest acceptance rates, lowest costs, and best user experience.
This was transformative for Rappi, which reduced its response times from 5-10 minutes during peak times to milliseconds, preventing revenue loss and driving growth (even a few minutes of downtime during peak periods could risk substantial revenue loss).
Monitors also untied internal resources by reducing the time analysts spent on support tasks by nearly 80%.
The newest of Yuno’s features, Payout, is perhaps the most groundbreaking because it presents merchants with the first ever end-to-end payment solution.
This means Yuno enables businesses to optimise incoming payments from customers and outgoing payments to suppliers and providers.
This is transformative for companies like marketplaces, ride-hailing businesses, and gig economy platforms with complex payment transactions.
Merchants and businesses looking to streamline their payment processes and scale across diverse markets can partner with Yuno to unlock seamless, cost-efficient solutions.
To learn more about how Yuno’s payment orchestration platform can transform your business, visit their website or contact their team for a consultation.
Featured image credit: Edited from Freepik
