Razer is a gaming lifestyle company headquartered in the US. Some of you might know their hardware products that often come with unique colourful lightening effects (i.e., keyboard or mouse for the gaming desktop PC).
If you are less of a gamer, you might have heard about Razer’s prepaid card that they launched in 2020 in Singapore. The card offered various benefits for its users but was mostly known for it’s feature to light up during a successful payment, bringing Razer’s unique colourful lightening effects to the POS. The card was, however, shut down in 2021. But the card was neither the start nor the end of Razer’s fintech product offering.
The company launched their first fintech product in 2018, which was an e-wallet service for teenagers and millennials in Malaysia. The unit responsible for this product was called Razer Fintech, which is now rebranded as Fiuu.
In the years after the launch in Malaysia, Razer Fintech expanded to other Southeast Asian markets (i.e., Singapore) and launched additional services (i.e., banking products). The company then shut down its e-wallet solutions in 2021 to focus fully on online payments. It seems that all of Razer Fintech's (or now Fiuu’s) activities are in Southeast Asian markets, and none of them are in the US or Europe.
From my research, there does not seem to be a strong connection between Razer’s main product (gaming hardware) and their fintech products, except, of course, leveraging the popular brand name.
The “exceptional growth” of Fiuu (doubling revenue over the past four years and projected revenue of $295b by 2025) shows a different angle for how companies can leverage embedded finance, even when this was not in their DNA before.
