As digital payments become increasingly embedded in everyday commerce, the competition among payment providers is shifting beyond transaction processing to the broader infrastructure that powers how businesses sell, engage customers and grow. Across Singapore and Southeast Asia, merchants are looking for ways to accommodate a widening range of payment preferences while managing increasingly complex operations across online and offline channels.

India-headquartered Pine Labs has recently launched a unified payments platform in Singapore, combining payment acceptance, acquiring, instalment payments, and customer engagement for merchants.

In an interview with TNGlobal, Dheeraj Chowdhry, Pine Labs’s Chief Business Officer for Southeast Asia, discussed the evolution of merchant technology stacks, the growing demand for integrated commerce solutions and how it plans to strengthen its position in Singapore and Southeast Asia’s increasingly competitive payments landscape.

Below are the edited excerpts: 

As businesses across Singapore and Southeast Asia become more digital, how are merchant technology stacks evolving, particularly around payments, acquiring, instalments and customer engagement?

For years, merchants in the region have used separate providers to manage acceptance of multiple modes of digital payments, introduce value-added service (VAS) offerings such as instalment plans for consumer financing via banks and brand offers, acquiring, and customer engagement.

As businesses look for platforms that connect these capabilities into a unified commerce ecosystem, the focus is no longer limited to accepting a payment. They want technology that improves checkout experiences, increases conversion, drives higher-value purchases through instalments and strengthens customer loyalty, all from a single provider.

This shift toward integrated commerce and payments infrastructure serves the omnichannel aspirations of merchants and enterprise customers in Southeast Asia.

Why are these capabilities increasingly being brought together within integrated platforms rather than managed separately?

The main business motivation is simplicity.

Managing multiple providers often means separate integrations, fragmented reporting, added reconciliation work, and slower customer experience programs. As operations scale across channels and markets, that complexity rises in parallel.

Integrated platforms can bring payment acceptance, acquiring, instalments, and customer engagement into one technology environment. This reduces operational overheads, gives merchants greater visibility into business performance, and lets them scale and innovate faster.

When payment and engagement data work together, businesses can unlock actionable insights, understand customer behaviour, and build engagement that drives growth.

Merchants today need to support a growing range of payment methods and customer preferences. How can they offer greater choice without adding unnecessary operational or technology complexity?

Consumers now expect flexibility at checkout, whether that means a frictionless card payment, paying through digital wallets or loyalty points, exploring instalment options, or using other value-added services.

The challenge for merchants is being infrastructure-ready to offer that choice without adding overhead. The most practical approach is to adopt solutions that aggregate multiple payment methods and services through a single integration and management layer.

This lets merchants offer more ways to pay while keeping operations simple. The technology should absorb the complexity, so merchants can focus on consistently good customer experiences rather than managing multiple systems and vendors.

What role does Singapore play in Pine Labs’ broader technology and Southeast Asia growth strategy, particularly as the company expands its payments capabilities across the region?

Singapore is a strategically important market for Pine Labs and a foundation for its wider Southeast Asia strategy. The market is highly digital, innovation-focused and a gateway to other markets in the region. Merchants here often adopt new technology ahead of regional peers.

Pine Labs’ investments in Singapore support its goal of giving merchants a unified commerce platform that brings together payment acceptance, acquiring, instalments, and customer engagement. The partnerships and infrastructure built here can carry over to other key Southeast Asian markets.

As payments become increasingly embedded and real-time, how do you see the underlying commerce infrastructure changing over the next few years?

We expect commerce infrastructure to become more intelligent, embedded, AI-first, and largely invisible.

Consumers will experience faster and more contextual payments, while merchants will get integrated platforms covering payment orchestration, financing options, loyalty, and customer engagement.

Data-backed insights will matter more, as immediate decisions based on transaction and customer data become increasingly important. AI-assisted commerce is also a key trend.

The platforms that succeed will connect multiple commerce functions while staying flexible enough to adapt to changing technologies, consumer preferences and payment innovations.

Singapore and Southeast Asia are highly competitive payments markets. How does Pine Labs differentiate its proposition for merchants?

Pine Labs brings together capabilities that have traditionally sat in silos. Many providers focus on one part of the commerce journey. Pine Labs combines payment acceptance, acquiring, instalment payments and customer engagement on one platform, which reduces operational complexity and creates room for growth.

Beyond payment acceptance, the company says it helps merchants increase conversion, support higher-value purchases through integrated consumer financing and build customer relationships through engagement programs and rewards.

On the issuing and acquiring side, Pine Labs supports debit, credit and prepaid cards, as well as open, semi-closed and closed-loop cards, on an acquiring stack built for AI-driven commerce.

As Pine Labs expands further in Singapore and Southeast Asia, what would you consider the key indicators of a successful regional expansion?

Success should not be measured only by market presence or transaction volume, though both matter.

For Pine Labs, success also means becoming a trusted commerce technology partner for merchants across the region. The company looks at indicators such as merchant growth and merchants’ adoption of new technologies through its product suite.

Ultimately, success means merchants rely on the platform not just for payments, but as a foundation for better commerce experiences and sustainable growth.

Indian fintech firm Pine Labs launches unified payments platform in Singapore