Grab and deals platform Fave - formerly Groupon Singapore - have formed a strategic partnership to speed up their growth across the Asean region.
The tie-up will start this week, with Fave bringing on board merchants for GrabFood and GrabPay in Singapore and Malaysia, both said in a statement yesterday .
Later this month, Fave will add the GrabPay mobile wallet to its platform, enabling its customers to spend their GrabPay credits at restaurants and retailers on the Fave network, and also on Fave deals.
Users can spend their credits across multiple Fave categories - from food and beverage to beauty, massage, fitness, travel and attractions - and get discounts and cashback, said the joint statement.
Fave's founder Joel Neoh said that with GrabPay wallet as a payment option on its platform, "our merchants will immediately benefit from additional customer traffic from the millions of people who use the Grab platform daily".
Integrating the GrabPay wallet on Fave's platform was done via GrabPlatform, a suite of application programming interfaces which enables partners to access components of Grab's technology such as logistics and payments.
The move is a "first of its kind" integration for a partner app for GrabPlatform, said the two companies.
Both also said they will explore ways to help small and medium-sized enterprises grow, and focus on integrating more services on both platforms, including FaveDeals (Fave's deals and cashback platform), GrabPay's QR code payments service and the GrabRewards loyalty programme.
Said Mr Reuben Lai, senior managing director of Grab Financial: "We've always believed that for the region to go cashless, we would need a collaborative approach and are happy we can now count Fave, one of the fastest growing O2O (online-to-offline) platforms in South-east Asia, as a strategic partner."
He added: "As the region's leading fintech platform, we will increasingly offer integrations through GrabPlatform.
"This allows more local and global partners to tap into previously untapped consumers and grows the Grab ecosystem as an everyday app."
