Fintech company PingPong has been authorized as an electronic money institution (EMI) by the Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier (CSSF) in Luxembourg. This would make it the first Luxembourg-based B2B fintech (with offices in Hangzhou, New York, San Francisco, Japan and Hong Kong) to achieve this feat in the EU after applying in December 2019.
The license enables PingPong to offer a more flexible array of services and increase the scope of customers in the future. PingPong has already helped more than 800,000 sellers across the globe spanning 14 different markets. It will aid the firm’s international expansion, which officially became a unicorn in March this year with a valuation of $1.5 billion. With this license, the company will be able to provide a secure electronic wallet and access to a host of new services.
While banks were slow to digitally adapt, mobile cross-border payment services have exploded in popularity over the past few years. Europe currently leads the instant payments evolution, and is predicted to see an unprecedented growth of over 500 per cent in world-wide volume by 2025. This has allowed agile fintechs such as PingPong to capitalize on the global e-commerce boom that could see a record-breaking $3.914 trillion in sales this year.
Innovation is enabling fintechs to deliver efficient payment services to consumers at a much lower cost, with the EMI license filling the gap between conventional banks and consumers by creating digital products, services and channels for fulfilling a vast range of customer payment needs.
We are extremely proud to announce obtaining an EMI license in Luxembourg, a world-renowned fintech hub and pioneer within the EU market,” cofounder and CBO Ning Wang said. “This will strengthen our existing services which can support customers on different market places such as Amazon, eBay and Walmart and grant us the flexibility to broaden our business model to beyond e-commerce platforms.
“Now with the wind force of the pandemic, e-commerce is becoming a dominant force in the retail landscape and a catalyst for globalization. This EMI license will allow us to diversify our offerings to support customers in a way the banking system was not built to, consolidating our world-class capability in cross border payments whilst priming our position as the e-commerce bank of the future.”
