Online shopping has outpaced traditional retail in the Asia Pacific as more people turn to e-commerce. Online shoppers who shop ‘a few times a month’ regularly are now outpacing their offline counterparts by 42% vs 31%. Those who shop online ‘once every few months’ leapfrog offline shoppers by 66%.
Citi Australia is getting into the buy now, pay later (BNPL) market with its new product called Spot, which is being issued by company subsidiary Diners and will officially launch in October.
AirAsia’s e-wallet arm BigPay has secured approximately US$100 million in financing from South Korean conglomerate, SK Group. The company said that the funding will be used to further its mission to become the leading challenger bank in Southeast Asia, with plans to build out its offerings, accelerate product development and scale.
Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.