Stripe Says AI Helps Asian Firms Expand Globally at Record Pace

Artificial intelligence is enabling Asian businesses to expand globally at unprecedented speed, Sarita Singh, Stripe Inc.’s managing director for Southeast Asia, Greater China and South Korea, said in an interview on Bloomberg Television.

AI companies on Stripe’s platform have grown more than 240% year-on-year, according to Singh. Among businesses using Stripe in Asia, 55% operate cross-border, with Singapore-based AI firms entering an average of seven new markets within their first year of inception, she said.

A decade after expanding to Asia, Stripe still faces a fragmented payment landscape in the region. Singh framed it as a competitive advantage, arguing that hyper-local innovation has made the region an originator of global technology rather than just a consumer.

“Asia was very much an order-taker,” Singh said. “But now, what we see is because of this innovation and because of the degree to which businesses are very aggressive about growing and adapting and being hyper-local, we’ve become the order-makers.”

Singh expects AI’s rapid evolution from chatbots to agents capable of executing tasks on behalf of users to be a key growth driver in the future. The impact on the bottom line over the next five years is “going to be incredible.”

“We would go to AI and ask it questions,” she said. “Now AI is being able to do things for us, which includes completing that closed-loop transaction.”

On the current impact to e-commerce, however, Singh tempered expectations. While a shift toward agentic commerce is underway, she said “it’s still very early days.”

On the regulatory front, Singh singled out the Monetary Authority of Singapore as a benchmark, citing its frameworks for money movement and processing. She positioned Stripe’s single-integration infrastructure — covering payments, risk management, revenue tools and government rails — as its primary competitive differentiator in a market that includes dominant local platforms in major economies such as China.

This story was produced with the assistance of Bloomberg Automation.