▪ Wirecard will explore ways to enable OYO with innovative digital financial services and solutions, including payment acceptance, credential issuance and payments technology
▪ The collaboration would span international markets where OYO is present, including the USA, the UK, Europe and Southeast Asia
▪ The collaboration facilitated in strategic partnership with SoftBank
Wirecard, global innovation leader for digital financial technology, and OYO, the world’s fastest-growing company and third-largest chain of operated hotels, homes, managed living and workspaces, today announced that they are exploring collaboration opportunities to provide a suite of financial services to make payments for OYO hotels and home bookings seamless and hassle-free across several regions in the world, notably Southeast Asia, Europe, the UK and the USA. OYO is a constituent of the SoftBank Vision Fund, which facilitated the introduction to Wirecard.
As part of the collaboration, Wirecard will look to enable OYO with a wide range of digital financial commerce-related services, including payment acceptance and issuance for OYO’s booking services – online, mobile and point-of-sale (POS) – as well as enabling it to leverage Wirecard’s banking-as-a-platform capabilities. These include lending and loyalty to ensure guests booking an OYO hotel have a hassle-free payment experience.
As Filipinos become more digitally inclined, cashless payment and transactions are gaining more traction among consumers. The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) reported 33 million e-wallet users in its 2018 Financial Inclusion Dashboard. The number represents a 22 percent increase from the number of e-wallet users in 2017 and almost double the adoption rate of credit cards in 2018 at 9.4 million users. Being the world’s heaviest internet user, Filipinos are more likely to adopt more innovative solutions for handling payments.
“We are very excited to explore working with Wirecard not only because of the all-encompassing scope of the company’s set of financial service offerings but also because of its international financial payments expertise. By easing the booking experience for our customers around the world and helping create value-added offerings, Wirecard can help us come closer to our goal of becoming the most preferred and trusted hospitality brand in the world,” said Maninder Gulati, Chief Strategy Officer (Global), OYO.
“OYO has truly revolutionized the hospitality space across the globe and we are excited to be engaging with them as they take their business to the next level. The future of the travel industry is digital, with unified, integrated customer experiences across all channels – and this includes smooth and reliable digital financial processes such as we intend to provide to OYO around the world,” said Georg von Waldenfels, EVP Group Business Development, Wirecard.
OYO provides quality living spaces for business and leisure travelers by leveraging its core capabilities of broad reach and efficient renovations, superior guest experiences, technology-based operations and independent distributions. Currently, OYO has an international presence with its hotels and homes business spread across the Indian subcontinent, China, Southeast Asia, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Europe, the USA and many other countries and regions with a portfolio that exceeds more than 23,000 hotels and 125,000+ vacation homes in 800 cities in 80 countries. In the Philippines, OYO has more than 100 asset hotels nationwide and will be present in 10+ key cities by 2020.