Jessica Ellerm is a thought leader specializing in Small Business and the Gig Economy and is the CEO and Co-Founder of Zuper, a neowealth disruptor in Australia

Australian fintech Assembly Payments has announced it has entered into a 50/50 JV with multinational bank Standard Chartered, to create a new global ecommerce company that will be underpinned by Assembly’s technology. The move isn’t the first offshore foray for the Australian based fintech, who has a number of international clients on its register, along with home-grown ecommerce talent. It also isn’t the first time the platform has teamed up with a large bank, having cut its teeth with Australian bank Westpac, who took an equity stake in the company back in 2018.

While Standard Chartered has its eyes on the ecommerce prize with this JV, the Westpac deal instead sought to use Assembly’s technology to enable it to rollout an integrated payment offering for its bricks and mortar retail customers.

Under the new venture, the two businesses will run hard after the USD $29 trillion global ecommerce industry, a large prize that many other businesses, like Adyen, PayPal, Square and Stripe have already made solid inroads into. Given the JV’s Singaporean headquarters, a focus on the booming Asia region may be on the cards.

Standard Chartered is clearly bullish about innovation in the Asia region, securing a virtual bank licence in Hong Kong in 2019, in partnership with several other financial institutions. It has also established a presence in India, launching a B2B commerce platform, Solv.

Growth can only come from looking global for many Australian fintechs, especially those in the payments game, where access to volume is everything. In a tightly held local market, exporting great tech overseas soon becomes a necessity. While this may or may not be the case for Assembly Payments, there is no question that Standard Chartered has just put a huge tick next to their technology, which will no doubt further the core businesses expansion back home.