Rapyd Expands Asia Pacific Team with Strategic Hires to Drive Global Payment Network Growth

Rapyd, the global FinTech-as-a-service platform that helps businesses collect and disburse money via locally preferred payment methods, today announced it has appointed Richard Oh and Larry Lee as its APAC Senior Director of Network Management and Senior Director of Network Growth and Optimization, respectively. These strategic hires support the company’s strategy to expand operations and infrastructure in Asia Pacific, with an emphasis on strengthening the Rapyd Global Payment Network. Both executives join Rapyd from PayPal and will be based in Singapore. Together they bring close to four decades of extensive international experience in senior positions across FinTech and technology industries. These appointments follow the announcement of a $40 Million investment received by Rapyd in its recent Series B round led by General Catalyst and Stripe.

Richard Oh brings nearly 20 years of experience from PayPal and eBay where he was part of the core payments and partnerships team. During his tenure at PayPal, Mr. Oh was responsible for building the payments backbone of PayPal’s business, expanding PayPal’s payment and disbursement capabilities across Asia Pacific, Latin America, and the emerging markets. Having spent most of his career building international payments, Mr. Oh will be tasked to further grow Rapyd’s network-of-networks through partnerships and ensure users in every APAC market can pay and be paid with locally relevant payment methods.

Larry Lee joins Rapyd after spending 14 years across PayPal and eBay, where he held key responsibilities including geographic expansion, cross border trade, partnerships, regulatory licensing, financial operations, and corporate structure and governance. In his most recent role as Director of International Licensing, he helped develop market entry strategies for PayPal and was responsible for a portfolio of payments and e-money licenses for the international business. In his new role at Rapyd, Mr. Lee will work closely with Mr. Oh on the expansion of network partnerships, while ensuring Rapyd is able to navigate complex regulatory frameworks across a diverse international footprint and enable our customers to scale their businesses globally with ease.

“Richard and Larry join Rapyd at an inflection point of our global growth, and their expertise will be essential as we build out the Rapyd Global Payment Network,” said Joel Yarbrough, Rapyd’s VP, Asia Pacific.

“They are both recognized international business leaders and understand the unique challenges of scaling payments in Asia and globally.”

“Richard is literally a veteran of ‘the PayPal Wars’ that resulted in eBay acquiring PayPal, and he has truly seen it all. That experience is invaluable as we forge strong network partnerships globally and across the region to make going ‘local’ simple for the largest platform companies in the world.”

“Larry has invaluable insights on the licensing, regulatory, and treasury management structures that will help us establish a highly scalable platform that will enable us to keep up with and accelerate growth for the most innovative companies in the world.”

Rapyd already offers over 500 alternative payment methods such as real-time bank transfers, cash-in-store, e-wallets, and local card networks in 100+ countries, with plans to significantly expand its network capabilities and use cases in 2019 and 2020, extending its disbursement, compliance, foreign exchange management, and issuing solutions.

One of the latest milestones for network capabilities expansion in Singapore was Rapyd’s partnership with OCBC Bank to enable real-time bank payments for Singapore consumers and online retailers. The partnership leverages PayNow, Singapore’s national peer-to-peer funds transfer service, enabling OCBC Bank customers to make real-time bank transfers using the OCBC Pay Anyone app.

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