Singapore-based payments platform HitPay has integrated its payment infrastructure with Superbench, allowing business-to-consumer service providers to manage customer inquiries, bookings, and payments through a single system.
The partnership adds embedded payments to Superbench’s AI-powered customer engagement platform, covering transactions from online deposits to in-person point-of-sale payments, per the announcement Tuesday.
Superbench maintains customer-facing information on behalf of businesses, updating its system as pricing, products and promotions change. HitPay provides the payment layer, including fraud detection, compliance with card-network rules, and the settlement of funds into the appropriate account and currency.
The companies said the integration allows Superbench to add a working payment flow without building or maintaining that infrastructure itself.
“Getting a customer from ‘I’m interested’ to actually booking and paying is where platforms tend to lose people, because the tools in between are fragmented,” Superbench co-founder Jingjing Zhong said.
Zhong said customers may abandon a transaction after encountering a difficult checkout process or an unfamiliar payment method, even if their initial interaction with a business was positive.
HitPay co-founder and CEO Aditya Haripurkar said every AI tool adopted by a small business could eventually touch financial transactions, including deposits, card payments, and refunds.
“None of that can be improvised. It has to be built and licensed the way a bank builds it,” Haripurkar said.
HitPay supports online and in-person transactions through cards, bank transfers, QR codes and more than 700 digital wallets. The company said it serves more than 20,000 businesses across e-commerce, retail, food and beverage, and other sectors.
The integration is available to B2C service businesses in Singapore, Malaysia, Australia and the United Arab Emirates, including early users in the aesthetic and family-services sectors.
HitPay also operates in the Philippines and is regulated by the Monetary Authority of Singapore, Bank Negara Malaysia, Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, AUSTRAC, and the US Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.
Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Singapore, HitPay is backed by investors including Tiger Global, Y Combinator, Global Founders Capital and HOF Capital.
Superbench provides sales automation and customer engagement tools for businesses including home-service providers, tuition centres, and beauty clinics.
The partnership comes as smaller companies across Southeast Asia increase their use of AI but continue to face higher barriers when adding payments.
Payment infrastructure carries requirements ranging from fraud controls and card-network rules to licensing in each market where a company operates.
In Singapore, AI adoption among SMEs increased to 14.5% in 2024 from 4.2%, but remained below the 62.5% rate recorded among larger companies, according to the Infocomm Media Development Authority.
In Malaysia, AI adoption increased to 27% of businesses from 20%, according to Amazon Web Services research cited by Bernama.
A Philippine Institute for Development Studies report found that 14.9% of companies in the Philippines used AI tools, with adoption concentrated among large, urban businesses.
The integration illustrates a broader embedded-finance model in which software platforms add financial services through specialist providers instead of becoming payments companies themselves.
For AI platforms, this approach can shorten product-development time while transferring much of the regulatory, fraud-management, and settlement work to licensed infrastructure providers.