Shailesh Naik found a new business at the checkout

A customer could reach the game and still be unable to buy anything inside it. For Shailesh Naik, that awkward gap became more interesting than the game itself. His company had set out to bring entertainment to Asian internet businesses. It found a different assignment waiting at the checkout.

MatchMove Play began in 2009, supplying entertainment to telecommunications and media companies. Mobile access was spreading, but access to a usable payment card was another matter. Naik’s team kept accommodating local payment methods, including scratch cards. Each accommodation brought another integration. A growing audience could generate plenty of activity without producing the corresponding sales. The internet had opened the shop; someone had forgotten the till.

In 2014, the company began building a payments solution for itself. The practical question soon widened: if this inconvenience affected MatchMove, how many other businesses were losing customers at the same point? Naik followed the question into financial infrastructure. Today, as MatchMove’s founder and group CEO, he works on putting payment services inside other companies’ products. The game business supplied the problem that changed his working life.

An engineer with a consulting past

Naik arrived at entrepreneurship with an unusually long corporate apprenticeship. Born in South Africa, he studied engineering at IIT Kanpur and later earned an MBA at Henley Business School. His career included partnerships at PwC and Ernst & Young, a vice presidency at Capgemini, and responsibility for strategy and operations in Cisco’s Asia Pacific business. Before MatchMove, he headed CryptoLogic’s regional operations.

That sequence matters. Engineering asks how a system works. Consulting asks why an organisation needs it and who will pay. Regional management adds a less tidy examination: whether the same proposition works across borders. By the time Naik and co-founder Hsueh Huah Leow started a gaming company, they had already worked inside organisations whose ambitions extended beyond one market.

His account of the transition is refreshingly practical. He and Leow looked for a payment service that would solve their problem, then investigated neighbouring industries. E-commerce had similar difficulties. A missing component in their own business started to look like a business in its own right. Experience had given them the confidence to attempt the change; customers supplied the reason.

Before the wallet, there was AppKungfu

The payments pivot followed earlier revisions. MatchMove’s original gaming platform brought developers and internet portals together. Yahoo! Asia became its first major client, with a deal that made 143 game titles available through Yahoo!’s online store. MatchMove handled technology and relationships that a portal would otherwise have had to assemble itself.

Success introduced a problem of its own. By late 2010, integrations required engineers to work at clients’ offices, tying expansion to repeated installation work. Naik chose to rebuild the platform into modules that customers could configure themselves. The resulting product, AppKungfu, arrived in 2011 and extended access beyond the original enterprise audience.

The name had considerably more swagger than a banking product usually permits. The decision beneath it was sober: a service becomes difficult to expand when each customer needs another bespoke engineering expedition. Naik was learning to package the machinery so someone else could use it. That habit would become central to the financial business that followed.

A room full of bankers

In October 2014, MatchMove won the Top Innovator title at the Innotribe Startup Challenge during Sibos in Boston. More than 280 businesses had entered the competition. Fifteen reached the final. MatchMove’s proposition addressed smartphone users who could get online but lacked the cards needed to buy there.

For Naik, the appeal of the prize included something more useful than applause: “global credibility and valuable exposure.” A young payments company needed financial institutions to take its unfamiliar proposal seriously. Winning in a room assembled around banking helped make that conversation possible.

He later described the award’s value in terms of the confidence it created when meeting banks and investors. The distinction reveals a recurring feature of his career. He builds products that depend on other organisations agreeing to work with them. An elegant demonstration has limited commercial value if the necessary partners remain politely unconvinced. Credibility, in that setting, becomes part of getting the product into use.

“Global credibility and valuable exposure.”

Shailesh Naik on winning at Innotribe, 2014

Three verbs, several complications

Naik’s shorthand for the financial business is Spend.Send.Lend. The sequence begins with a purchase, then follows the customer beyond it. Someone who needs a way to pay may also need to transfer money, receive it, or borrow. MatchMove’s offer lets a business bring those capabilities into an application its customers already use.

His explanation to app developers was direct: “you give him one.” The subject was a payment card. A developer could provide a route into digital payments instead of waiting for every potential customer to arrive with one already arranged. MatchMove would work through organisations such as businesses, universities and banks, with monthly charges and transaction fees supporting the model.

The succinct description conceals a considerable amount of work. Naik has spoken about having to understand financial rules that vary between countries, while building the underlying platform. In 2016, MatchMove’s workforce expanded from 25 people to 150. More offices, customers and employees brought the management problem that accompanies a successful product: how to give a larger organisation enough structure to keep delivering it.

He connected that hiring to early customer wins and the ability to attract people from established payments and technology businesses. His ambitions were international, but the work involved making particular markets function. A phone screen is small. The institutional arrangements behind a payment can occupy quite a crowd.

The checkout leads back to the shopkeeper

Naik’s interest in financial access also took him beyond consumers. In 2019, MatchMove bought a stake of up to 20 percent in Singapore lending platform MoolahSense. The intended benefit was concrete: use its credit assessment and capital distribution capabilities to serve small business customers. The transaction price was undisclosed.

Then came Shopmatic. In April 2020, MatchMove announced an agreement to invest in the e-commerce platform, whose network then included more than 435,000 small businesses and individual entrepreneurs. Naik saw a distribution opportunity alongside the payment problem: merchants were already gathering on a platform designed to help them trade online.

In May 2022, MatchMove announced its acquisition of Shopmatic in a deal it valued at US$200 million. Shopmatic brought an ecosystem of more than a million e-commerce small business customers. Its CEO, Anurag Avula, was to continue leading that business, with Naik heading the combined Singapore-based group. Online storefronts and financial services would sit within the same group, while retaining their customer-facing brands.

The logic followed the old gaming discovery into another setting. Helping someone put goods online leaves several jobs unfinished: collecting the proceeds, paying suppliers, and financing the next round of trade. In May 2023, the group launched Shopmatic Pay with virtual accounts, virtual cards and wallet top-ups for Singapore merchants. A strategy that could sound abstract in a presentation had acquired the recognisable chores of running a shop.

What he wants software to notice

Naik’s public arguments about technology tend to return to these operational details. Writing about neobanking in 2022, he focused on the difficulty small businesses face in obtaining loans, the time spent on applications, and the potential for transaction data to inform credit assessment. He also pointed to payroll and administrative work as places where financial software could save a merchant time.

His discussion of artificial intelligence was similarly grounded. In July 2022, he described MatchMove using AI to examine transactions for fraud and verify documents during customer checks. Further uses, including machine learning for business insights and predicting suspicious behaviour, were plans he wanted to develop.

He summed up the company’s task as moving money “safely, quickly and legally.” Those three requirements impose a useful discipline on a technology business. Speed has to coexist with checks. Convenience has to survive the rules. For a customer, the desired result is pleasantly uneventful: the payment works, the money arrives, and the rest of the day can continue.

The work behind an ordinary payment

By February 2026, MatchMove was marking a decade of collaboration with Mastercard, tracing the relationship to 2015. The partnership had included the IMBA GAMERCARD, an early connection to the audience from which Naik’s payments business emerged. The company reported more than three million cards issued through its own work and partnerships, and more than US$5 billion processed through its platform.

More recent milestones show where the work has travelled. In July 2026, MatchMove received Frost & Sullivan recognition for embedded finance in Singapore and cross-border payment technology in Asia Pacific. In August, it received the Asian Banking & Finance Fintech Infrastructure Award for the Philippines. Its Philippine operations work with Asia United Bank and partners including Atome, Salmon and Luvit.

The original question remains useful because it is so modest. Can the person already holding a phone actually complete the transaction? Naik’s career has expanded around the answer: from games to payment cards, from cards to transfers and financing, from individual purchases to the daily affairs of merchants. Each addition brings another organisation, another integration, another practical reason a transaction might fail. He has made a business of attending to those reasons. The customer, with luck, gets to think about something else.