Next-generation payments & eCommerce in Japan
BUSINESS OVERVIEW
Leading payments and e-commerce platform that helps businesses easily create bespoke online stores and process in-store cashless payments.
10X
Employee growth from 2018 - 2022
THE BAIN CAPITAL ADVANTAGE AT WORK
Bain Capital identified a leading e-commerce and payments company in Japan and applied its global expertise in the sector to help position the company for success in a growing Japanese market for digital payments.
Having a broad global presence allows us to see how technology trends play out in different geographies around the world and leverage those insights to invest behind similar themes in markets that may be later to develop, providing strategic support based on our first-hand experiences and pattern recognition.
A good example of our border-crossing advantage is stores, a leading payments and e-commerce platform in Japan. Japan is the world’s third-largest economy, with $2.7 trillion in consumer spending, and highly technologically advanced, but the country has historically lagged other markets in the penetration of mobile payments and e-commerce.
In diligence, the Bain Capital team recognized that Japan is at an inflection point, undergoing a generational shift to next-generation shoppers who want to pay and purchase consumer goods and services in new, digital-first ways.
We gained conviction that stores was uniquely positioned at the intersection of e-commerce and electronic payments. We saw that their ability to tech-enable the Japanese SMB created a significant opportunity to build and cross-sell a broader set of software offerings to this customer base, following a strategy that has been well-developed in the US and European markets.
In August 2020, Bain Capital made a Series E investment in stores to support their acquisition of an online bookings platform and invest behind the development of an integrated point of sale solution, key steps in the expansion of stores’s product suite. Since then, Bain Capital has supported stores in the expansion of their sales and marketing efforts, the acquisition of a CRM software solution and in the preparation of the company for a potential IPO.
We have a tremendous amount of global experience in the e-commerce and payments sector. We understand businesses in this market. We know how to operate them efficiently and expand them. We’re now applying that expertise to stores, a growth-stage company in Japan, where e-commerce and electronic payments have historically lagged the rest of the world, but which are now at an inflection point in growth.
