Super Bench Integrates with Hit Pay to Power Southeast Asia’s B2C Smes and Enterprises 

• AI customer engagement platform Superbench has integrated with HitPay’s payment infrastructure, giving small businesses across Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines a single system covering inquiry, booking and payment

• The partnership reflects a divide in how the region’s SMEs are approaching AI: fast to adopt it for customer-facing tools, more cautious about building their own payment systems given fraud, compliance and licensing requirements
• HitPay’s infrastructure is built to work with the AI development tools already in wide use, letting platforms like Superbench add payments without building or maintaining that layer themselves

Superbench, an AI-powered customer engagement platform for business-to-consumer (B2C) service businesses, and HitPay, a payment platform for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) across Southeast Asia, today announced a partnership that gives B2C businesses one system covering the full path from a customer’s first message to a completed payment.

That path starts with answering a customer’s questions, and most AI tools put that work on the business: uploading a price list, writing FAQ answers, and updating both every time something changes. Superbench maintains that knowledge on the business’s behalf, updating it automatically as pricing, products or promotions change. Paired with HitPay’s payment infrastructure, covering everything from online deposits to in-person point-of-sale, the partnership covers two things most AI tools for small businesses leave to the business itself: the ongoing upkeep, and the money.

This is crucial for Southeast Asia’s economy, which runs on small, consumer-facing businesses., where most operate in services, in retail, hospitality, personal care and other trades that deal directly with the public rather than with other businesses. Southeast Asia’s e-commerce sector, the clearest measure of how that activity moves online, is on track to reach $185 billion in gross merchandise value this year, according to the e-Conomy SEA 2025 report by Google, Temasek and Bain & Company.

However, AI adoption is moving unevenly across that base of small, consumer-facing businesses. In Singapore, AI adoption among SMEs tripled from 4.2 percent to 14.5 percent in 2024, still well behind the 62.5 percent rate among larger firms, according to the Infocomm Media Development Authority. In Malaysia, AI adoption rose from 20 percent to 27 percent of businesses this year, Bernama reported, citing research by Amazon Web Services. In the Philippines, only 14.9 percent of firms use AI tools, according to a study by the Philippine Institute for Development Studies, with adoption concentrated among large, urban companies.

Uneven adoption also points to where small businesses may need the most support: payment infrastructure, which carries its own set of complexities, from fraud detection to card network rules and licensing requirements in every market a business operates in. HitPay carries that compliance and regulatory coverage across Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines. Its infrastructure is also built to work with the AI development tools already in wide use across the industry, so a platform can plug in a working payment flow instead of building one from scratch.

“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,” said Jingjing Zhong, Co-Founder of Superbench. “For a small business, that fragmentation is costly. A customer who has a great conversation and then hits a clunky checkout, or a payment method they don’t recognize, remembers the checkout, not the conversation. Every part of that journey has to be built with the same care, by tools that are actually built to work together.”

“Every AI tool a small business adopts eventually touches money, a deposit for a service, a card payment at checkout, a refund when something goes wrong,” said Aditya Haripurkar, Co-Founder and CEO of HitPay. “That’s the layer we’ve spent years building specifically: catching fraud, following card network rules, and settling funds into the right account and currency, every time, in every market. None of that can be improvised. It has to be built and licensed the way a bank builds it, which is exactly why it’s worth a platform like Superbench pairing with a specialist for that piece, so they can put their energy into what they do best.

The integration is available now to B2C service businesses across Singapore, Malaysia, Australia and UAE, including early adopters in the aesthetic and family services sector.