Dragonpay

Dragonpay was established in 2010 by Robertson “Dick” Chiang as the Philippines’ pioneer in alternative online payments. It began with a narrower idea — letting shoppers pay via online banking transfer — but Chiang quickly found that only a fraction of Filipinos had internet banking access at the time. The company pivoted to aggregate a much wider range of payment channels behind one merchant API: online bank transfers, e-wallets, and over-the-counter payment centers at pawnshops, convenience stores, and remittance outlets nationwide.

For over a decade, Dragonpay served as critical payments infrastructure for Philippine e-commerce and online merchants who needed to reach the large share of the population without credit cards or bank accounts. As of the company’s most recent public figures, it supported roughly 900 merchants and worked with over 40 bank, e-wallet, and OTC partners.

In 2021, Southeast Asian payments company Xendit made a strategic investment in Dragonpay. That relationship culminated in July 2026, when Xendit announced it had fully absorbed Dragonpay’s operations — merchants now onboard through Xendit’s platform while Dragonpay keeps its brand and Philippine presence. This makes Dragonpay one of the clearer acquisition outcomes among the Philippines’ first wave of fintech startups.

Filipino online merchants in the early 2010s faced a payments dead end: credit and debit card penetration was low, and most shoppers had no way to complete an online purchase from their bank account. Merchants needed a single integration that could route payment collection across whichever channel a given customer actually had access to.

Philippine online merchants and e-commerce platforms, and by extension the large segment of Filipino consumers who could pay only through bank transfer, e-wallet, or a physical over-the-counter payment center.

Rather than betting solely on online banking or cards, Dragonpay built its entire model around channel aggregation — one API surfacing dozens of local, already-trusted payment methods, including OTC networks most foreign payment processors ignored entirely. This let it serve the large unbanked and underbanked share of Filipino shoppers that card-only gateways structurally could not reach.

In August 2021 Xendit made a strategic investment in Dragonpay, and on July 8, 2026 Xendit formally announced full integration, absorbing Dragonpay's merchant base onto its regional payments platform. Dragonpay continues operating under its own brand and local presence, but all new merchant onboarding now runs through Xendit.