• by Ben Frederick  @mp_benfred, June 13, 2016

Finnish peer-to-peer payments startup Tapp has announced that it has raised $9 million to expand its operation into Southeast Asia. This round of funding brings the total raised by the company to $12 million.

Tapp Market, Tapp's consumer app, doesn’t need bank account or credit card information from its users, making it infinitely more useful in the APAC market (where many people don’t use banks) than some of the more well-known services in the United States, like Venmo, Apple Pay, or Android Pay.

Customers can convert their cash, through trusted vendors on the ground, into digital currency in order to pay bills online or gain access to online retailers.

The company has already seen impressive growth in Indonesia, and plans to use the money to accelerate growth in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, with an eye towards opening up Myanmar by the end of 2016.

“Sustainable business that just works, without relying on so-called traditional single business models like “advertising” alone, is an absolute game-changer for setting the bar in our industry. Now the question shifts towards focus and scaling the business in order to spread the benefit to our end users,” states Tapio Järvenpää, COO at Tapp Commerce.

While the space that Tapp finds itself in is crowded, emulating and expanding the scope of the local cash economy through an app is a fairly unique approach to help differentiate it from its competitors.