Island Fintech Weekly (25 July)

Jul 25, 2021

Greetings Islanders,

I took a break last week - a few days off work as well as time off from writing. I took the time to practise some mindlessness 🙂

I would encourage you to do the same, from time to time!

In the words of Mehnaz Ansari:

Mindfulness is contrary to mindlessness, yet both fit quite well in the spectrum of ways to recharge the human brain.

Note: Want to get in touch with me? Reach out to me at vinay.palathinkal@gmail.com or connect via LinkedIn.

🎣 Dips

Grab has partnered with Adyen, the Dutch payments company, to expand its Buy Now, Pay Later offering, PayLater. Now more merchants who have already connected via Adyen’s API can offer PayLater to their consumers, allowing Grab to have a broader reach. This falls in line with Grab’s partnership with Stripe in May - where GrabPay was enabled as a payment option to Stripe merchants - and is all part of Grab’s strategy of increasing the ubiquity of its financial products.
Jago has partnered with Gojek, to have Jago Bank as an accepted source of funds for transactions made on Gojek. This is basically the same update I wrote in the above paragraph, but for an Indonesian landscape. With Jago as an accepted form of payment, they tout ‘many new benefits’ such as a dedicated ‘pocket’ for their Gojek expenditure to easily track their transactions. The main one I see, once again, is the increased ubiquity of the payment method. More payment acceptance => more usefulness.
OY! Indonesia raised a $45m series A round recently, allowing it to double down on efforts to improve interbank transfers. Interestingly, OY! and its competitor, Flip, are the only main players who compete in the free, domestic interbank fund transfer space in Indonesia - most other players play in the remittance market, according to the Indonesian business journal Dailysocial. Remittances could also be a potential place for OY! to consider as an area of expansion that could be fuelled by the new funding round.
SGX will be acquiring MaxxTrader for $125m, which will help the exchange expand its offerings FX-linked financial products such as FX futures and OTC solutions.
Syfe, the Singapore based roboadvisor, raised a $40m Series B. According to its CEO, they weren’t really looking to raise a round, but investors offered them terms that seemed to have been too good to refuse. My guess is that, hot in the heels of the fundraises by Endowus ($23m Series A) and StashAway ($25m Series D), roboadvisor companies (sometimes known as wealthtechs) have become hot commodity for venture cap investors.

🐋 Dives

MAS: The Future of Money Is Too Important to Be Left Entirely to Central Bankers (Fintechnews Singapore)
The State of Faster Payments in the US (Dana Kivis)
BNPL's Next Phase: Shakeout and Profitability (Prince Jain)

🍹 Twitticisms

(P.S. Again, if anyone has SEA or Asia focused fintech Twitter accounts I should be following, tweet me. The accounts I see on my feed are overwhelmingly 🇺🇸 focused)