Island Fintech Weekly (6 June)

Jun 06, 2021

Greetings Islanders,

A little bit of a different edition this week. For Dives, we’ll rely on something very familiar to fintechs - outsourcing to external partners!

Something I loved reading this past week was this piece by Haris Samigan, explaining how APIs are pretty similar to a common experience in Singapore - ordering roti prata.

Note: If you’re interested in contributing content or getting involved with Island Fintech Weekly, reach out to me! vinay.palathinkal@gmail.com.

🎣 Dips

Grab partners with Stripe to enable GrabPay as a payment option within Stripe Checkout. The move is good for Grab, as its GrabPay wallet more widely used as a payment option outside of the Grab ecosystem.
BRI Agro, the digital-focused bank owned by the largest bank in Indonesia, BRI, has partnered with Payfazz to help issue and distribute its low-interest loans via the 10M+ Payfazz agent-banking network.
Pintu, an Indonesian crypto exchange, raised a US $6 million series A round. The Indonesian security regulator began issuing cryptoassets broker licenses in 2019.
Wise (formerly TransferWise) launched outward remittances in India, allowing its users in India to send money to 44 countries around the world.
Jai Kisan, an Indian lender, raised a US $30 million series A round, along with an undisclosed amount of debt financing. The company targets rural South Indian farmers, and underwrites primarily for agri-input (equipment) related loans, which are likely to yield output and reduced delinquencies.
Bank Jago announced a partnership with Mambu and Google Cloud. This combination, according to Jago, who are backed by Gojek (ahem, Goto), allows them to remain compliant with Indonesia data regulation standards.
Rapyd launches Rapyd Ventures in Singapore to invest in infrastructure-focused companies between seed and Series B rounds, helping to grow what it calls the ‘FinTech as a Service ecosystem’.
Synctera raised a US $33M Series A to pair fintechs with banks, with some senior execs from Feedzai and Marqeta supporting as angels. Synctera works on an interesting marketplace model that I believe we’ll see more of - helping to filter the right fintech partnerships and outsourcing a lot of the vetting necessary for banks.

🐋 Dives

Fintech SPACs

Some of the top fintech listings in the past two years were structured as SPAC deals. In this list, you will see some familiar ones, and I’m proud to see Grab in the top spot. I was curious as to why they opted for a SPAC rather than a traditional IPO - this interview with Ming Maa, Grab’s president, sheds some light.