Island Fintech Weekly (19 September)

Xendit becomes a unicorn, many pushes to make the SGX great again, India and Singapore central banks do a collab.

Sep 19, 2021

Greetings Islanders,

Thanks for the overwhelmingly positive support for Island Crypto Weekly last week. Joyce has kindly agreed to become a permanent fixture to IFW and will be jumping in for the first week of every month’s edition, wrapping up a monthly update in the world of crypto. I would love to tackle some other verticals too, such as lending (credit decisioning, open banking, etc.) If anyone else is interested in joining this motley crew of writers, let me know. We also hope to build an open source community around SEA fintech amongst many other things - keep you posted about this!

Meanwhile, enjoy this picture of a beach.

Note: Want to get in touch with me about content or angel investing? Reach out to me at vinay.palathinkal@gmail.com. If you have any questions or thoughts around Wise’s Platform API, reach out at vinay.palathinkal@wise.com. You can also do all of the above via LinkedIn.

🎣 Dips

Xendit, an Indonesia based API platform, recently became a unicorn with a $150m round led by Tiger Global. Xendit is really interesting in that they want to become a full-stack digital payments platform for their merchant partners - they see this as a way to get them to find a more attractive package to step out of the physical world and into the digital-first reality. in Tessa (COO)’s words - “For merchants to come online, they don’t just need payments, they need to be able to do things like subscribe to Shopify or subscribe to Google Suite, to be able to support being digital-first.”
India and Singapore’s central banks have agreed to integrate their local instant payments networks. This move is expected to go live in July 2022, and if similar to the PromptPay and PayNow (Thailand and Singapore) integration - will be instant, yes, but not exactly class leading in terms of cost. Currently, there are pretty hefty (and non transparent) FX spreads charged by the banks managing the payouts from PayNow. I just checked right now and the spreads are about 1.6% of the transfer value. So essentially - convenience : ✅ but cost:❓
Singapore Exchange (SGX) is set to launch a depository exchange linking program with Stock Exchange of Thailand (SET). Is it just me or did all these SEA finance brass suddenly start a WhatsApp group to collaborate on projects? Depository receipts (DRs) basically represent shares in a security listed on an exchange - so Singapore investors will have access to Thai stocks and vice versa. It’s a great move in enhancing liquidity and will also improve access for retail investors. With SGX also set to relax restrictions for SPACs, this is certainly helps with the ‘more-readily-available-liquidity’ argument.
Singapore is setting up a new $1.5bn fund for jettisoning new listings on the SGX. The funds will be call 65 Equity Partners, managed by Temasek, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund. The strategy is to make major late stage growth investments in Singapore and the region and eventually take them public on the SGX - most likely to be encouraged to be done on a SPAC model, essentially test-driving the newly launched framework here.
Pluang, a wealthtech firm from Indonesia, just closed a $55m Series B round. Retail investing is all the rage in Indonesia, and Pluang provides access to various investment instruments, including gold, mutual funds, and crypto assets. The platform allows users to invest as little as IDR 10,000 ($0.70) in its products. Other investment startups that raised significant funding this year are crypto exchange Pintu, which bagged $35m in August; Bibit, which raised $65m in May; and Ajaib, which also snagged $65m in March.

🐋 Dives

Digital Banking in Asia-Pacific (BPC downloadable report)
I Have Summarised the Most Recent CBDC Experiments So You Don't Have To (Luca Prosperi)
Vertical Fintech is Reimagining Community Banking with the Help of Next-Gen Infrastructure (Redpoint)

🍹 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)