Skip to main content
https://www.highperformancecpmgate.com/rgeesizw1?key=a9d7b2ab045c91688419e8e18a006621

Grab and Singtel team up to apply for a digital full bank license in Singapore

Grab and Singtel, one of the largest telecoms in Singapore, announced today that they are applying for a digital full bank license together. If approved, the license will allow them to offer simple credit and investment products, before progressing to a full-functioning bank if they meet the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s (MAS) criteria.

Grab will hold a 60% stake in the consortium, with Singtel holding the other 40%. A joint statement said the companies are “committed to contributing to the financial services sector with a differentiated offering that addresses the unmet and underserved needs of consumer and enterprise segments in Singapore,” including SMEs that need access to credit. Securing working capital is a major pain point across Southeast Asia, with several startup and financial institutions working on new tools to gauge creditworthiness and manage loans.

Grab launched in 2012 as a ride-sharing company, but now bills itself as “Southeast Asia’s leading super app,” with app that provides a wide array of service, including transportation, logistics, food delivery, ticket and hotel booking and financial services, through one portal.

It entered financial services in 2016 with the introduction of GrabPay Wallet, a digital wallet, before launching Grab Financial Group in 2019. Grab Financial Group’s services include online payments, lending and insurance products that it says reaches 100 million users across Southeast Asia.

In a press statement, Grab Financial Group senior managing director Reuben Lai said the consortium’s plan is to “build a truly customer-centric digital bank that will deliver a variety of banking and financial services that are accessible, transparent and affordable.”

MAS announced in June that it will issue up to two digital full bank licenses and three digital wholesale bank licenses, as part of a bid to to liberalize Singapore’s banking sector.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Uber co-founder Garrett Camp steps back from board director role

Uber co-founder Garrett Camp is relinquishing his role as a board director and switching to board observer — where he says he’ll focus on product strategy for the ride hailing giant. Camp made the announcement in a short Medium post in which he writes of his decade at Uber: “I’ve learned a lot, and realized that I’m most helpful when focused on product strategy & design, and this is where I’d like to focus going forward.” “I will continue to work with Dara [Khosrowshahi, Uber CEO] and the product and technology leadership teams to brainstorm new ideas, iterate on plans and designs, and continue to innovate at scale,” he adds. “We have a strong and diverse team in place, and I’m confident everyone will navigate well during these turbulent times.” The Canadian billionaire entrepreneur signs off by saying he’s looking forward to helping Uber “brainstorm the next big idea”. Camp hasn’t been short of ideas over his career in tech. He’s the co-founder of the web 2.0 recommendatio

Drone crash near kids leads Swiss Post and Matternet to suspend autonomous deliveries

A serious crash by a delivery drone in Switzerland have grounded the fleet and put a partnership on ice. Within a stone’s throw of a school, the incident raised grim possibilities for the possibilities of catastrophic failure of payload-bearing autonomous aerial vehicles. The drones were operated by Matternet as part of a partnership with the Swiss Post (i.e. the postal service), which was using the craft to dispatch lab samples from one medical center for priority cases. As far as potential applications of drone delivery, it’s a home run — but twice now the craft have crashed, first with a soft landing and the second time a very hard one. The first incident, in January, was the result of a GPS hardware error; the drone entered a planned failback state and deployed its emergency parachute, falling slowly to the ground. Measures were taken to improve the GPS systems. The second failure in May, however, led to the drone attempting to deploy its parachute again, only to sever the line

ProtonMail logged IP address of French activist after order by Swiss authorities

ProtonMail , a hosted email service with a focus on end-to-end encrypted communications, has been facing criticism after a police report showed that French authorities managed to obtain the IP address of a French activist who was using the online service. The company has communicated widely about the incident, stating that it doesn’t log IP addresses by default and it only complies with local regulation — in that case Swiss law. While ProtonMail didn’t cooperate with French authorities, French police sent a request to Swiss police via Europol to force the company to obtain the IP address of one of its users. For the past year, a group of people have taken over a handful of commercial premises and apartments near Place Sainte Marthe in Paris. They want to fight against gentrification, real estate speculation, Airbnb and high-end restaurants. While it started as a local conflict, it quickly became a symbolic campaign. They attracted newspaper headlines when they started occupying prem