Grab Financial, the fintech arm of Southeast Asia’s ride-hailing giant Grab, has launched a SME lending and micro-insurance service for drivers in Singapore as a part of its ‘Grow with Grab’ motion plan.
The roadmap gives Grab Financial a powerful foothold within the financial services sector because the group seeks to offer more opportunities for micro and small enterprises, To catch – it was written within the statement.
The company claims to have served over 9 million micro-entrepreneurs over the past six years.
Through a three way partnership partnership with Credit Saison in March last yr, Grab began providing working capital loans to assist small businesses in Singapore and lending pilots to its driver partners. The company said it would apply for lending licenses across Southeast Asia.
“This is a large, untapped opportunity for Grab Financial to support entrepreneurs within the region who’ve less access to traditional financial institutions. While SMEs contribute over 50 percent to ASEAN’s GDP, two-thirds of SMEs cite business financing and financing as their biggest problem,” said Reuben Lai, senior managing director at Grab Financial, as quoted by Deal Street Asia
The premiere will happen just a couple of weeks after Grab raises $1.5 billion from Vision Fund as part of a bigger $5 billion Series H funding round that can be used to tackle rival Go-Jek, which is competing with Grab to be the preferred on-demand app for greater than 600 million consumers in Southeast Asia.
To catch in 2018, it acquired Uber’s Southeast Asian branch and has spent the last yr or so pushing a “super app” strategy. It’s essentially an effort to turn out to be the on a regular basis app for Southeast Asia, and beyond ride-hailing, it includes food delivery, payments and other on-demand services. Financial services also make up an enormous a part of that focus, with Grab now moving into lending and microinsurance for the primary time.
