50 years of Asia: Uday Kotak, Kotak Mahindra
9 May, 201950 Years of Asia: Boon Chye Loh, SGX
9 May, 2019Euromoney, May 9 2019
Read the full article here: https://www.euromoney.com/article/b1f9jzcmcgt3ss/reuben-lai-from-taxi-to-take-off
Grab is one of a cluster of fintechs that are revolutionizing grass-roots financial services in Asia. While Ant Financial and Tencent’s WeChat have disrupted China and Paytm leads a similar march in India, in southeast Asia, Grab and Indonesia’s Go-Jek are the standouts, launching dedicated financial services businesses off the back of ride-sharing platforms.
Grab was formed in 2012 by a group of friends irritated about how hard it was to get a taxi in Malaysia. It started out as a local equivalent of Uber (and went on to take over Uber’s business in southeast Asia last year) and remains first and foremost a transportation network, empowering individual drivers of cars and, particularly in Indonesia, motorbikes, with a strong financial inclusion objective.
In the course of taking on the region’s mobility problems, “we discovered that southeast Asia was really underserved in terms of financial services,” explains Reuben Lai, who runs the Grab Financial division that was launched last year.
Grab had had to set up over a million bank accounts for its drivers so it could deposit money into their accounts.
“At first we didn’t understand why,” Lai says. “They said they just didn’t have bank accounts, so we had to team up with the banks.” Additionally, 90% of the drivers didn’t have credit cards or insurance. “So they didn’t have access to the traditional products that people in developed countries take for granted. We realized that if we could use technology to solve this financial services gap, we could enable social mobility for the masses.”
Full article: https://www.euromoney.com/article/b1f9jzcmcgt3ss/reuben-lai-from-taxi-to-take-off?copyrightInfo=true
