Over 70% of adults in Southeast Asia currently lack sufficient access to financial services and millions of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the region still face large funding gaps.

The underbanked and unbanked is often overlooked by incumbent banks due to low margins, however, with the emergence of new technologies fintech startups are increasingly able to find a commercially viable model to provide the much-needed service to plug the gap in the market.

With fintech set to reinvent how consumers spend, save and invest across the region, we look today at seven startups that are bringing financial services to Southeast Asia’s unbanked populations.

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CredoLab (Singapore)

Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Singapore, CredoLab develops bank-grade digital scorecards based on anonymous smartphone metadata.

Built on over 18 million datasets collected across 50+ lending partners in more than 19 countries, CredoLab’s AI algorithm is able to crunch over 1 million features from opt-in smartphone metadata to find behavioral patterns and convert them into credit scores.

CredoLab’s goal is to redefine the way creditworthiness is assessed by enabling decision makers to leverage mobile device metadata and tap into financially underserved populations including the unbanked as well as new-to-bank and new-to-credit (NTC) customers.

CredoLab has powered about US$1 billion worth of loans based on smartphone metadata, and was the winner in the ASEAN Open category of the 2019 SFF x SWITCH Fintech Awards.

In January 2020, CredoLab was officially recognized by the Financial Services Authority (OJK) as Indonesia’s first credit scoring fintech firm. This year, the startup plans to raise at least US$3 million in a Series A funding round to fund its global expansion plans as well as research and development (R&D).

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