Taiwan is grappling with an increasingly serious scam problem, according to a new report that surveyed 25,000 people across the region has found. Conducted jointly by the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, Gogolook and ScamAdviser, a Web site legitimacy checker, the report found that Taiwanese may have lost up to US$7.5 billion over the past 12 months. On average, Taiwanese each lost US$1,940 to scammers, equivalent to 1% of GDP in 2023.

TymeBank is a rising star in Africa as well a key player in the Philippines’ fintech sector. It is one of the few online banks of note to emerge from Africa thus far. TymeBank claims to be one of South Africa’s fastest growing banks and recently reported reaching 10 million customers. While many digital banks highlight rapid customer acquisition, TymeBank appears to be an outlier with its presence in several emerging markets and a strong balance sheet.

Taiwan has long been one of the most overbanked markets in Asia. Strolling the streets of Taipei, one sees a plethora of physical bank branches. Overall, Taiwan has 37 banks, 21 life insurers and 50 securities brokers for a market of just 23 million people. Despite regulatory pressure for consolidation, there have been very few bank mergers in Taiwan over the past two decades.

Of the major economies in East Asia, Thailand has been among the slowest to introduce digital banks. The Bank of Thailand (BoT) has never said much about its decision-making rationale in public, but we reckon the Kingdom’s relatively high banked rate (more than 80%) has something to do with it. The wait is finally over, however. The deadline for submitting an application for a digital bank was September 19, and there only be three licenses awarded.

In the alternate reality inhabited by crypto bros, most jurisdictions are always on the cusp of a full-throated embrace of digital assets. Case in point: in late August, Tron founder Justin Sun wrote on X, “China unbans crypto. What’s the best meme for this?” Regardless of Sun’s true intentions in this post, Beijing is not only “unbanning” crypto, it is tightening oversight of the industry.

In 2021, Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) imposed a three-year moratorium on applications for digital banking licenses so that it would have enough time to monitor the performance of the new online lenders and their impact on the financial system. It will take time for Philippine online banks to get out of the red, and in March, the BSP said that just two of the official digital lenders – which it did not identify – are profitable. It may take five to seven years before the others reach that milestone. Nevertheless, the Philippine central bank is pressing ahead with its plan to allow for more digital banks. From January 1, 2025, four more licensed online lenders will be permitted.

How is it that a digital bank startup expects to become the No. 4 retail lender in Singapore before long? After all, digital banks are, with the occasional exception, better known for losing money than making a profit. Of the four online lenders who received licenses in December 2020, not one is currently profitable. However, Trust Bank, which launched in September 2022, is a different story. Trust Bank is not a traditional digital banking venture but rather an entity created by large incumbent lender Standard Chartered and supermarket chain Fair Price Group.

South Korea’s No. 2 digital bank K Bank had been planning to go public on the Korea Exchange (KRX) at the end of this year, but has been hesitant to make that commitment given uncertain market conditions. However, K Bank posted such a strong performance in the first half of the year that it may decide the time is right to go public irrespective of market fluctuations. South Korea’s first online lender posted a net profit of 85.4 billion won (US$64 million) in the first half of this year, the highest since its establishment and more than thrice as much as during the same period a year ago.

It was not so long agao that Indonesia’s troubled peer-to-peer (P2P) lending company Investree was riding high. In October 2023, the company announced it had raised US$231 million in a Series D funding round led by Qatar’s JTA International Holding which also included participation from Japan’s SBI Holdings. The Series D round suggested high investor confidence in Investree, which had previously raised $23.5 million in a March 2020 Series C round led by MUFG Innovation Partners and Bank Rakyat Indonesia Ventures. Yet the company has since been flummoxed by problems with its management, bad loans and lawsuits. In late August, Investree established a caretaker team to manage its daily operations under the guidance of Indonesia’s Financial Services Authority (OJK).

Kakao Bank has a history of proving wrong skeptics of digital banks. It has been consistently profitable since 2019 and is now set to expand in Southeast Asia. It has managed, for the most part, to stay out of regulatory crosshairs despite disrupting South Korea’s financial services sector. It seemed Kakao Bank’s long string of good fortune might finally have come to an end with the arrest of its parent company’s founder Kim Beom-su on July 23. He has been accused of manipulating stocks during Kakao’s acquisition of the K-Pop agency SM Entertainment last year. Yet thus far, the company’s stock price has been stable, increasing 2% to 21,900 won over the past month, while its second quarter earnings were solid.