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.

China has long been working on the development of an alternative payments system that would not be dependent on the U.S. dollar. It is not a single payments rail, but more a series of initiatives that collectively aim to make Beijing a stronger player in global payments infrastructure that can operate outside of the confines of the dollar-dominated system. These include a Chinese version of the Swift messaging network, the digital renminbi (e-CNY), the respective payment networks of Alipay and Tenpay, and various bilateral deals Beijing has established with countries.

With the September 19 deadline for Thailand’s digital bank license applications less than a month away, it is worth taking a closer look at the prospective applicants. As expected, startups are absent. Instead, the likely applicants – and winners – are a mix of Thailand’s ultra-wealthy tycoons, prominent incumbent banks and Asian tech giants. The newest would-be applicant belongs to the latter category.

Airwallex, a plucky Tencent-backed B2B payments company founded in Australia, said on Aug. 15 that it has surpassed US$100 billion in annual processing volume, a 73% annual increase. The company, which has moved its corporate headquarters several times since its 2015 founding and is now based in Singapore, said it has seen growing volumes across all products and an annual run rate revenue of almost $500 million. While these numbers suggest that Airwallex continues to experience robust growth amid a broader fintech slowdown, it remains unprofitable.

Ant Group and Globe-backed Mynt, which operates the e-wallet GCash, is on a roll. Long one of the most valuable startups in the Philippines, it this month saw its valuation increase to US$5 billion – more than doubling its previous valuation of US$2 billion that it reached in 2021 – following a combined US$800 million capital injection from Japan’s MUFG and the Philippine conglomerate Ayala. The new funding for Mynt comes at a time when large fintech investments are hard to come by given high interest rates and more-stringent investor expectations.

There is a fundamental problem with digital banks in Hong Kong. Not only are they non-essential because the city’s population is so well banked, they also are almost all the offshoots of large incumbent lenders and/or tech companies. What that means is that most of them lack a startup ethos. While a startup mentality can result in massive cash burn – as seen with Revolut in the UK or N26 in Germany – it also can lead to genuine product innovation. In the absence of such innovation, online lenders resort to gimmicks like high deposit interest rates to attract customers. It is thus no surprise that the eight licensees together owned HK$49.9 billion (US$6.4 billion) in assets last year. That is just 0.3% of the assets owned by all the city's retail banks, according to the Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s data.

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 unfavorable market conditions could force the company to delay the listing. There are three main issues that could adversely impact the IPO: the softening of the U.S. economy, the legal troubles of the founder of rival internet bank Kakao Bank and the souring of regulators’ views on digital lenders.

The Singaporean sovereign wealth fund Temasek has long been one of the largest institutional investors in China, reflecting the close economic ties between the city-state and the world’s second largest economy. As recently as 2020, China accounted for 29% of Temasek’s portfolio. However, today Temasek’s investments in China have fallen to just 19% of its portfolio, below the U.S. at 22% and Singapore at 27%.