WORKWEEK

NEWS OF THE WEEK

Grab’s Singapore Digital Bank Launch Set for Second Half

Singapore’s Grab is gearing up to launch their digital banking feature later this year. Grab is one of Singapore’s “everything” lifestyle delivery apps, offering ride-share, restaurant, package, grocery, and financial services. Imagine Uber, Apple, USPS, and a bank account all in one. Grab obtained their digital banking license in 2020 and are working on an internal pilot for the program.  The CEO, Anthony Tan, plans to use this license, awarded to only 3 companies to date, to “create a regional digital bank footprint in a cost-efficient manner.” They will also expand this technology to their digital banks in Singapore, Malaysia and their Indonesia bank investment.

The numbers are pretty staggering: payments are up 32% from last quarter to a whopping $3.6 billion; revenue is up 52% to $11 million; BNPL grew 5x year-over-year; and overall loans grew 3x over that timeframe too. With the right engagement on a platform like Grab that powers so many aspects of a users life, adding financial services on top can be a massive revenue driver, further validating the popular embedded fintech thesis. 

Brazilians are adopting digital payments faster than anyone else 

Over 16 million Brazilians have joined their country’s financial system and now over 85% of Brazil’s citizens have access to financial services, according to a new report from the World Economic Forum. 

The change has been going on for awhile—companies like NuBank, founded in São Paulo in 2013, are used by over 53 million people, 5.6 million of which had never previously been able to access these resources. 

Interestingly, the real catalyst was a government-led initiative. A direct solution developed by the Brazil Central Bank in 2020, otherwise known as Pix, is a real-time payment system that allowed over 40 million people to make their first ever bank transfer. There are now 124 million users in the program, which clearly is growing faster than other projects from similar countries.

Stash Now Growing Faster Than Robinhood

According to data from Apptopia, an app analytics platform used by firms like Visa and Andressen Horowitz, things are not looking good for investing apps. New installs for the top 15 investing apps are down 67% over the last quarter. Public.com was the fastest growing, but Stash surpassed Robinhood in February 2022 in MAU’s (monthly active users). If that’s the case, that’s a huge change from just a few months ago when Robinhood had 40% of the market share.

TWEETS OF THE WEEK

• Here’s a great Twitter DM reply from Weekend Fund & Product Hunt’s Ryan Hoover that he shared on what defensibility means. 
• CEO of FTX Derivatives, Zack Dexter, shares his thoughts on the recent CFTC roundtable.
• BTV’s Sheel Mohnot reminds us that investment advisors need to file public documents about their company metrics: he highlights numbers from Vise, Titan, Compound, Ethic Investing, and others.
• Lux Capital’s Josh Wolfe: communicating clearly is a critical skill for CEO’s.
• Here’s a great thread from Rabbithole’s Zach Davidson on Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin’s new whitepaper on Decentralized Societies and “soul-bound tokens.”