Fintech is booming all round the world, including Southeast Asia, where a growing number of fintech-related businesses are emerging to fill the gap left by traditional financial institutions.

With the Internet and smartphones spreading rapidly across the region, these new businesses are utilizing technology to find solutions to the region’s financial problems and serve the large populations of financially excluded individuals and businesses.

Several of these fintech ventures are quickly emerging as global leaders, propelling their founders into the rank of international superstars. The followings are some of Southeast Asia’s most inspiring fintech founders:

 

 

Louis Liu, 26, Singapore

Zack Yang, 26, Singapore

Co-Founders, FOMO Pay

Louis Liu and Zack Yang are the co-founders of FOMO Pay, a multi-award-winning alternative payment platform that seeks to open up vendors in Southeast Asia to cashless payments. The platform allows merchants to accept a full suite of digital payments including NETS Pay, VISA QR, and WeChat Pay.

FOMO Pay sits in the Singapore central bank’s SGQR taskforce which focuses on jointly develop common QRCode standards for the city stage. Launched in 2015, the startup is used by prestigious vendors such as Marina Bay Sands and CHANEL.

 

 

 

Nyha Shree, 29, Singapore

Co-Founder, Jumper.ai

Seeing a trend where businesses were using social media platforms to engage potential customers, Nyha Shree co-founded Jumper.ai. The social media commerce tool facilitates instant transactions on sites such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. This means consumers do not have to navigate away from a website or an app to make a purchase. Since launching in May 2017, the startup has worked with more than 3,000 businesses across the globe, including corporate giants such as Unilever and Disney.

 

Winnie Chua, 29, Malaysia

Wilson Beh, 27, Malaysia

Co-Founders, PolicyStreet

Winnie Chua and Wilson Beh co-founded PolicyStreet in 2016 to create relevant insurance products for Southeast Asians through an online insurtech platform. By making it affordable, simple to understand and easy to access private healthcare, PolicyStreet covered some 1,300 people in its first year of operation. PolicyStreet targets underserved markets in the insurance space, such as the poor, students and startups. They also serve Millennials and Malaysia’s rising middle class.

 

 

 

Kenneth Lou, 25, Singapore

Co-Founder and CEO, Seedly

Kenneth Lou is the co-founder and CEO of Seedly, a fintech startup with a mission of simplifying personal finance across the Millennial generation. Seedly aims to help the community make smarter financial decisions with the right tools, mindset, and content. The platform acts as a personal finance assistant to give users their overview balances, monthly cashflow and categorizes of all their expenses automatically at a click of a button by syncing with all major local banks. Seedly was acquired by the ShopBack group in October 2018.

 

 

Loi Luu, 26, Vietnam

Victor Tran, 26, Vietnam

Co-Founders, KyberNetwork

Loi Luu and Victor Tran are the co-founders of KyberNetwork, a decentralized exchange for cryptocurrencies that raised US$52 million in its token sale in September 2017. Luu has a PhD in computer science from the National University of Singapore, where he worked on blockchain securities. Tran has been involved in cryptocurrency development since early 2016, and is a lead engineer on a cryptocurrency open source project called SmartPool, which Luu also co-founded.

 

 

Patrick Lynch, 28, Philippines

Co-Founder and CEO, First Circle

Irish native Patrick Lynch is the co-founder and CEO of First Circle, a startup that helps small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the Philippines access capital through invoice financing and purchase order financing. First Circle uses available information such as social media, credit, network and cellphone data to create credit scores to determine the feasibility of a loan. Backed by the likes of Deep Blue VC and 500 Startups, First Circle has loaned millions of dollars to businesses in the Philippines.

 

Haryanto Tanjo, 29, Indonesia

Co-Founder and CEO, Moka

Haryanto Tanjo is the co-founder and CEO of Moka, a startup that offers a cloud-based point of sale (POS) system and enables SMEs to easily accept credit card payments. The POS software allows merchants to take orders, issue invoices and accept payments using a smartphone, iPad or Android tablet. Founded in 2014, Moka said it now serves 12,000 businesses in the food and beverage, retail, and beauty industries, and is close to hitting US$1 billion in annual transaction volume.

 

Iwan Kurniawan, 28, Indonesia

Reynold Wijaya, 29, Indonesia

Co-Founder, Modalku

Together with Kelvin Teo, Iwan Kurniawan and Reynold Wijaya founded Indonesia-based Modalku, called Funding Societies in its sister operations in Singapore and Malaysia, a peer-to-peer (P2P) digital lending platform that connects cash-strapped SMEs with lenders. The startup is backed by Sequoia, Softbank Ventures Korea, and Alpha JWC Ventures, and recently passed the US$110 million mark through more 3,000 loans to businesses in the region.

 

 

 

Rorian Pratyaksa, 26, Indonesia

Co-Founder, PayAccess

Rorian Pratyaksa is determined to introduce people who don’t use banks in Indonesia to the world of mobile pay, so he cofounded PayAccess, a licensed mobile payments startup. His platform provides transactions via smartphone for online to offline payments as well as in-app digital payments. Formerly an analyst with PwC, he is now chief business development officer at PayAccess. Pratyaksa was also awarded an Australian Awards Scholarship from the Australian Government in 2016.

 

Jackie Tan, 28, Singapore

Co-Founder, fundMyLife

Jackie Tan is the co-founder of fundMyLife, a financial planning online platform that uses an algorithm to connect users with financial advisors based on their financial planning questions. The company also provides a platform for financial advisors to not just brand themselves as professionals but as people as well to foster trust between potential clients and financial advisors.

 

 

Teguh Ariwibowo, 28, Indonesia

Co-Founder, Pinjam Indonesia

Teguh Ariwibowo is the co-founder of Indonesian digital pawning service Pinjam Indonesia. The startup offers an automated value of users’ collaterals, which can be anything from vehicles to jewelry, based on pictures uploaded online. Funds are distributed after a courier from the company picks up the items. Prior to Pinjam Indonesia, Ariwibowo worked as the director of Jakarta-based communications firm Voila.

 

Marshall Pribadi, 27, Indonesia

Founder and CEO, PrivyID

Marshall Pribadi is the founder and CEO of PrivyID, a trusted identity and legally binding digital signature startup in Indonesia. The award-winning app provides the most advanced digital signature and digital identity technology by using public key infrastructure and comply with e-sign act in the US, Canada, Indonesia, China, India and the EU.

 

 

Val Ji-hsuan Yap, 31, Singapore

Founder and CEO, PolicyPal

Val Ji-Hsuan Yap is the founder and CEO of PolicyPal, a free app that allows users to organize, and track, all their insurance products in one dashboard, and the PAL Network, a dual-layered protocol for financial assets. Founded in 2016, PolicyPal aims to help customers understand their insurance coverage better. It was the first graduate from MAS’ fintech regulatory sandbox. Prior to PolicyPal, Yap worked at Allianz, PwC in London, and OCBC Bank in Singapore.

 

Rachel De Villa, 25, Philippines

Founder and CTO, Cropital

Rachel De Villa is the co-founder and CTO of Cropital, a crowdfunding platform that helps finance local Filipino farmers. Established in 2015, Cropital aims to improve the income and productivity of farmers through crowdfunding, providing scalable and sustainable financing. Through Cropital’s online platform, investors choose a farm or farms to invest in. Cropital manages the fund for the farmer making sure it goes to the right resources, assuring as well that investors will get a return on investment.

 

Moses Lo, 29, Indonesia

Founder and CEO, Xendit

Moses Lo is the founder and CEO of Xendit, a P2P mobile payment service focused on Southeast Asian countries. Users load money onto Xendit and they can spend and request money from friends in the service or through phone numbers. The platform processes more than US$500 million worth of transactions annually, and has been growing at a 20% rate month-on-month for the last two years. Xendit was part of the 2015 summer Y Combinator batch and was the first Indonesian startup to join the prestigious program.

 

Abraham Viktor, 25, Indonesia

Co-Founder and CEO, Taralite

Abraham Viktor is the co-founder and CEO of Taralite, a P2P lending platform. Taralite’s loans are issued by financial institutions other than banks, also known as multi-financers, which allows it to reduce the interest rate up to 2% and extend the loan period of up to three years. The platform accepts houses, cars or motorcycles as collateral. Founded in January 2015 as Wedlite, Taralite graduated from startup incubator program Global Entrepreneurship Programme Indonesia (GEPI) in November 2015. Previously, Viktor was an investment banking analyst, first with Boston Consulting Group and later at Nomura investment banking.

 

Mohamed Abbas, 27, Singapore

Co-Founder, Rely

Mohamed Abbas is a tech entrepreneur and the co-founder of Rely, a startup that enables online shoppers to shop and pay for their purchases by splitting their cost into manageable monthly payments, interest-free. Abbas is also the co-founder of Onelyst, an online marketplace that helps users from lower-income brackets compare loan rates across different licensed moneylenders. The website allows users to find loans for different purposes, such as medical or rental expenses, and produces a list of personalized options in minutes.

 

Featured image credit: Edited from Unsplash