Back in 2020, Southeast Asia’s tech sector was red hot. Sea, the parent company of e-commerce giant Shopee, had debuted on the Nasdaq just a few years earlier, and regional start-ups like Gojek and Grab were pulling in huge amounts of foreign investment and gobbling up market share. That same year, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) awarded four digital banking licenses, which at the time seemed like it might open up an exciting new chapter in digital finance.
With several years of data now to look back on, we can see things have not developed quite as expected.
MAS awarded two full digital bank licenses to MariBank and GXS, which means they can engage in the complete range of retail banking activities. Both are backed by major tech players. MariBank is a wholly owned subsidiary of Sea, while GXS is backed by Grab and Singaporean telecom giant Singtel. One would think, given that these are some of the biggest companies in the region with hundreds of millions of existing customers, that their digital banking units would quickly find success. So far, that’s not the case.
MariBank posted a loss of S$51 million last year, and GXS S$145 million. Their balance sheets, especially deposits and total assets, are growing quickly, but it’s not translating into loans. At GXS, loans were equal to 18 percent of total deposits in 2024, while at MariBank it was only 7 percent. At both banks, the vast majority of their assets are simply parked in government bonds. At a typical bank, you would expect the loan-to-deposit ratio to be much higher.
In hindsight, Singapore is a tough market for upstart banks to break into, even with the backing of big tech companies. Capital markets are deep and well-developed, and most people in Singapore already have an account at one of the big banks, which are well-run and very profitable. The banking sector, in other words, is not crying out for major innovation. Regulatory scrutiny in Singapore is also pretty tight, especially for new retail banks.
Further afield, the picture becomes more complex. I wrote a few weeks ago about Indonesia, where digital banks backed by Grab and Gojek have been growing rapidly while some of their competitors face stiffer headwinds. I neglected to mention that Sea has its own wholly owned digital bank in Indonesia, and that it is doing very well. Gross loans were reported at $1.4 billion in 2024, with a loan-to-deposit ratio of 84 percent. Deposits are growing, and the bank is posting modest but regular profits. That places it on similar footing as Gojek’s Bank Jago.
A nascent digital banking sector is also emerging in the Philippines, and there we again find Sea in the thick of it. By assets, the largest digital bank in the country is Maya, which is majority owned by telecom conglomerate PLDT. Maya has a digital wallet and a digital banking arm. According to Bangko Sentral Pilipinas, the banking unit reported $871 million of total assets in the first quarter of 2025, including $404 million in gross loans. It also turned a profit in the first half of 2025.
SeaBank Philippines, meanwhile, is not far behind, with total assets of $673 million in 2024 and a net profit of $17 million. Sea has a higher loan-to-deposit ratio than Maya, meaning a larger percentage of their assets are in the form of customer loans. Outside of these frontrunners many other digital banks in the Philippines are pretty lackluster, holding a lot of assets at the central bank or in bonds, with very little of their balance sheets made up of loans. They also tend to be losing money.
This brief tour of the digital banking landscape in the region tells us two key things about how digital banks are developing and scaling in Southeast Asia. One, market environments differ drastically, posing different commercial and regulatory risks. Singapore is proving hard to break into, while Indonesia and the Philippines have more upside for growth. In Thailand, meanwhile, regulatory approval for the country’s first three digital banks was only finalized this year, and the banks won’t be operational until at least 2026.
The second point is that in digital banking it matters a lot who your backers are. The banks that are scaling the most rapidly in Indonesia and the Philippines are backed by tech giants like Grab, Gojek, and Sea or by telecom conglomerates like Singtel and PLDT. Not only does it help to have deep-pocketed investors, but these companies have large existing customer networks, which they can tap to offer digital banking services. It seems to me that this, along with conducive regulatory and business conditions, makes a big difference when it comes to who is leading in Southeast Asia’s digital banking race.