Six years on from the referendum where the United Kingdom voted to leave the EU, and in the midst of an apparent government meltdown, the country is announcing its first international data sharing deal: it’s inked an agreement with South Korea, which will allow organizations in the UK to transfer data to the Republic of Korea, and vice-versa, without restrictions.

“Data transfers” cover any and all digital services that might be provisioned in one country but used or run in the other. It covers data in services like GPS and smart devices, online banking, research, internet services, and more. South Korea is home to two of the world’s biggest tech and specifically mobile tech companies, Samsung and LG, and already represents some £1.33 billion ($1.6 billion) in international digital trade, the UK said.

“Today marks a huge milestone for the UK, the Republic of Korea and the high standards of data protection we share,” said UK Data Minister Julia Lopez in a statement. “Our new agreement will open up more digital trade to boost UK businesses and will enable more vital research that can improve the lives of people across the country.”

“I am honored to agree to this joint statement today. Strengthening cooperation between the UK and the Republic of Korea based on the shared recognition of high standards of protection can contribute to forming a healthier and more sustainable global data landscape,” added Republic of Korea Commissioner of the Personal Information Protection Commission Jong in Yoon.

South Korea was one of several countries earmarked for a so-called international data adequacy initiative aimed at “unlocking the benefits of free and secure cross-border data flows now the country has left the EU” — the others being the U.S., Australia and Singapore, the Dubai International Finance Centre and Colombia. “The government continues to make excellent progress in its discussions with other priority countries,” it said today.

Ironically, had UK remained in the EU, it would be no further along in the effort it has achieved today: South Korea already has a data adequacy deal with Europe.

Google, Mastercard and Microsoft were among the companies and outside experts advising the government on this deal as part of an International Data Transfer Expert Council formed earlier this year. The government argues that data transfers and the many regulations that have been built around them have led to “billions of pounds” of trade going “unrealized” due to navigating that landscape.

Specifically, UK’s Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport — which is overseeing the deal — said that the idea will be that now companies and organizations doing business across the two countries will be “able to share data freely and maintain high protection standards” while doing so. Given that the basics of the country’s respective data usage policies have theoretically been vetted and harmonized, parties will no longer have to deal with contractural safeguards, it said, including paperwork for International Data Transfer Agreements or Binding Corporate Rules.

Still, you could argue that the time it’s taken, the fact that it’s only covering one country that would have been a partner the UK could have had (sans Brexit) anyway, and that fact that today’s deal is still not fully done — it’s just in “principle” — pulls the rug a little from under the argument that Brexit will lead to a lot less red tape for the UK going forward when it comes to trade deals.

Getting the deals done with the rest of the priority list will be a start, however. The DCMS estimated that “data-enabled services” to the full list (which includes the U.S.) are currently worth more than £80 billion.

E-commerce and other online businesses are becoming increasingly global in their operations and customer bases, and a startup called Airwallex — which has built a banking solution that addresses the opportunity to provide cross-border financial services — has been seeing a massive surge of activity. To capitalize further on that opportunity, today the company is announcing growth funding.

Hong Kong and Melbourne-based Airwallex has raised $100 million, capital that it will be using to continue building out its banking and payments businesses into more markets, and to invest expanding its products.

The funding — which is being led by Lone Pine Capital, and joined by 1835i Ventures (the venture arm of ANZ, the Australia and New Zealand Banking Group) and Sequoia Capital China, all previous investors — is an extension to the company’s Series E that it announced only in September; and it brings the total of the round to $300 million.

The valuation is also being extended with this latest injection: Airwallex is now worth $5.5 billion (compared to $4 billion in September). From what we understand, the company was getting term sheets as high as $7 billion from outside investors (that outside interest was what prompted the round in the first place).

Airwallex today has around 20,000 customers spanning areas like e-commerce, tech/SaaS companies and professional services. It also has 500 large platform customers (Papaya Global and GOAT are two examples) that have embedded Airwallex’s services within their own services to power transactions for their own customers.

That business has seen a big boost of activity as a result of a few key developments in the world.

For starters, the Covid-19 pandemic has led to a big shift towards more e-commerce among both consumers and businesses. In turn, businesses have needed to extend their financial infrastructure to accommodate more customers. And because e-commerce has broken down the barriers of where you can do business, they’ve also had to extend their financial reach to touch customers in ever-wider geographies. Covid-19 has also massively disrupted supply chains, so businesses have also had to become more enterprising in how they manage these: they may now have to work with more partners, and potentially be agile enough to pay different people month-to-month.

All of these present the kinds of use cases that speak to the kinds of services that Airwallex offers. Jack Zhang, Airwallex’s co-founder and CEO, said that revenues at the company grew 100% in Q3 over Q2. Its annualized revenues in that most recent quarter were $100 million. “We had a target to achieve that at the end of the year, but we delivered it a quarter earlier,” he said.

It also means a number of other companies are also looking to serve this need: competitors to Airwallex across its different services include Stripe, PayPal, Revolut (via Revolut Business), and more.

Airwallex built its company originally around business banking — its thesis was that companies had a lot of banking options when it came to doing business in their own markets, but for those who worked across borders, it offered domestic and international accounts that worked as easily as domestic ones, along with card issuing, transfers and foreign exchange, payouts and so on. More recently, the company has moved into payments to complement that. The plan will be to add more services natively to that stack, as well as integrate with third-party providers by way of an app store that it is now developing. That will launch potentially next year.

Zhang also said some of the funds will be used for M&A, as part of the inevitable consolidation that we’re going to continue seeing in fintech.

“We’ve now raised $800 million in the last 6 years, with $600 million in the last two years, and we still have $600 million in the bank right now,” he told TechCrunch. “A very large part of that is going to be used for M&A purposes.” Features that Airwallex wants to have as a native part of its stack it might buy instead of building itself include subscription payments; software to automatically calculate stamp duty depending on the market where items are being sold; and more data analytics to help customers analyze their revenues better. “I think there will be consolidation in the next period. But it won’t be just two players. The [fintech] space is big enough for a dozen winners.”

And it looks like Airwallex is setting itself up to be one of those winners. Zhang confirmed to me that Stripe — which today is a key competitor of Airwallex’s — approached the company to acquire it around 2018/2019, when Airwallex was significantly smaller but already developing a strong presence in Asia Pacific, which is still its biggest market, even as Airwallex moves deeper EMEA and North America. (It would have been a big step for Stripe into the region, which is has instead taken on its own steam.)

Zhang said that another big fintech, currently valued at around $20 billion, also approached Airwallex more recently. Nothing has come of that, either — partly because Airwallex is now too expensive, he said.

“I think we are probably to big for others to buy us,” Zhang added.

As for what is coming next on the liquidity front, an IPO “is not on the agenda,” but is something that the company will think about potentially for 2023 or 2024.

“Airwallex’s achievements in the last quarter alone showcase the strength of the company’s business model and its unique ability to meet their customers’ evolving needs in a competitive digital payments market,” said David Craver, co-chief investment office at Lone Pine Capital. “The future is bright for Airwallex, and we look forward to helping its team unlock greater growth opportunities.”

Open banking — a disruptive technology that seeks to bypass the dominance of card networks and other traditional financial rails by letting banks open their systems directly to developers (and new services) by way of APIs — continues to gain ground in the world of financial services. As a mark of that traction, a startup playing a central role in open banking applications is announcing a big round of funding with a milestone valuation.

TrueLayer, which provides technology for developers to enable a range of open-banking-based services has raised $130 million in a funding round that values the London-based startup at over $1 billion.

Tiger Global Management is leading the round, and notably, payments juggernaut Stripe is also participating.

Open Banking is a relatively new area in the world of fintech — the UK was an early adopter in 2018, Europe then signed on, and it looks like we are now seeing more movements that the U.S. may soon also join the party — and TrueLayer is considered a pioneer in the space.

The vast majority of transactions in the world today are still made using card rails or more antiquated banking infrastructure, but the opportunity with open banking is to build a completely new infrastructure that works more efficiently, and might come with less (or no) fees for those using it, with the perennial API promise: all by way of few lines of code.

“We had a vision that finance should be opened up, and we are actively woking to remove the frictions that exist between intermediaries,” said CEO Francesco Simoneschi, who co-founded the company with Luca Martinetti (who is now the CTO), in an interview. “We want a financial system that works for everyone, but that hasn’t been the case up to now. The opportunity emerged five years ago, when open banking came into law in the UK and then elsewhere, to go after the most impressive oligopoly: the card networks and everything that revolves around them. Now, we can easily say that open banking is becoming a viable alternative to that.”

It seems that the world of finance and commerce is slowly catching on, and so the funding is coming on the heels of some strong growth for the company.

Services that TrueLayer currently include payments, payouts, user account information and user verification; while end users range from neobanks, crypto startups, and wealth management apps through to e-commerce companies, marketplaces and gaming platforms.

And the startup says it now has “millions” of consumers making open banking transactions enabled by TrueLayer’s technology, and some 10,000 developers are building services based on open banking standards. TrueLayer so far this year has doubled its customer base, picking up some key customers like Cazoo to enable open-banking based payments for cars; and it has processed “billions” of dollars in payments, with payment volume growing 400%, and payment up 800%.

The plan is to use the funding to invest in building out that business further — specifically to extend its payments network to more regions (and more banks getting integrated into that network), as well as to bring on more customers using open banking services for more regular, recurring transactions.

“The shift to alternative payment methods is accelerating with the global growth of online commerce, and we believe TrueLayer will play a central role in making these payment methods more accessible,” said Alex Cook, partner, Tiger Global, in a statement. “We’re excited to partner with Francesco, Luca and the TrueLayer team as they help customers increase conversion and continue to grow the network.”

Notably, Stripe is not a strategic investor in TrueLayer at the moment, just a financial one. That is to say, it has yet to integrate open banking into its own payments infrastructure.

But you can imagine how it would be interested in it as part of the bigger mix of options for its customers, and potentially also to build its own standalone financial rails that well and truly compete with those provided by the card networks (which are such a close part of what Stripe does that its earliest web design was based on the physical card, and even its name is a reference to the stripe on the back of them.

There are other providers of open banking connectivity in the market today — Plaid out of the U.S. is one notable name — but Simoneschi believes that Stripe and TrueLayer on the same page as companies.

“We share a profound belief that progress comes through the eyes of developers so it’s about delivering the tools they need to use,” he he said. “We are in a very complementary space.”

Singapore-based Aspire, which wants to become the financial services “one-stop shop” for SMEs, announced that its business accounts have reached $1 billion in annualized transaction volume one year after launching. The company also unveiled Bill Pay, its latest feature that lets businesses manage and pay invoices by emailing them to Aspire’s AI-based digital assistant.

Launched in May 2020, Aspire’s online business accounts are targeted to startups and small- to medium-sized enterprises, and do not require minimum deposits or monthly fees. Co-founder and chief executive officer Andrea Baronchelli told TechCrunch more than 10,000 companies now use Aspire’s business accounts and that adoption was driven by two main reasons. The first was Aspire’s transition to a multi-product strategy early last year, after focusing on corporate cards and working capital loans. The second reason is the COVID-19 pandemic, which made it harder for companies to open accounts at traditional banks.

“We can go in and say we offer all-in-one financial tools for growing businesses,” he said. “People come in and use one thing first, and then we offer them other things later on, so that’s been a huge success for us.”

Founded in 2018, Aspire has raised about $41.5 million in funding so far, including a Series A announced in July 2019. Its investors include MassMutual Ventures Southeast Asia, Arc Labs and Y Combinator.

Baronchelli said Aspire’s business account users consist of two main segments. The first are “launchers,” or people who are starting their first businesses and need to set up a way to send and receive money. Launchers typically make less than $400,000 a year in revenue and their Aspire account serves as their primary business account. The second segment are companies that make about $500,000 to $2 million a year and already had another bank account, but started using Aspire for its credit line, expense management or foreign exchange tools, and decided to open an account on the platform as well.

The company has customers from across Southeast Asia, and is particularly focused on Singapore, Indonesia and Vietnam. For example, it launched Aspire Kickstart, with incorporation services for Singaporean companies, at the start of this year.

Bill Pay, its newest feature, lets business owners forward invoices by email to Aspire’s AI-based digital assistant, which uses optical character recognition and deep learning to pull out payment details, including terms and due dates. Then users get a notification to do a final check before approving and scheduling payments. The feature syncs with accounting systems integrated into Aspire, including Xero and Quickbooks. Baronchelli said Aspire decided to launch Bill Pay after interviewing businesses and finding that many still relied on Excel spreadsheets.

Aspire’s offerings overlap with several other fintech companies in Southeast Asia. For example, Volopay, Wise and Revolut offer business accounts, too, and Spenmo offers business cards. Aspire plans to differentiate by expanding its stack of multiple products. For example, it is developing tools for accounts receivable, such as invoice automation, and accounts payable, like a dedicated product for payroll management. Baronchelli said Aspire is currently interviewing users to finalize the set of features it will offer.

“I don’t want to close the door that others might come toward a multiple product approach, but if you ask me what our position is now, we are basically the only one that offers an all-in-one product stack,” he added. “So we are a couple years ahead of the competition and have a first-mover advantage.”

 

With many businesses switching staff to remote working during the COVID-19 pandemic there’s been a clearly chronicled surge in demand for videoconferencing and others comms tools like Zoom.

Other types of startups are also seeing a bump in usage as both consumers and businesses seek to do more online during a global health crisis. Telehealth is an obvious one. Earlier this month US president Trump waived restrictions on telehealth services for the federal health insurance program, Medicare — opening the door to a surge in remote consultations from Americans with federal health insurance.

Europe, meanwhile, is currently seeing the fastest rates of confirmed infections of COVID-19 — which is also driving demand for remote medical check-ups.

Sweden-based doctor-by-video startup, Kry, today reported a huge surge in demand across all of its markets (Sweden, Norway, UK, France and Germany) which it attributed to the on-going coronavirus pandemic, with consultations for viral symptoms alone up 240% since February 1.

Several online identity verification startups also told us they’ve seen increased demand over the past few weeks — including from parallel growth in telemedicine where remotely verifying a patient’s identity is a core requirement given the sensitivity of the data involved. 

Digital identity startup Passbase, which offers APIs to make it easy for developers to plug and integrate a range of consumer-friendly identity checks into their digital services, also told us it’s seen an “unprecedented” spike in requests from European and North American companies operating in the MedTech sector over the past two+ weeks — as more people seek out remote consultations to reduce potential spread of the virus.

One of Passbase’s customers — German telemedicine platform TeleClinic — was directly involved in helping diagnose staff at a car plant which reported the first COVID-19 infection in the country.

“As a health and digital product trust in our service is a must have,” said TeleClinic founder and CEO, Katharina Jünger, in a supporting statement on how Passbase had sped up scalable onboarding. “The fact that an individual patient can talk to a medical professional and receive trusted information instantly is very important, especially in times like these.”

Passbase said it’s giving priority integration support and waiving all subscription fees for any company dedicated to helping individuals get through the COVID-19 crisis. “In these unprecedented times, everyone needs to do their part as we battle this ongoing epidemic together. By fast tracking onboarding for these companies we hope we can help some people affected by the Coronavirus,” added co-founder and CEO, Mathias Klenk.

Another digital identity startup, Onfido — which pledges on its website to be able to verify a person’s identity in as little as 15 seconds — also told us it’s seen a big jump in demand from the healthcare sector.

“Our clients offering remote online consultations have seen a massive 370% increase in the number of applicants since January, compared to last year,” said a spokesperson. “Clearly there are advantages from not having to go into a hospital or a local physician’s waiting room for fear of contracting the virus in the waiting room.”

It also said it has seen a bump around travel — though for a very specific niche: Car rental.

Customers in the sector are onboarding 26% more applicants this month vs the same time last year, it told us. “The likely explanation is that daily commuters who don’t own a car are refraining from taking public transport for fear of picking up the virus in overcrowded trains or buses, instead electing to drive themselves to work,” the spokesperson noted.

Increased demand for online banking and fintech is also driving usage of its tools at the present moment, per the spokesperson. “Early signs seem to suggest a 21% increase in signups this month. Presumably, so that people can gain access to financial services from their home without the need to go inside branches,” they added.

Last week, another startup in the space — Veriff, with an “end-to-end verification service” that combines automated and manual analyses to authenticate inputs — reported seeing a “steady increase” in verifications, which it partly linked to the COVID-19 outbreak.

Though it said it’s expecting a bigger boost going forward, after seeing a surge in inquiries about its service.

“Coronavirus does present new use-cases and needs for remote ID verifications,” founder and CEO Kaarel Kotkas told us. “For example, we have been contacted by universities who are looking for remote examination options, but also large tech companies for account recovery and credentials reset to support remote work.”

“As to our current clients, we have seen a steady increase in ID verifications over the last month — globally it is around 20% increase. However, it definitely cannot all be accounted for the coronavirus. Yet, when looking at the last 2 weeks when coronavirus has really escalated in Europe and the US, it has triggered a lot of integrations connected to coronavirus like e-notaries, digital healthcare, and others. Therefore we expect a 50% jump in our volumes next month,” he added.

A longer term player in the digital identity space — Authenteq, which sells an omni-channel ID verification and KYC services — also confirmed an uptick in demand.

“We are seeing an increase in requests from both companies that cater to the remote worker market as well as companies that want to move to increased remote work or work from home policy,” said co-founder and CEO Kari Thor.

“We had a large muliti-national client that we were working on integrating our ID Verification solution, that a few weeks ago changed the focus of their use case to verify their workers remotely, not only to access company intranet and other systems but as well to allow people now working from home to electronically sign documents and contracts using the Authenteq technology.

“Although this hasn’t been the main value proposition that we have had and have only dealt with employee eID on special occasions, we have started focusing more on this product offering for companies in these uncertain times.”

“Obviously the US market is maybe a little behind the Asian and European clients and I think we will see more interest from the US companies this week as they realize that things might be heading in the same direction with regards to WFH [working from home] policies as we’ve seen in Europe in the last 10 days,” he added.

Grab and Singtel, one of the largest telecoms in Singapore, announced today that they are applying for a digital full bank license together. If approved, the license will allow them to offer simple credit and investment products, before progressing to a full-functioning bank if they meet the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s (MAS) criteria.

Grab will hold a 60% stake in the consortium, with Singtel holding the other 40%. A joint statement said the companies are “committed to contributing to the financial services sector with a differentiated offering that addresses the unmet and underserved needs of consumer and enterprise segments in Singapore,” including SMEs that need access to credit. Securing working capital is a major pain point across Southeast Asia, with several startup and financial institutions working on new tools to gauge creditworthiness and manage loans.

Grab launched in 2012 as a ride-sharing company, but now bills itself as “Southeast Asia’s leading super app,” with app that provides a wide array of service, including transportation, logistics, food delivery, ticket and hotel booking and financial services, through one portal.

It entered financial services in 2016 with the introduction of GrabPay Wallet, a digital wallet, before launching Grab Financial Group in 2019. Grab Financial Group’s services include online payments, lending and insurance products that it says reaches 100 million users across Southeast Asia.

In a press statement, Grab Financial Group senior managing director Reuben Lai said the consortium’s plan is to “build a truly customer-centric digital bank that will deliver a variety of banking and financial services that are accessible, transparent and affordable.”

MAS announced in June that it will issue up to two digital full bank licenses and three digital wholesale bank licenses, as part of a bid to to liberalize Singapore’s banking sector.

Visa is pitching a new way for startups in the fintech space to get to market faster by using its rails and a group of pre-approved partners.

The Fast Track program, a variant of an investment commitment and ecosystem of services the company has already launched in other geographies around the world, comes to the U.S. without an investment commitment, but with a pre-defined list of partners that will help new financial services startups launch more quickly, the company said.

Chiefly, the process makes it easier to integrate with Visa . It’s an attempt to put the payment processor’s network, VisaNet, at the center of a vast array of services ranging from payroll to business to business payments and online banking, online lending, and even digital wallets.

“There’s about $17 trillion in cash and checks today that hasn’t gone digital and $20 trillion in business to business that’s happening over wires and check… those are all opportunities for Visa,” says Terry Angelos, a former fintech entrepreneur who now serves as an senior vice president at Visa and the company’s global head of fintech. 

“To some degree Visa has been the original fintech,” says Angelos. “Today, you would  pitch it as a SAAS platform for payment and commerce.”

For its new service, Visa has come up with a list of partners to provide the array of compliance services and infrastructure that a startup in the financial services space would need to get up and running quickly.

“These are vetted partners that are providing a fast track process and a concierge service so we can track the companies in the program,” says Angelos. 

What the program won’t include, Angelos said, is a commitment to invest in startups in the U.S. that would be equivalent to the $100 million investment fund the company has carved out for European investments as part of the fast track program there.

“We have investments that are happening that are in parallel,” Angelos says. “We don’t have a separate fund.”

Companies that are partnering with Visa on this program represent a different service offering for the ecosystem including: Alloy, BBVA Open Platform, Cross River Bank, Galileo, Green Dot, Marqeta, Netspend (TSYS’ Consumer Segment), Stripe, TabaPay, TSYS, Q2, and Very Good Security. The company said its debit processing service will support some of the partners’ participation in the program.   

Last year, fintech companies raised $39.5 billion from investors globally, up 120% from the previous year, according to data provided by Visa. And as part of their outreach to this startup community, Visa is pre-qualifying portfolio companies from investment firms like Andreessen Horowitz, Nyca Partners, Ribbit Capital and Trinity Ventures for its program. 

“We see many entrepreneurs with big ideas that can add real value and solve problems in the global payments system; the problem can be the difficulty of distribution and connectivity to the essential infrastructure,” said Hans Morris, Managing Partner, Nyca Ventures, in a statement. “Fast Track solves for this, enabling some of our best companies to start working with Visa right away.”

Many of the firms’ portfolio companies are already partnering with Visa in some capacity. The company has already announced agreements (of an undefined and undisclosed nature) with startups like Currencycloud, Flutterwave, Ininal, N26, PayActiv, Rappi, Razer and Remitly. 

Visa has also invested in startups. In 2019 alone, the company added Anchorage, Bankable, Branch, Finix, Minna Technologies and Paymate to its stable of startups. 

The main thing that startups would get from the Visa Fast Track program is mentorship and access to the company’s experts in payments and fintech. And its effort to tie itself more closely to a financial services ecosystem comes as Visa finds itself under threat from some of the very startup technologies that the company may look to co-opt.

Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies offer the possibility of alternative payment mechanisms that don’t rely on the traditional money transfer systems developed decades ago by companies like Visa and Mastercard and can offer potentially faster transaction times and charge lower fees.

To combat that threat, Visa has been aligning with some of the largest technology companies to head off challengers at the pass. The company (along with its largest rival, Mastercard) is collaborating with Facebook on its controversial proposed cryptocurrency, Libra, in an effort to head off any challengers with a new transaction system of its own.

Angelos insists that there’s nothing nefarious in Visa’s efforts to engage with startups and says that the company is merely another actor supporting the movement of trillions of dollars into a digital economy.

“If you look at what’s happening in the fintech ecosystem… Fintechs are reducing friction and adding consumers that are underbanked,” Angelos says. “They can work on any payment rails they choose. [But] all those fintechs… are choosing to build at least part of their products on top of the rails that we built… if you look around the world, fintechs are probably leveraging the existing payment  rails to provide a lot of innovation and remove friction.”

Fintech continues to be among the biggest topics driving startups and investment in Southeast Asia. The region’s ‘internet economy’ is forecast to grow massively as its 600 million people increasingly come online — already Southeast Asia more internet users (350 million) than the U.S. has people but developing a robust payment landscape underpins those heady growth forecasts.

Beyond the most prevalent consumer brands — such as ride-hailing giants Grab and Go-Jek — and the outsiders pouring money into the region — including Tencent and Alibaba — fintech startups take a different approach to other parts of the world. Unlike Europe or the U.S, where disruption is the name of the game, Southeast Asian fintech is about third parties working with the system to make it more efficient and wide-ranging. That’s because credit card ownership is low double digits, and transfers from bank accounts — which aren’t universally operated by all consumers — represent an estimated [PDF] half of all online purchases.

The most visible niches attracting investor attention and capital is the data-play — companies that operate as super aggregators of financial services, such as insurance or loans — but there’s also an increasing number of startups that enable banks to kickstart their digital strategy.

Brankas, an Indonesia-based startup that operates regionally, is one such young company — it operates a platform that gives banks and financial companies the tech to roll out digital products and embrace online services.

The company takes its cue from Western success stories — U.S-based Plaid (a Disrupt alum no less) is valued at $2.65 billion while, in Europe, Tink and Bud have both raised big sums from investors — to offer a service that essentially provides the digital plumbing to ease Southeast Asia’s financial incumbents into the digital era.

“What we’re doing is similar to banking API infrastructure,” Brankas CEO and co-founder Todd Schweitzer told TechCrunch in an interview. “The difference being that in Southeast Asia it is very early days and little to no regulation.”

Former management consultant Schweitzer founded the startup in 2016 with Kenneth Shaw, his former classmate in California who had been CTO of Southeast Asian online marketplace Multiply.com. They describe themselves as “now longtime Southeast Asia residents.”

Brankas — which means safe in Indonesia’s Bahasa language — graduated Plug And Play’s first incubator in Southeast Asia and it grew from being a service managing multiple bank accounts to a platform that digitizes banking. Today, it is headquartered in Jakarta with 25 staff — 15 of whom are engineers — across that office and another in Manila, Philippines.

The company raised an undisclosed investment from investors, including Singapore fintech fund Dymon Asia, earlier this year and now its founders have their eyes on growth.

The service is currently operational in Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam. Schweitzer said the plan is to expand to Thailand and Malaysia around the middle of 2019.

“We are excited to partner with Todd and Kenneth as they build out open banking infrastructure in the region. Brankas enables seamless connections between financial institutions, merchants and fintechs. This is critical for the next stage of growth of the digital ecosystem in Southeast Asia,” Dymon Asia partner Chris Kaptein told TechCrunch.

So what does the plumbing service for financial organizations actual entail? Brankas focuses on two distinct audiences at this point: banks and financial companies, and companies providing online services, predominantly e-commerce.

For banks, Brankas uses its APIs and systems to essentially slot new services into their platform.

Schweitzer said banks are aware that they need to offer “more open” services. Even in the event that they can figure out what that means in terms of product, they typically don’t have the in-house team to build and manage the tech stack, let alone make it “productized” — i.e. usage by their customers.

“Banks here in Southeast Asia aren’t investing in consumer banking,” he explained,” because the bulk of their revenue comes from traditional corporate lending.”

For those using banks and collecting money from consumers, the end play is different. The challenges are often similar. For example, most consumers in Southeast Asia use bank transfers to pay for online. That works for collecting payment in theory, but there is no system that optimized for that — actually making sure the correct amount money is in from the correct customer.

Schweitzer recalled a story of how he visited an unnamed (but high profile) e-commerce company’s office and noticed “a whole floor of people who hit refresh on online banking systems to figure out who had made the transfer.”

The Brankas system helps handle that local complexity, and other areas like direct payouts without middlemen, or batched and real-time payments for gig workers and others who receive daily payouts. Other products in the pipeline include credit scoring, a much-needed resource across the region.

To date, Brankas has picked up partnerships with six banks in Indonesia, three in the Philippines and one in Vietnam, where it is in talks to add others. Schweitzer said it has “dozens” of customers across e-commerce, consumer finance and insurance verticals. The startup is also a part of Indonesia’s Open API Sandbox hosted by the country’s Central Bank.

“Today, we address the domestic, non-card payments market in ASEAN,” he told TechCrunch. “That includes everything from bank transfer fees to domestic remittance fees, POS merchant fees, payment aggregator fees and more.”

That alone, he estimates, is worth $7.8 billion in Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s largest economy. Then there’s the rest of the region to factor in, too.

 Eleven companies, including Alibaba-backed Paytm and several telecoms, can now offer a wide array of financial services after being granted provisional approval by the Reserve Bank of India, the country’s central banking authority. Read More

 Tencent, one of the top Internet companies in China, launched the country’s first private online bank today. Called WeBank after Tencent’s popular messaging app WeChat, the financial institution is the first one in China to be based on the Internet. Read More