East Asia and Pacific

A storm is brewing in global retail banking. In the post-Global Financial Crisis era, financial technology (fintech) businesses have encroached not just upon the periphery of finance

(such as payments), they have assumed a place in core banking activities like lending and wealth management. Fintech investments more than doubled in 2015 and there are 19

fintech unicorns (companies valued at US$1 billion or more) globally that are in a position to challenge banks.

Micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises face the constant challenge of identifying sources of finance.

Online alternative finance is developing rapidly in the Asia-Pacific region. It is characterized by innovative financial instruments and channels that fall outside the traditional avenues of capital raising and financial intermediation. From reward-based crowdfunding to peer-to-peer consumer and business lending (i.e.

Fundnel (pronounced like Funnel) is one of several investment crowdfunding platforms that have launched in Singapore over the past year. But even though there are a growing number of sites entering the internet finance space, Fundnel claims the title of Asia’s first collaborative fundraising platform for businesses and investors.  While Singapore may be home base, Fundnel wants to empower early stage companies across all of Asia – regardless of nationality.

Fundnel (pronounced like Funnel) is one of several investment crowdfunding platforms that have launched in Singapore over the past year. But even though there are a growing number of sites entering the internet finance space, Fundnel claims the title of Asia’s first collaborative fundraising platform for businesses and investors.  While Singapore may be home base, Fundnel wants to empower early stage companies across all of Asia – regardless of nationality.

Financial settlement services platform Ripple announced a partnership that will boost its expansion into a region where it has seen lots of local interest and growth potential.
The San Francisco-based startup has teamed up with financial conglomerate SBI Holdings to form a new company called SBI Ripple Asia.
As a part of the joint venture, SBI Holdings will launch an engineering and business development team to sell and install Ripple’s cross-border payments solutions for banks across the Asia region.

Commissioned  by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Women's World Banking conducted research to examine the profile of women-owned SMEs in five countries in Southeast Asia (the Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar and Indonesia) and surveyed the landscape of their access to finance. Based on these findings, we give recommendations for government, private sector players and development agencies that will enable women's access to finance in these countries.

Read more about Indian e-commerce platforms help sellers get easy loans to aid growth on Business Standard. These firms use tools to crunch data on trading history of small vendors on the platform and give them a leg up to scale their business.

Small-scale businesses may soon be allowed to use movable assets as collateral as part of a move among Asia-Pacific economies to improve access to credit for micro, small, and medium-scale enterprises (MSMEs).

ACCESS to financing remains a challenge for small- and medium-scale enterprises (SMEs) in the Philippines and elsewhere in Asia and the Pacific, even as business conditions have improved and notwithstanding moves to provide funding options for this sector, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) said in a recent report that noted that banks remain reluctant to lend to this sector despite more stringent regulatory requirements.