MariBank taps Sea’s ecosystem to build regional banking group from Singapore

[SINGAPORE] MariBank is increasingly tapping its parent Sea’s ecosystem as it charts a path to profitability in Singapore – using data from e-commerce platform Shopee to grow its lending business while laying the foundations for a regional banking group based out of the Republic.

Access to Shopee’s data has given the digital bank an advantage in assessing creditworthiness for some small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), said Natalia Goh, CEO of MariBank.

“(For) merchants that sell on Shopee, we can see their sales, which gives us more data points on how we can underwrite them and manage risk around that,” Goh told The Business Times.