How a Major Tech Subsidiary Is Launching a Regional Digital Banking Network for SMEs

A new detail from Fortune caught our eye this week: one in three Singaporean business owners still runs company money through a personal bank account, sidestepping the transaction fees that come with proper business banking. The figure comes from a MariBank survey, and it neatly explains why the digital bank — a subsidiary of Sea, Southeast Asia's largest tech firm — has decided to build its identity around that exact paper cut.

The paper cut nobody names

When every business transfer carries a percentage fee, the rational move — and we say this with some empathy — is to muddle personal and company finances until tax season turns into a forensic exercise. That is the user journey MariBank's CEO Natalia Goh sketched for Fortune: business owners tolerating two financial lives because separating them felt worse than the legal headache it creates. MariBank's response is almost aggressively simple. Zero transaction fees on a business account, one app that toggles between personal and company balances. It is a product decision built on a behavioral insight you can set your watch to. People will absorb cognitive load, and even a bit of regulatory risk, before they absorb what reads as a surcharge on every move. Goh calls these gaps "white spaces"; the incumbents left them wide open.

The ecosystem logic (and the math)

MariBank didn't appear from nowhere. It launched in 2023 as a wholly owned subsidiary of Sea, the company behind e-commerce giant Shopee and payments platform Monee — two products that already live inside millions of regional users' daily routines. Banking, in Goh's telling, was the "obvious next piece of the puzzle." That reframing makes the story less interesting as a standalone fintech launch and more interesting as a study in choice architecture. When your checkout, your wallet, and now your savings sit behind the same login, the friction of switching banks becomes the friction of leaving a super-app. Which, as any product designer will tell you, is a lot of friction.

The numbers, though, keep things humble. MariBank Singapore posted a 55.6 million Singapore dollar loss in 2025, wider than the 51.3 million Singapore dollar loss the year before. Parent Sea injected 75 million Singapore dollars (roughly 58.6 million US dollars) into the bank in January to buy more runway. Across Singapore's retail digital banks, only Trust Bank — a Standard Chartered and FairPrice collaboration — has managed a profitable month, logging its first in March. GXS, the Singtel-and-Grab partnership, posted a 208 million Singapore dollar loss last year. Each of these institutions has a five-year clock running from its license award to demonstrate a credible path to profitability; MariBank's runway now stretches into 2028.

What we're watching

The playbook from here is legible: spend the parent company's user base to scale, absorb the losses, expand outward. MariBank debuted in the Philippines last year after Sea's acquisition of rural lender Banco Laguna. GXS, meanwhile, holds a lead stake in GXBank, billed as Malaysia's first digital bank. The bet is straightforward — that regional scale eventually fixes the unit economics a single market cannot. We don't yet know whether it will.

What we do know is this: consumers tend to trust digital banks more slowly than they trust the apps they already live inside. The fee schedule will get them through the door. The trust question, quietly compounding with every transaction, is what decides whether a "regional digital banking group" becomes a regional bank at all.