Digitalization in banking is not something new, Toh Su Mei, CEO of Anext Bank, says in an interview with finews.asia about her strategy for winning Singapore’s overbanked population.
Singapore banks have started their digitalization journey in the last few decades, but the new digital players may have their own strategies to win the market. For Anext Bank, its approach to innovation makes it different from others, namely open and customer-obsessed, CEO Toh Su Mei says in an interview with finews.asia.
«We are not innovating for the sake of innovation, but rather, to reimagine financial services to enable financial inclusion at scale,» the digital bank’s CEO explains. Anext Bank is Singapore's digital bank, backed by China’s fintech giant Ant Group.
Underserved SMEs
Although Singapore is known to have a highly banked population, the small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the country are still underserved by its banking sector. According to Anext Bank’s survey, seven in ten Singapore SMEs wanted to get access to financial services from non-banking platforms.
On the other hand, one-third of SMEs found it difficult to get access to financing. «We are not here to compete with the incumbents, but to provide SMEs with an additional choice to cater to different needs as we offer an alternative for SMEs,» Toh says.
Cross Border Transactions
Anext Bank notes that over 30 percent of customers are foreign business owners from 44 different nationalities. It also sees around 40 percent monthly increase in cross-border transactions.
The bank claims to have had a strong demand from SMEs since its launch in June 2022, mainly from the micro and growing businesses. Currently, almost 70 percent of the bank's customers are micro businesses, Toh says.
