Grab Holdings is done dabbling in consumer lending. The Nasdaq-listed superapp operator has announced that it will pay US$1.49 billion in cash for a controlling 60 per cent stake in Atome Financial, the buy now, pay later (BNPL) and digital lending arm of Advance Intelligence Group (AIGL).
It is, by some distance, the biggest fintech acquisition Southeast Asia has seen this year, and a clear signal that Grab wants to stop renting financial infrastructure and start owning it.
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Atome Financial brings two businesses into the fold: Atome, the BNPL brand familiar to anyone who has checked out on Shopee, Tokopedia or Lazada; and Kredit Pintar, an OJK-regulated digital lender in Indonesia. Together they operate across Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand, and claim 25 million cumulative transacted users and a US$1 billion gross loan portfolio.
Why Grab wants a lender, not just a wallet
Grab already runs payments, digital banks, partner lending and insurance under its financial services segment, but it has largely underwritten credit using its own ride-hailing and delivery data, a useful but narrow lens. Atome Financial gives it a second, complementary data set built on retail spending and instalment repayment behaviour, plus a merchant network north of 30,000 brands to cross-sell into.
Alex Hungate, Grab’s President and COO, framed the deal as an extension of what the company already does for its driver-partners. In 2025, the company says 68 per cent of driver-partner borrowers accessed formal credit for the first time through Grab, with half saying they did so specifically to avoid predatory lenders, a statistic that also doubles as Grab’s answer to critics who accuse gig platforms of trapping workers in debt cycles rather than freeing them from informal ones.
For Jefferson Chen, Chairman and CEO of AIGL and CEO of Atome Financial, the sale caps eight years of building what he called a platform meant to serve “everyone” left out of conventional banking. The company has raised over US$500 million historically and was last valued near US$2 billion, a valuation this deal’s structure suggests Grab is willing to exceed only if Atome Financial keeps performing.
The mechanics: pay now, pay more later — maybe
The transaction is split into two phases, and the second is where the real financial engineering sits. Phase 1 closes the 60 per cent stake for US$1.49 billion, of which US$260 million is earmarked as primary growth capital for the business itself rather than a payout to sellers. Grab expects this to complete by Q3 2027, pending regulatory sign-off across five markets, not a trivial hurdle given how differently Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines each regulate consumer lending.
Phase 2 kicks in roughly two years after that, when Grab has agreed to buy the remaining 40 per cent, but not at a fixed price. Instead, the payout is pegged to a formula: 13x annualised adjusted EBITDA weighted at 75 per cent, plus 2.5x annualised revenue weighted at 25 per cent, both measured over the six months before Phase 2 closes. The resulting valuation is collared between a floor of US$2 billion and a cap of US$4.5 billion, with at least half settled in cash.
In plain terms: Grab has protected its downside if Atome Financial underdelivers, while capping how much it pays if the business outperforms. It is a structure that reads less like conviction and more like hedged conviction; Grab wants in, but on terms that punish disappointment.
The inclusion pitch, and its limits
More than 70 per cent of adults in Southeast Asia remain unbanked or underbanked, and Grab’s pitch leans hard on closing that financial inclusion gap. Grab CFO Peter Oey said the deal is funded entirely from existing cash, will not touch the company’s ongoing share buyback, and should be accretive to Group Adjusted EBITDA once it closes. Grab has also revised its 2028 targets upward on the back of the acquisition: US$500 million in Adjusted EBITDA from the combined lending book (which it expects to exceed US$6 billion), and Group-wide targets of US$1.7 billion in Adjusted EBITDA with more than 30 per cent revenue CAGR from 2025 to 2028.
Those are punchy numbers for a company that has spent years explaining to investors why its financial services arm mattered before it had proven itself. Whether combining two AI-underwriting engines actually produces better credit decisions, rather than simply more exposure, is the question regulators, and eventually Grab’s own risk teams, will have to answer as the loan book scales past US$6 billion.
A crowded lending market just consolidated
The deal also reshapes competitive lines in Southeast Asia’s BNPL and digital lending market, which was already getting crowded before this. Atome has spent years jostling with Indonesia’s Kredivo and Akulaku, both of which have their own bank licences (Bank Neo Commerce and Bank Jago-style partnerships) and aggressive merchant tie-ups. Sea Group’s SeaMoney and GoTo’s GoPayLater have also been pushing BNPL deeper into Shopee and Gojek’s respective ecosystems, effectively daring standalone players like Atome to find a bigger distribution partner or get squeezed. Grab, notably, is GoTo‘s biggest regional rival in ride-hailing and deliveries — so folding a scaled lender into its financial services arm is as much a shot at GoTo’s fintech ambitions as it is a fintech deal in its own right.
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For founders and operators watching from the sidelines, the takeaway is less about the headline number and more about what it signals: super-apps in this region have decided that owning proprietary credit infrastructure, rather than partnering for it, is where the next phase of the financial services land grab will be won.
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