Harish Venkatesan of HSBC Singapore (L) with Kelvin Teo, Group CEO of Funding Societies
Funding Societies (also known as Modalku in Indonesia), Southeast Asia’s leading digital finance platform for micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs), has secured a third credit facility from HSBC under the bank’s ASEAN Growth Fund.
Also Read: Funding Societies raises US$7.5M debt financing from Norway’s state-owned Norfund
This transaction, which forms part of HSBC’s cumulative commitment of over US$100 million since their partnership began in 2022, will enhance the fintech lender’s capacity to provide financing to underserved MSMEs across the region.
“This funding enables us to explore scalable debt financing and foster financial inclusion for underserved SMEs across the region,” Kelvin Teo, Co-founder and Group CEO of Funding Societies, said.
Founded in 2015, Funding Societies claims to have disbursed over US$4 billion in financing to 100,000+ businesses in Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam. In recent years, it made strategic milestones including its acquisition of regional digital payments platform CardUp and co-investment into Bank Index in Indonesia.
Also Read: Funding Societies hopes to move from alternative to mainstream financing one day
Early this year, Khazanah and CGC Digital announced a joint investment in Funding Societies. A few months earlier, the fintech lender secured US$7.5 million in debt funding from Norwegian government-owned development financial institution (DFI) Norfund.
Its other investors are SoftBank Vision Fund 2, SoftBank Ventures Asia, Sequoia Capital India, Alpha JWC Ventures, SMBC Bank, BRI Ventures, VNG Corporation, Rapyd Ventures, Endeavor, EBDI, SGInnovative, Qualgro, and Golden Gate Ventures.
Despite rapid digitalisation and economic growth, Asia-Pacific’s MSMEs still face a US$2.5 trillion credit access gap, accounting for over half of the global financing shortfall. In Southeast Asia, MSMEs represent 99.9 per cent of all enterprises and contribute 35-69 per cent of each nation’s GDP.
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