Kelvin Teo

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586 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard 15 Mar

Kelvin Teo’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.

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BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech: Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand & Malaysia Startups, Founders & Venture Capital VC (English) · How Kelvin Teo Built Southeast Asia’s Largest SME FinTech Empire - E678 · 15 Mar 2026 podcast

But I think because the default there was a big default such that you see a judge sudden spike in terms of NPL that we learn that hey, like how the how do we avoid this?

Because the natural human tendency is that hey, these are comp these are bigger companies that are safer, they ask for bigger loans.

If you're giving them

a smaller they'll they'll ignore you right so you you you apply to it right but

This this strategy works when it works.

When it when it starts collapsing can bring down the company, right?

So we started thinking that h how are we going to reduce concentration risk also and we realized that actually, to be fair to other platforms as well, that it's almost impossible for you to avoid concentration risk at a start.

question is whether are you actively reducing it over time also, right?

Because based on the macro conditions and based on the fundraise environment at that point in time, if you are not growing reasonably fast enough, you're not going to attract capital and that's just fact on life.

And of course it can be irrational at that point in time, but that's a fact of life at that point, right?

And if you are doing too many small ones or so, your product union economics will be terrible because you will not be automated enough early, right?

And similarly the risk on the smaller companies will be bigger also.

So you are really choosing on outsized high risk segment versus concentration risk, right?

So both are tough choices.

But I think that the key is that hey, you need to still have concentration risk, but make sure that we've actively reduced it over point in time.

And that's how we have actually survived through the first sectoral recessions.

Example, there was a whole construction recession in Singapore, and then it was this whole trading companies uh exploding.

Uh, and then subsequently you have COVID, and of course the multi decade high rate.

hikes has actually damaged the social the SME fabric quite significantly after following quite closely from COVID nineteen, right?

But we managed to navigate the advanced credit risk still because of the lessons learned over time.

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