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

I think first and foremost, this whole phenomenon does cause pain to the better players, right?

Because now investors or capital markets tend to pay pain Southeast Asia and in a similar brush and you have to prove yourself so much more than in my view it is fair per se.

Um but I think this is uh it's just evolution of the industry and over time with more good players emerging and proving that hey, uh our corporate corporate governments are

Tight, I think that the capital markets investors will change their mind and have an updated view of the region.

But when it comes to the credit space perspective, I think we again did something that's quite contraryant compared to what other players were doing, right?

At that point in time, everyone's saying that fintech, fintech, uh as if there's you don't need a lot of information and can give you a credit score supernaturally, right?

Uh using social media, blah blah uh footprint and so forth, which is accurate to a certain extent, where it when it relates to

Consumer lending.

But because SME landing reality is that

The risk factor is so heterogeneous, such that it's not just the business owner themselves, and even less so being reflected on the social media, on web per se, right?

So they are helpful by that.

They're not as statistically significant as some make up to be, right?

So that's why we did a contrarian view approach of we actually asked for a lot of information, documents from the SMEs.

So when others were saying that, oh, you don't need a gift this, a gift that, that they're really just being more like they say that you're using technology, but they're really just taking more risks per se, right?

We actually ask quite a significant amount of information, actually more than what the banks are doing.

And I think we could do that because what we're really replacing is moneylenders.

And in the same case of Singapore, moneylenders charge up to 48% a year, or like credit cards, 24% or so, right?

So or friends and families, right?

So we're really not competing with banks, we're really competing with all these high-risk lenders.

And because the next best alternative is actually quite bad, such that they're that SMEs are actually

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