iFAST

[Curiousparty]

i do have a different perspective.

i was wondering why will the average person not go to his/her local banks with a strong local presence (i.e. singaporean will think about dbs, ocbc, uob) and instead choose to bank with this "Global bank"? Is the global bank accepting customers that the local banks dont want?

i also dont see small digital banks compete successfully with incumbent banks. Digital banks dont seem to be able to scale effectively. Say different people from country A, country B, country C...., country Z want to take up loan, i will be skeptical that the small digital bank can underwrite all the loans smartly and efficiently. You will need to train personnel to be familiar with the rules and regulation in different countries, all of these cost money and i would say that small digital banks wont be able to do it effectively

iFast clientele base is around the whole world. Singapore market is just one part of the ecosystem..

FAQ - For iFAST Global Bank, what do you think is the most significant growth driver for deposits, as you will need over $750 million new deposits to breakeven by the end of this year?

Answer -

iFAST Global Bank (iGB) consists of 3 business division, namely (i) Digital Personal Banking (“DPB”), (ii) Digital Transaction Banking (“DTB”); and (iii) EzRemit business.

In my opinion, the division with the biggest potential will be from the Digital Personal Banking. This is the part of the business where we are looking to be able to attract customers from all over the world to open account with iGB and put deposits in.

Currently we have customers from over 70 countries with accounts opened with iGB. The deposit base is more concentrated from a few countries, about one-third of deposits is from UK residents, and the remaining from other regions.

What we are seeing is, the demand that we are expecting from customers who want to open bank accounts outside their home country has proven to be true, and we are seeing deposits coming in. Some digital banks tend to burn huge amounts of money to acquire business before seeing the inflows, while for iGB, we are able to see natural demand bringing in deposits, and this is the premise that we actually have when we acquired the bank and set up the division.

From our perspective, a Bank is an institution that allows us to let various customers from around the world to open account and to deposit cash, where we then collect the deposits and we make a spread of around 1%, 1.25%, to 1.5%, and we have taken a low-risk approach with a conservative balance sheet strategy. With the ability to collect deposits from around the world, and given the potential upside, DPB is the biggest driver that we are looking at going forward.

While we expect the other parts of iGB to grow, including Digital Transaction Banking and EzRemit, the key reason as to why the bank was acquired was for personal banking, which is also synergistic with our wealth management platform business.

We have already seen some customers who have open accounts with iGB who have also realised that they are able to transfer monies to a Singapore platform, where we have made it seamless for them to also do their investments with iFAST.

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By Q4 2024 or Q1 2025, iGB should breakeven. We will know soon...