Fintech is increasingly seen as an attractive sector for attracting listings to the SGX. The city-state is now a regional fintech hub, home to digital banks such as Trust Bank, GXS and MariBank, as well as payments companies and fast-scaling venture-backed start-ups over the past decade.
As these companies mature, a public listing offers a way to raise capital and provide early investors with an exit. Yet much of the sector’s activity remains privately held and out of reach for public investors. A new initiative aims to close that gap.
SGX push to spotlight private firms
Smartkarma’s private-market research arm, pvtIQ, recently co-hosted its inaugural Insights First Series with SGX on June 4. The latter was launched on Nov 13, 2025, after Smartkarma was approved as the first recipient of the Grant for Equity Market Singapore (Gems) private market research grant.
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The Gems scheme aims to support equity research development in Singapore. In Smartkarma’s case, the grant will go towards covering private companies that could list on the SGX.
Ben Lim, a senior analyst at pvtIQ, opened the session with a presentation on Singapore’s digital banks. The coverage is part of the platform’s push to build research coverage on private companies before they reach the public market.
This was followed by a panel discussion featuring Chan Kum Kong, SGX’s head of capital market development; Raghav Kapoor, co-founder and chief executive of Smartkarma; Shane Chesson, founding partner of Openspace Capital and vice-chair of the Singapore Venture & Private Capital Association; and Shailesh Naik, founder and chief executive of MatchMove.
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“More companies are staying private longer,” says Lim. “There’s lots of capital still invested in private assets, so we want to help people to uncover this and discover them.”
Lim adds that pvtIQ has initiated coverage on just over 30 fintech names and aims to more than double that by year-end. Its current coverage includes Singapore’s digital banks, which it views as an instructive test case.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) awarded four digital bank licences in December 2020 after a competitive process that drew 14 eligible applications. Two were digital full bank licences, allowing holders to accept deposits from and serve retail customers. One went to a Grab–Singtel consortium, which later became GXS Bank. The other went to a wholly owned subsidiary of Sea, the parent company of Shopee, which became MariBank.
The remaining two were digital wholesale bank licences, restricted to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and other non-retail customers. These were awarded to a consortium led by Greenland Financial Holdings, now Green Link Digital Bank, and to an Ant Group entity, now ANEXT Bank.
A fifth player, Trust Bank — the joint venture between Standard Chartered and FairPrice Group — later entered the fold. Unlike the other digital banks, it operates under Standard Chartered’s full bank licence rather than a separate digital bank licence. Trust Bank, GXS and MariBank are the three competing for everyday consumers. MAS gave the banks a roughly five-year timeline to reach profitability at launch, and they are now about halfway through that period, Lim notes.
Digital retail banks near profitability
Trust Bank, the joint venture between Standard Chartered and FairPrice Group, has made the most progress amongst its peers. It narrowed its FY2025 loss to $54 million, from $93 million a year earlier, on revenue of $135 million, with costs actually falling. The bank posted its first monthly profit in March 2026, the first of the three digital banks to cross the threshold, though its first quarter as a whole stayed in the red.
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“Trust Bank, as recently as March this year, actually turned a profit during the month, and looks like they will be continuing to do so,” says Lim. Unlike its peers, Trust Bank operates without the deposit caps attached to a digital full bank licence. Trust Bank’s marketing has been hard to miss. “I went by a cinema, a supermarket, a restaurant, a retail shop, all had Trust Bank tents,” Lim says, adding that a sizeable share of Trust Bank accounts are now main salary accounts.
GXS Bank, which is pitched at younger, gig-economy customers, posted the largest loss of the three, though it has continued to narrow. Its Singapore operation cut its FY2025 loss to $132.1 million, from $145.4 million, as total income rose to $44 million, from $29.6 million. Across the wider group, which includes its Malaysian arm, GXBank, the loss was $208.1 million.
MariBank, on the other hand, leaned on its product features rather than marketing spend. “The Mari Invest product, you can put in six digits, get daily interest accrued, with immediate withdrawal up to $10,000 the same day. That alone got me in,” says Lim. Its losses in Singapore widened to $55.6 million in FY2025, up from $51.3 million in FY2024, even as total income climbed to $37.4 million, from $24.4 million, as it set aside more for soured loans. MariBank’s newly acquired Philippines arm was profitable, which helped to narrow the wider group’s loss to $46.6 million.
Digital banks in Singapore are increasingly looking overseas as they search for profitability. With the local market small and saturated, both GXS Bank and MariBank are expanding across Southeast Asia’s underbanked markets to grow their loan books.
The strategy is already yielding results. MariBank’s Philippines unit turned a profit in FY2025, helping to offset group losses, while GXS is counting on GXBank Malaysia to drive regional lending.
The massive scale gap
The strategic pivots come as Singapore’s traditional banking trio shows no intention of ceding ground. Since the launch of these digital banks, the respective share prices of the three incumbents have reached historical highs. On June 1, DBS rolled out a “tap-to-phone” feature on its DBS MAX merchant app, turning any Android device into a contactless payment terminal and targeting the small and medium enterprise segment that its digital rivals are also courting.
The gap in financial heft, meanwhile, remains vast. DBS posted a record total income of $22.9 billion and net profit of $11 billion for FY2025, while OCBC and UOB reported net profits of $7.42 billion and $4.68 billion, respectively. Against those results, the three digital banks are still a fraction of the size, and none have yet turned a full-year profit.
For now, the question is less whether the digital banks can make a dent in the big three than whether they can prove the model works at all. Lim, for one, sees the halfway scorecard as encouraging.
“At this halfway point, things look pretty promising,” he says, even as he cautions that an uncertain interest rate environment and the banks’ ability to weather a shock remain the things to watch.
