SINGAPORE, Oct. 20, 2020 — The financial services industry has seen drastic technology-led changes over the past few years. While some of the big tech giants have launched their own Fintech verticals, there are many brands that are also increasingly looking to offer financial services to their customers. These companies tend to partner with existing financial institutions and resell their financial products, but many fails to offer a seamless onboarding experience mainly due to partner banks’ legacy processes. 

Embedded Finance, as opposed to reselling financial products, is becoming more attractive to brands. It enables any non-financial companies to integrate innovative financial services into their offerings. This creates new revenue opportunities at low marginal costs for the brands that already have a large customer base and enables new customer experiences that drive loyalty and purchases.

AIZEN, a leading provider of banking-as-a-service platform, has partnered with companies in Southeast Asia including leading e-commerce in Indonesia and e-wallet platform in Vietnam to provide an Automated Banking Operating System (ABOS) focusing on lending. The company is working with Balance Sheet providers (both banks and non-banking entities) and will act as an intermediary for all other processes related to the end-to-end credit lifecycle. ABOS is built on a robust risk management framework that automates the core operations from product design, credit acquisition, portfolio management and collection, and allows banks and brands to take proactive measures on the economic downside risks amid COVID-19.

According to the latest report by Google, Temasek and Bain & Company, digital financial services in Southeast Asia is expected to generate revenues of about USD 38 billion by 2025. Digital lending has also gained momentum as we enter the "contactless economy" after COVID crisis, and it will offer the majority of revenue opportunities. 

AIZEN has recently raised from a government-led fintech innovation fund (KGIC, also known as K-Growth) led by major banks including KB, Shinhan, Woori and NH, which brings the company’s total funding to USD 10 million including USD 3.5 million in R&D grants. The company plans to roll out Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) primarily targeting the underserved markets in Vietnam, Indonesia, Singapore, and Taiwan.

For traditional lenders, the absence of credit history has meant a limited risk appetite for lending to this segment. Using proprietary AI technologies, AIZEN is able to better underwrite customers by converting non-traditional sources of data into credit-related data in Finance. This is powered by ABACUS, an AutoML platform in finance that is specifically designed to accommodate the fast-changing customer dynamics in real-time. 

Founded in 2016, AIZEN has been working on digital transformation projects with financial institutions including loan underwriting, transaction fraud detection, and insurance claim analysis. The company has joined Plug and Play APAC Fintech Batch in Singapore and has been named by Gartner as a Cool Vendor in AI for Fintech for high scalability and easiness of adoption. AIZEN is also a member of Intel’s AI Builders Program and is optimizing the solution with access to Intel’s latest technology and engineering expertise. "We will strategically expand our banking service with our AI operating model and will service our new AI-powered banking model in Vietnam, Indonesia, Singapore, and Taiwan," said Jung Seok Kang, CEO at AIZEN.