One in three Singaporean business owners still use their personal bank accounts for their company banking needs, trying to escape high transaction fees, according to a survey from MariBank, a digital bank owned by Southeast Asian tech firm Sea. That creates tax and legal headaches, as business owners find it difficult to deduce their legitimate profit and deductions come tax season.
“Our local banks are good, and international banks also have a strong presence here,” Natalia Goh, MariBank’s CEO, told Fortune. “But there are certain banking needs that are still underserved.”
MariBank’s answer is a business account with zero transaction fees and a single app that lets customers toggle between personal and business banking. “These needs are the white spaces that nobody’s really addressing,” Goh explains. “That’s what makes it exciting, and that’s where I think we have room to play.”
The origins of MariBank
MariBank launched in 2023 as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sea, Southeast Asia’s largest tech firm and No. 12 on the Southeast Asia 500. Goh assumed her role as the bank’s CEO in 2024, taking over from its inaugural head Zheng Yudong.
Goh sees Maribank as a “natural extension” of Sea’s offerings on e-commerce site Shopee and financial payments platform Monee, which sit “at the heart” of its users’ digital lives. “Sea’s existing businesses give it insights and a good understanding of what consumers do online,” Goh said. “Banking was the obvious next piece of the puzzle.”
MariBank is one of five Singaporean digital banks set up after a 2019 ruling that empowered the monetary authority to issue standalone digital banking licenses. (A digital bank is a financial institution that operates entirely online through mobile apps and websites without any physical brick-and-mortar branches.) Other Singaporean digital banks include Trust Bank, which is a collaboration between Standard Chartered Bank and supermarket chain FairPrice Group, and GXS bank, a partnership between telco Singtel and superapp Grab.
Asia’s first digital banks emerged in Hong Kong, mainland China, and South Korea; Southeast Asia followed soon afterward. “In ASEAN, especially, digital banking licenses encourage greater participation and innovation in the banking sector, and make banking services more accessible to the masses,” Goh says.
Path to profitability
Still, the promise of digital banking has yet to be realized. Among Singapore’s digital banks which cater to retail consumers, only Trust Bank is profitable, posting its first profitable month in March.
In 2025, MariBank Singapore posted a loss of 55.6 million Singapore dollars ($43.4 million), larger than the 51.3 million loss reported the year before. Fellow digital bank GXS also posted a 208 million Singapore dollar loss last year, a slight narrowing of its 214 million Singapore dollar loss in 2024.
Each bank has a tight window to prove themselves. As part of the application process, each digital bank had to show a credible path to profitability within five years of launch. (MariBank, which launched in 2023, thus has a three-year runway; In January, parent group Sea injected $75 million Singapore dollars, or $58.6 million, into the bank, in a bid to help it scale.)
Both MariBank and GXS are now pushing into less-banked markets like Malaysia and the Philippines. GXS is a lead shareholder in GXBank, Malaysia’s first digital bank. MariBank debuted in the Philippines last year, following Sea’s acquisition of the rural bank Banco Laguna. Last month, the Philippines’ central bank upgraded MariBank’s license from that of a rural bank to a full-fledged digital bank.
The share of Filipinos with bank accounts jumped from 29% in 2019 to 56% in 2021 during the pandemic, according to the Philippine Information Agency.
“The idea is, with the product knowledge that we build up in Singapore, we can bring it across and deploy that in the Philippines,” Goh says. “We can localize it to the Filipino market, by lowering ticket sizes and changing the features a little.”
Unlike in Singapore, MariBank in the Philippines has had to adapt to a market that still relies on physical cash. According to Worldpay’s 2026 Global Payments Report, cash still holds 42% of point-of-sale payments in the Philippines, despite the rising popularity of e-wallets like GCash. As such, MariBank is piloting cash-in, cash-out partnerships with local retail outlets, something it doesn’t need to do in Singapore.
“Singapore is very much moving towards being cashless, and the Philippines is also heading in that direction, but there’s still quite a need for cash,” Goh explains.
Goh admits that MariBank is still in the “growth stage” in the Philippines; the company has yet to offer investment and overseas remittance products to its user-base. Still, she’s confident that MariBank Philippines can quickly scale, given Sea’s other offerings in the country.
“Shoppers are already acquainted with the Shopee name,” Goh explains. “That becomes a natural point for us to introduce MariBank, since it’s associated with a brand that they already know.” (Goh declined to share exact user numbers in the Philippines, but said the bank is on a “really good growth trajectory.”)
MariBank is also leveraging Sea’s own data to underwrite loans in a market with a thin formal credit history. “The Philippines’ credit bureau data is not as strong or robust, given that a lot of the population there may not have an existing credit product,” Goh says. “So we use quite a bit of data from Shopee to help us judge creditworthiness.”
Goh hopes that the Philippines will be the first step towards building a regional digital banking group, headquartered in Singapore. “Singapore is a sophisticated banking market, so it’ll be our hub for innovation, talent and strategy,” she says, adding that MariBank remains “open” to further expansion (though declined to name specific markets).
Ultimately, for Goh, the goal is straightforward: to make banking simple, reliable and rewarding. “No matter how much we expand, we will always stay true to these values,” she concluded. “They’ll continue being reflected in our product designs and the propositions that we roll out.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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