Fatfish is seeing its investments pay off rapidly, as the company aims to scale across the huge and potentially lucrative Southeast Asian region.

Insurtech company Fatberry is turning out to be one of the best investments for ASX-listed tech venture firm, Fatfish (ASX:FFG).

Fatberry has continued its strong run, reporting yet another record quarter in sales following the record half reported in August.

The company’s gross sales for the September-ending quarter was $2.78m, easily its best ever quarterly performance.

The figure was notably higher than its previously reported first half results of $1.98m.

This exponential growth resulted in a year-to-date gross sales of $4.76m, a record high in Fatberry’s operating history.

The growth is consistent with the company’s rapidly increasing market share in the Malaysian digital insurance market.

Fatfish is also seeing its recent buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) investment, PaySlowSlow, gaining rapid traction after launching it mid-September.

The Malaysia-focused platform saw an encouraging start within the first two weeks of operations, signing up 87 merchants and recording $50,839 in gross merchandise sales.

FFG’s management believes the strong  early traction proves that strong demand exists for  PaySlowSlow’s BNPL service,  and the company now intends to accelerate rollout of the platform across Southeast Asia.

 

The ‘blue ocean’ opportunity in Southeast Asia

Southeast Asia’s fintech industry is growing very rapidly, due to the high percentage of the population being connected online.

Around 70% of the region’s population now have access to the internet compared to just 46% in 2016, according to ratings company Fitch.

Fatfish is vying for a slice of the action in the growing market of 655 million people.

The company’s portfolio includes gaming and fintech, with the latter making the bulk of its investments.

“We’re interested in targeting the digital savvy population who prefer to do things online with a couple of clicks,” Fatfish founder and CEO Kin Lau told Stockhead.

Lau has positioned Fatfish’ portfolio to be highly scalable, where a platform used in one country could be  rolled out to various other countries in the region.

He’s also developed a ‘circular economy strategy’, leveraging cross-sell opportunities in selling services from one lending platform to customers from another.

Fatfish is now in a position to ramp up all of its BNPL and fintech businesses in Southeast Asia, after raising $8 million funding last August.

Its other investments include Smartfunding, a Singapore-based fintech platform licensed by the Monetary Authority of Singapore, that has recently launched its BNPL offering to SMEs and corporates in Southeast Asia.

Forever Pay,  a Malaysia-based company that was awarded a lending licence by Malaysia’s Ministry of Housing and Local Government, is also one of FFG’s investments.

In addition, FFG owns a slice of Pay Direct, a payments gateway with $380m in annual transactions.

Pay Direct has been certified by Malaysia’s central bank to process payments through the country’s domestic network which include Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and FPX.

This article was developed in collaboration with Fatfish, a Stockhead advertiser at the time of publishing.

 This article does not constitute financial product advice. You should consider obtaining independent advice before making any financial decisions.

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