In a pivot from chasing users and quick wins, Asian fintechs are now focused on metrics that signal resilience, industry leaders said at DealStreetAsia’s Asia PE-VC Summit 2025 in Singapore last week.
At a panel session titled, “The Next Frontier for SE Asia’s Financial Innovators: Who is Built to Last?”, MariBank CFO Kevan Chow, Tyme Group founder & CEO Coenraad (Coen) Jonker, Zalopay executive chairman Andy Nguyen Tran, and Kickstart Ventures general partner Joan Yao sketched a new playbook for Asian fintechs: the race is no longer just for users or revenue but for lasting relevance, measured by the strength of long-term customer relationships. The session was moderated by Dmitry Levit, founder & general partner, Cento Ventures.
According to DealStreetAsia DATA VANTAGE‘s Southeast Asia Startup Funding Report: H1 2025, fintech remains the region’s most active sector, with 57 deals worth $631 million. Both deal count and value, however, fell sharply from a year earlier—down 32.9% and 26.7%, respectively—marking the weakest half-year in over six years and reflecting a squeeze on early-stage funding as investors tread carefully.
Late-stage fintechs have fared better, consistently raising over $300 million per semester and peaking at $402 million in H2 2024. The pattern shows a market that still prizes growth but increasingly rewards companies that can scale, stay resilient, and remain relevant over the long term.
Amid this backdrop, industry leaders said for fintechs aiming to endure in Southeast Asia, the challenge is clear: simply winning customers is not the whole story. For these three leaders, these metrics are central to keeping their house in order and build for the long haul.
Organic retention
For Zalopay, Tran said their “north star” metric isn’t payment volume or revenue growth but what the company calls “organic retention”.
“In a very, very brutally competitive and fast-moving market like tech, it’s not every day that fintechs get to survive. The reason we continue to survive year after year is that we want to build products that people love. That’s always been our philosophy,” Tran said.
Since September last year, Zalopay—the financial services arm of Vietnam’s first unicorn, the VNG Group—has been transforming itself from an e-wallet into an open payment platform. The move has allowed the company to expand its offerings to include lending and investment products.
The strategy has shown early results: transaction volume rose 60%, while revenue from financial services jumped 152% in the first quarter of 2025 compared to the same period last year.
“Whenever we launch a new product, we look at a subset of retention metrics,” Tran told the panel.
For Zalopay, these metrics go beyond the plain retention rate. They measure how often customers engage with the app and whether they return even without incentives or promotions.
“To us, that is actually the biggest evidence that we are continuing to build something that people love and something people are willing to pay for,” he said.
Constant engagement
For MariBank, Chow emphasises a simple but telling metric: how often customers actively engage with the platform.
The frequency and depth of user interaction reveal more about a fintech’s health than raw transaction volume or short-term growth figures, the CFO said.
“What matters is whether the customer opens the app every day, whether they are actively using our solutions, and whether they keep coming back on their own,” he explained.
Chow described engagement as a two-fold signal. First, it indicates whether MariBank’s products remain relevant to customers’ evolving financial needs—from payments and savings to investment and planning tools. Second, it shows the bank’s ability to become a habitual part of users’ daily routines, embedding itself into their financial decision-making.
Even seemingly small behaviours like exploring new features, checking balances, or browsing offers provide insights into whether the app has become a trusted tool rather than a one-off utility.
Since its launch in March 2023, the bank has continuously tried to embed itself in multiple aspects of users’ financial lives, including being the first digital bank in Singapore to offer investment options that give instant cash-outs, rolling out zero-fee remittances, and introducing high-yield savings accounts that credit interest daily.
For Chow, daily interaction is more than a performance metric. “If customers aren’t consistently engaging—whether to make payments, grow their wealth, or explore new features—you risk losing them in the long run,” he said.
Metabolic rate
For Tyme Bank, Jonker told the panel that while customer metrics are vital, the company also tracks what he calls the “metabolic rate” of the business—a measure of how quickly the company can adapt to rapidly changing consumer needs, regulations, and technological developments.
To quantify this, Tyme has introduced the Dora metric, used in software development to measure the efficiency, speed, and quality of engineering processes. These metrics are: deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and mean time to restore. It evaluates how quickly teams can deploy code, how reliably new features function, and how fast issues are resolved.
Jonker likened Tyme to a “cybernetic creature” where humans and machines must work in harmony, efficiently and seamlessly.
“The faster the business can respond without sacrificing quality, the better positioned we are for long-term success,” he said.
In June 2025, GoTyme Bank, Tyme Group’s Philippine arm and its main business in Southeast Asia, reached 6.5 million users, surpassing its initial target of 5 million customers within three years.
The bank uses the term “phygital approach” to digital banking. In the Philippines, it has partnered with a local retail giant to use supermarkets as transaction counters, allowing customers to perform certain banking transactions nationwide.
The long game
For Yao of Kickstart Ventures, the story of Southeast Asia fintech underscores the importance of patience and perspective. Kickstart Ventures is the corporate venture capital arm of Globe Telecom, and Globe Telecom is a significant stakeholder in GCash through its subsidiary 917Ventures.
“Sometimes, it is hard to believe that we can build lasting or significant value in Southeast Asia,” she told the panel.
GCash, the Philippines’s largest e-wallet and now valued at around $5 billion, started in 2004. “It’s 21 years old. The first 13 years of that journey, GCash was not a thing. But over the last eight years, it has been on a lot of people’s minds—it is what people talk about.”
For Yao, Southeast Asia’s fintech success is a marathon, not a sprint. “It’s a matter of giving our startups the time and the space to grow into their potential. I really believe that we can build things of lasting value in Southeast Asia—it just takes time.”
