The numbers from Singapore’s digital banks in 2024 are, depending on which line you look at, either impressive or alarming. Trust Bank grew revenue 148 percent to S$97 million, grew deposits to S$3.8 billion, and hit 1 million customers — making it the fourth largest retail bank in Singapore by customer count. GXS Bank tripled its total income. MariBank grew deposits more than 250x in a single year. By user acquisition and deposit growth metrics, the digital banks are working.
Then you look at the loss column. GXS Bank posted a net loss of S$214 million in 2024. Trust Bank narrowed its loss to S$93 million. MariBank lost S$52 million in 2023. Combined, Singapore’s three digital bank licensees have lost well over half a billion dollars building a customer base that the three incumbent banks, DBS, OCBC, and UOB, were able to take S$20 billion in profit from in the same period.
The customer problem is not the problem. The revenue model problem is.
Trust Bank and GXS Are Growing Fast. The Revenue Model Is Not Keeping Pace.
Trust Bank’s user acquisition cost dropped dramatically because its distribution runs through NTUC FairPrice’s 2.4 million members. GXS tripled income and still lost S$214 million. The growth metrics are real. The path from those metrics to profitability is longer than the headlines suggest.
Trust Bank’s 1 million customers is a meaningful number. More than 70 percent of new customers came from referrals by existing ones — a cost structure that most fintech businesses would be grateful for. Deposit balances doubled to S$3.8 billion. The loan book grew 156 percent to S$800 million. These are not vanity metrics. They represent genuine engagement and genuine balance sheet construction.
But the path from these metrics to profitability is longer than the headline numbers suggest, and the trajectory differs significantly between the three banks in ways that reveal different model choices.
Trust Bank’s structure is the clearest case of ecosystem-subsidised growth. It is a joint venture between Standard Chartered, which contributes banking infrastructure, compliance architecture, and balance sheet capacity, and NTUC FairPrice Group, which contributes 2.4 million FairPrice members and daily transaction touchpoints at Singapore’s largest grocery chain. The customer acquisition cost is dramatically lower than a standalone neobank because the distribution channel pre-exists. The revenue per customer needs to justify a relationship that is already in place, not a cold acquisition spend.
GXS Bank’s structure is different. Grab’s super-app user base provides distribution, but the banking use case is less naturally embedded in daily transaction behaviour than grocery shopping. GXS’s path to margin requires turning transactional users, people who use it for top-ups and occasional transfers, into relationship users who hold savings balances, service loans, and pay for financial products. That conversion is harder, and the cost of driving it is what sits behind the S$214 million loss.
SEA Digital Banks’ Unit Economics Problem Is a Product Problem
The core question none of the SEA digital banks has fully answered is what a customer does in this bank that they cannot do more easily in the bank they already have. The losses are misread as marketing problems. They are product problems.
Most digital banking losses at this stage are misread as marketing problems. They are product problems. The core question that none of the SEA digital banks has fully answered is: what does a customer do in this bank that they cannot do more easily in the bank they already have?
For the underserved, meaning the gig worker without a bank account and the micro-entrepreneur locked out of traditional credit, the answer is clear. GXS’s lending to Grab drivers and delivery partners, MariBank’s SME credit lines through the Sea Group ecosystem, and Trust Bank’s early cashback card products all address genuine access gaps. This is real financial inclusion and it creates real customer value.
But these customers also represent the most complex credit risk, the highest cost-to-serve, and the lowest fee income potential. The banks are doing the hardest work in the market and trying to make a commercial return from it simultaneously. The economics of serving the underserved are not the economics that most fintech investors modelled when digital bank licenses were awarded in Singapore.
The revenue expansion play, covering investment products, insurance distribution, and premium tier accounts, is visible in all three banks. Trust Bank launched TrustInvest in 2025, targeting the fee income that comes from wealth management without the cost base of a full advisory platform. GXS is layering financial products onto its existing Grab relationship. These moves are rational. They are also being made at the same time as the incumbents, who have more capital, more data, and better brand trust in the segments where high-margin financial products get purchased.
Why Disrupting DBS Is a Different Problem Than Disrupting a Western Incumbent
The strategic tension in SEA digital banking is not technology. Every bank covered here has the technology. The question is which of two fundamentally different business models can generate returns, and neither has a clear answer yet.
The strategic tension in digital banking across Southeast Asia is not technology. Every bank in this article has the technology. The tension is between two business models that have different answers to the same question about who the customer is.
The first model, financial inclusion at scale, is valuable and defensible, but it requires subsidy, patient capital, or regulatory support to be commercially viable at the yields that private investors expect. The Monetary Authority of Singapore structured its digital banking license applications around genuine access mandates. Banks that take those mandates seriously are running a social infrastructure service alongside a commercial one, and those two things have different required returns.
The second model, a digital challenger to the incumbents, is the model most often pitched to investors, but it assumes that the incumbents are slow, expensive, and customer-hostile in ways that SEA’s banks are not. DBS has been voted the world’s best digital bank multiple times. The gap between an incumbent’s digital experience and a challenger’s in Singapore is narrower than the gap in most markets where neobanks have succeeded. You are not disrupting a Chase or a Lloyds with decades of accumulated technology debt. You are disrupting a DBS.
The neobanking market in Southeast Asia is projected to grow from roughly US$116 billion in transaction value in 2024 to US$187 billion by 2028, according to Statista. The growth is real. The question is what proportion of that growth flows to digital challengers versus the incumbents’ digital products, and at what margin.
GXS Bank’s break-even target is Q4 2026, as committed to MAS. Trust Bank is closer. The path is narrow but visible for the ones with ecosystem backing. For standalone neobanks trying to build the same customer base without Grab, Sea Group, or Standard Chartered behind them, the math is harder. Not impossible. But harder.
The SEA digital banking story is still being written. The chapter that has been written so far tells you that user growth and revenue growth are solvable. It has not yet told you whether the revenue model justifies the capital that built it.
For a broader view of the fintech capital landscape in Southeast Asia, see our Q1 2026 SEA tech funding analysis. For a related read on how digital infrastructure investment is shaping the broader technology ecosystem, see our hyperscaler data centre piece.
Sources:
- Trust Bank Moves Closer to Profitability as Revenue Rises 148% in 2024 — Fintech Singapore
- Trust Bank Reaches 1 Million Customer Mark; Launches TrustInvest — The Digital Banker
- Singapore Digital Banks Struggling for Profits — The Star Malaysia
- Southeast Asia Early Digital Bank Pioneers Post Big Losses — Asia Tech Review
- Neobanking Market Forecast — Southeast Asia — Statista
