Pine Labs filed for IPO; Singapore formed SPaN for payments | Fintech Inside #96
Fintech Top Three: Pine Lab's IPO, Singapore's Payment Network and South Korea's stablecoin rush
Hi Insiders, I’m Osborne, an investor in early stage startups.
Welcome to the 96th edition of Fintech Inside. Fintech Inside is the front page of Fintech in emerging markets.
This week I’m bringing back the Fintech Top Three section. It’s always been a popular section and I’m glad to be sharing my hot takes…errr… insights with you.
Busy week for payments across India and Southeast Asia. This week I cover insights and takeaways from the biggest news in fintech.
India saw Pine Labs file its draft IPO prospectus with the regulator to raise $300M.
Singapore’s MAS announced forming SPaN, a payments body to oversee the country’s payment systems
Major stablecoin and digital asset activity in South Korea and Thailand.
Thank you for supporting me and sticking around. Enjoy another great week in fintech!
Considering angel investing? I get a bunch of fintech founders reaching out to me for investors. I’d be happy to put you in touch. I’m at os@osborne.vc
3️⃣ Fintech Top Three
1️⃣ Pine Labs filed to go public in India
Pine Labs is the latest payments company, after Paytm and Mobikwik, to file to go public in india. Pine Labs is aiming to raise INR 2,600cr ($304M) via fresh issue and ~15M shares via offer for sale. Investors including PeakXV, Actis, Paypal, Mastercard and others will be selling their shares. PayU and Razorpay are reportedly also preparing to go public.
Takeaways:
Unique proposition to stand out: I found it interesting that Pine Labs is positioning itself as a digital affordability enabler and a closed loop gift card processor, in addition to the vanilla payments business. It's important to show its uniqueness in a hyper-competitive Indian payments market with potentially better valuation multiple outcomes. The pure POS terminal biz would have not been kind from a market cap perspective - the company will be utilising 10% of the IPO proceeds to purchase 275K POS devices. With this positioning, it's clearly carving out a niche for itself. It's affordability solutions GTV is roughly 45% of total payments GTV (not including pre-paid cards volume) as of Dec, 2024.
Good performance numbers: Pine Labs processed $88Bn in total transaction value for the nine months ended Dec, 2024, growing 68% YoY, from its network of 1.7M checkout devices with 916K merchants. It's revenue from operations grew 33% YoY during the same period to $196M i.e. 23 basis points in revenue over transaction value. It's revenue from ex-India operations was ~14%, but it's associated costs were ~19-20%. Pine Labs has 475M pre-paid/rewards cards issued, and earned $56M in revenue from $4.5Bn in GTV at 1.26% revenue margin (compared to 0.17% from payments). This is probably what's driving the 72% contribution margin.
Hot, competitive domestic payments market: While Pine Labs are carved a nice niche for itself, the domestic payments market is competitive. Online, Pine Labs competes with Razorpay, PayU and others, Offline it competes with Paytm, Razorpay and Banks, on UPI, it competes with PhonePe, Google Pay and others. It's a lot of attack surfaces. Razorpay always targeted building a consumer-facing brand so merchants demanded for Razorpay over others. That strategy seemed to work with its $293M revenue in FY24 (ended Mar, 24). PayU is used by large enterprises and other merchants for its online payments and infrastructure solutions - generating $675M in revenue in FY25 (ended Mar, 25). Not to forget PhonePe that generated $592M in revenue in FY24.
Exciting period for India's payments market!
2️⃣ Government entities want to be at the centre of the payments revolution
National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) reported INR 1,500cr ($175M) net profit, growing 42% YoY, and INR 3,000cr ($351M) revenue in FY25. Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and Association of Banks in Singapore (ABS) incorporated Singapore Payments Network (SPaN), a not-for-profit company, to oversee governance of national payment schemes.
Takeaways:
Most well run and profitable government entity? At $175M net profit in FY25 (ended Mar, 2025) within 10 years since launch of UPI, NPCI is probably the most well run government "startup". NPCI is innovative and quick to launch newer products to keep UPI and other products relevant. It's the central, non-regulatory body that powers and steers India's hyper competitive payments market, described above.
Should NPCI go public? At $175M net profit a year, that's a lot of profit for a non-profit organisation. As Pravin, founder of Dhan and Madhu, founder of M2P, noted NPCI should probably go public. Madhu mentions that other similar associations started as non-profits, converted to for-profits and are now public payments institutions. Those associations are Visa and Mastercard. At today's revenues and growth, NPCI is already a $5-7bn valuation company.
Singapore going the India way for retail payments? Singapore is doing an India by incorporating SPaN - the Singapore Payments Network. It's the exact same thing that India did in 2008 by incorporating NPCI. SPaN is also being incorporated as a non-profit with the MAS and seven Domestic Systematically Important Banks (D-SIB) as initial shareholders. The SPaN will initially onboard the other stakeholders and then takeover administration of Singapore's existing payment systems from the current administrators. If all goes well, SPaN is expected to live by end-2026.
3️⃣ South Korea wants to compete with Thailand as the capital for Southeast Asian digital assets activity
KB Kookmin Bank, South Korea's largest bank, filed trademark applications for KBKRW and KRWST stablecoins pegged to the Korean won, signalling growing institutional interest in blockchain-based finance in Asia. KakaoPay, a South Korean payments company, filed 18 trademarks related to a potential Korean won-backed stablecoin, causing its stock price to surge over 200% in a month. Thailand's Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sought public input on proposed changes to criteria for selecting digital assets offered on local exchanges, aiming to align regulations with evolving digital asset landscape while preserving investor protection.
Takeaways:
Active regulatory environment: Almost all regulators across Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, South Korea, Philippines and Malaysia are currently working on some form of regulation or is in active public consultation on the topic. And these aren't just CBDC regulations, these are regulations for digital asset trading or stablecoin issuance and activity.
Banks are actively participating too: It seems that the regulatory clarity with South Korea's draft Digital Asset Basic Act introduction as of early, Jun, 2025 is driving the rush for stablecoin issuance among banks as well. Aside from the trademark applications, Banks are rushing (surprisingly) to be able to compete with large payments companies including the likes of KakaoPay and others.
Thailand is actively competing: Thailand’s "boom" isn’t hype; it’s policy-engineered. A cascade of permissive rules (stablecoins, tokenised bonds, tax holidays) hit at the same time that major banks rolled out custody and payment rails. That alignment, plus a politically endorsed vision of becoming a regional digital-asset hub, has flipped the market from experimental to execution mode in under a year. But I'm not going to claim I fully understand what's happening in Thailand.
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🎵 Song on loop
Fintech updates can get boring, so here's an earworm: Been obsessed with the F1 movie soundtrack and this song OMG! is a banger (Spotify / Youtube). Solid track to get you in the mood for the week. Have a happy July!
✨ Call outs
[Video] What ails Indian manufacturing by Amit Varma and Ajay Shah’s Everything is Everything podcast. This is a great deep dive into the history of Indian manufacturing and what are some issues faced by manufacturers.
[Video] Behind the scenes of Notion Design team. This interview/video gives some good insight into the hundreds of prototypes and design choices that goes into making the simplistic functional frontend we see on Notion.
[Article] Valuation Multiples by Michael Mauboussin of Morgan Stanley. This is a research report that examines valuation multiples (P/E and EV/EBITDA), explaining how they fail to capture key value drivers like return on invested capital and why they've become less informative due to the rise of intangible investments that are expensed rather than capitalised.
👋🏾 That's all Folks
If you’ve made it this far - thanks! As always, you can always reach me at os@osborne.vc. I’d genuinely appreciate any and all feedback. If you liked what you read, please consider sharing or subscribing.
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See you in the next edition.