Singaporean super app Grab reached its first full year of profitability in 2025, posting US$200 million in net income. For a company once best known for burning cash in a race to the bottom against Uber and later GoTo, this is an important milestone—even if investors remain skittish: Grab’s stock has fallen 22% over the past year despite its improved financials.
We have been following the Singapore-based firm closely ever since it launched a bid for a digital banking license in Singapore almost six years ago, and it has come a long way in terms of fintech capabilities. In the fourth quarter, Grab reported a 34% annual increase in financial services revenue to US$99 million, up from US$74 million a year earlier.
Financial services revenue, while growing fast, is still just a fraction of the company’s overall business. Total group revenue for the fourth quarter was US$906 million, generated mostly by mobility and deliveries.
Grab’s digital banking deposits in Singapore and Malaysia have reached US$1.6 billion, a modest increase over US$1.2 billion a year earlier. Perhaps more noteworthy is that its loan portfolio has doubled over the past year from US$1.18 billion from US$536 million at the end of 2024.
Still, even by digital bank standards, this is not yet a significant lending business. Brazil’s Nubank, for instance, has a US$30.4 billion loan portfolio.
Additionally, Grab’s fintech business remains unprofitable while facing stiff competition from both pure-play fintechs and incumbent banks in Southeast Asia. Despite having millions of users in its ecosystem, converting them into active, high-balance digital banking users has proven difficult for the Singaporean firm. Most of the company’s customers have low average balances because they are not switching over from their primary banking providers.
At the same time, Singapore and Malaysia don’t have large underbanked populations that can allow digital banks to quickly build scale. More than 90% of adults in both countries have bank accounts, and most of the analysis claiming they have large “underbanked” populations stretches the definition of that term.
Grab does own an 11% stake in Indonesia’s SuperBank, which is also backed by Emtek and Kakao Bank. Superbank went public on the Indonesia Stock Exchange in December, raising approximately US$168 million (Rp 2.79 trillion). The shares jumped 24% on their debut after being oversubscribed 318 times.
Superbank offers Grab’s fintech business more significant growth potential than GXS Bank in Singapore and Malaysia because Indonesia actually has a large underbanked demographic. About 60% of Superbank users come from Grab’s ecosystem, allowing it to scale up quickly. The digital lender posted a profit of about US$5 million in the third quarter of 2025.
The most ambitious fintech-related move by Grab in recent months is its acquisition of the U.S.-based investment app Stash Financial for US$425 million in a deal expected to close in the third quarter of 2026. Grab will acquire 50.1% of Stash in a mix of cash and stock at closing, with the remaining stake purchased over the next three years.
The acquisition provides Grab with an established platform to enter the mass-market investment segment. Stash has over US$5 billion in assets under management and over one million subscribers.
We don’t see Grab trying to bring its super app to the United States, but owning Stash will give it exposure to the U.S. market that it would not otherwise have.What we expect Grab to do, though, is try to leverage Stash’s capabilities in Southeast Asia to offer more tailored wealth management systems to its customers. It remains to be seen, however, how much traction this move will get. Grab’s communications about the acquisition emphasize Stash’s “AI-powered ”capabilities”—which could describe just about any digital wealth management service in existence today.