GXS, the digital banking group backed by Grab and Singtel, is closing the gap to profitability, and it is doing so by rewriting what kind of lender it wants to be. The company narrowed its loss in 2025 after stepping up a push into corporate credit, a move that has turned a business once built almost entirely around everyday consumers into one that increasingly serves small companies.
The shift is striking in its speed. Loans to businesses now account for more than 40 percent of the group's total lending, a share that would have been hard to imagine when the bank launched with savings pockets and simple consumer accounts. That pivot is the clearest sign yet of how Southeast Asia's digital banks are searching for a durable path to profit after years of building scale.
From consumer app to business lender
GXS made its name with a slick mobile experience aimed at individual savers in Singapore and Malaysia. The savings features, goal based pockets, and low friction accounts were designed to win over retail users who had grown up on Grab's ride hailing and payments apps. That consumer base gave the bank reach, but retail lending alone is a slow and thin margin road to profit.
Corporate lending changes the math. By extending credit to small businesses, the bank can put more capital to work at better yields, and it can build deeper relationships with customers who borrow, transact, and hold deposits all in one place. The trade off is risk, since business loans demand sharper underwriting than a consumer savings account, but the reward is a faster route to the black.
Chasing an underserved market
The strategy leans on a real gap in the market. Across Southeast Asia, large numbers of small firms struggle to borrow from traditional banks, which often see them as too small, too informal, or too costly to serve. Digital banks argue they can reach these companies more cheaply, using data from payments and transactions to judge creditworthiness where paper records fall short.
For GXS, the Grab connection is a natural advantage here. Merchants and drivers already move money through Grab's ecosystem, and that activity offers a window into how a small business actually performs. Turning that visibility into responsible lending is the bet, and the 2025 numbers suggest it is starting to pay off.
A wider regional play
GXS is not a single bank but a family of them. Alongside the Singapore operation, the group runs GXBank in Malaysia and holds a stake in Superbank in Indonesia, giving it exposure to three of the region's largest and most competitive markets. Each sits at a different stage of maturity, but all face the same central question, which is how to convert millions of app users into a lending business that earns its keep.
That regional spread is both a strength and a challenge. It lets the group test approaches in one market and carry the lessons to another, yet it also means juggling three sets of regulators, funding conditions, and competitive dynamics at once. The corporate lending push gives these separate operations a common thread to pull on.
What to watch
A narrower loss is progress, not a finish line. The signals worth following from here are whether the business lending share keeps climbing without a jump in bad loans, whether deposit growth funds that lending cheaply, and whether any of the group's banks can post a clean profit rather than a shrinking deficit. Credit quality, in particular, will be the real test of a strategy built on lending to companies that other banks were unwilling to touch.
For Southeast Asia's crowded field of digital banks, GXS is becoming a case study in how to grow up. The easy part, winning users with a polished app, is largely done. The harder part, turning those users into a lending franchise that makes money without taking reckless risks, is the work now under way, and 2025 offered the first solid evidence that it can be done.
