Sea, owner of popular e-commerce platform Shopee, is marking its 16th anniversary with a “cute” rebrand of its financial services arm, the fastest-growing segment of its business.
The tech giant’s fintech division, formerly known as “SeaMoney”, will now get a much shorter title: Monee. The rebranded division will oversee the tech company’s two digital banks—MariBank in Singapore and SeaBank in Indonesia and the Philippines—along with its payments and lending services.
“We chose the name Monee because it is simple, cute and, just like Sea, easy to write and pronounce,” Forrest Li, Sea’s founder and CEO, said on Thursday. The new brand also aligns with Sea’s existing e-commerce brand, Shopee.
Sea, No. 20 on the Southeast Asia 500, started as a gaming company. In 2015, the company launched Shopee. E-commerce now makes up most of Sea’s revenue, with Shopee generating almost three-quarters of Sea’s $16.8 billion in revenue in its most recent fiscal year.
Yet fintech is becoming a fast growing part of Sea’s business. Revenue from digital financial services hit $2.4 billion last fiscal year, a 34.6% increase. In the last three months of last year, Sea’s financial services revenue grew 55.2% year-on-year to reach $733.3 million, the fastest growing segment for that period.
Sea generates revenue from lending to consumers and small- and medium-sized enterprises. As of December 31, 2024, consumer and loans principal outstanding stood at $5.1 billion, up 63.9% year-on-year.
On Thursday, Li recounted how fintech has long been core to Sea’s business. Even during its start as a games publisher, Sea built its own payment network to allow users to buy in-game items. That led to the 2014 launch of AirPay, a general purpose e-wallet, and then ShopeePay, an e-wallet integrated with its e-commerce platform. Sea later launched digital banking apps in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Singapore.
Southeast Asia’s young, mobile-friendly population are more open to interacting with a digital financial platform. Less developed economies in the region also have significant underbanked populations, providing an avenue for players like Sea to step in with digital banks.
Fellow tech platform Grab has also moved into financial services, which has become a fast-growing revenue segment for the Singaporean ride-hailing platform.
These tech platforms tap user data from consumer-facing businesses like e-commerce, ride hailing and food delivery to assess risk for unbanked and underbanked populations not normally served by traditional financial institutions.
At Monee’s launch on Thursday, Singapore’s second minister for trade and industry said that digital payment transaction value in Southeast Asia reached $1.1 trillion last year, and will double by 2030. Digital lending will also grow to about $200 billion by 2030, up from $70 billion last year.
