Reuben Lai: From taxi to take-off

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Fifty years of Asia The profiles: 23 of the biggest names in Asia Zafrul Aziz Laura Cha Wei Sun Christianson Piyush Gupta Uday Kotak Boon Chye Loh Agus Martowardojo Raghuram Rajan Jahja Setiaatmadja Weijian Shan Alan Smith Teh Hong Piow Tian Huiyu Sun Yu Nestor Tan Wee Ee Cheong Kartika Wirjoatmodjo Peter Wong Daniel Wu Wu Wei Joseph Yam Zeti Akhtar Aziz

Grab is one of a cluster of fintechs that are revolutionizing grass-roots financial services in Asia. While Ant Financial and Tencent’s WeChat have disrupted China and Paytm leads a similar march in India, in southeast Asia, Grab and Indonesia’s Go-Jek are the standouts, launching dedicated financial services businesses off the back of ride-sharing platforms.

Grab was formed in 2012 by a group of friends irritated about how hard it was to get a taxi in Malaysia. It started out as a local equivalent of Uber (and went on to take over Uber’s business in southeast Asia last year) and remains first and foremost a transportation network, empowering individual drivers of cars and, particularly in Indonesia, motorbikes, with a strong financial inclusion objective.