Funding Societies: Empowering Southeast Asia’s MSMEs at Scale
Funding Societies is the largest unified small and medium enterprise (SME) digital finance platform in Southeast Asia, with a commitment to improving the region’s societies by funding worthy and underserved micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs).
Over 73 million SMEs operate in ASEAN which comprise about 97 to 99% of total enterprises in the region. MSMEs face significant barriers to formal financing as traditional commercial banks cater to large enterprises and typically offer products that do not fit the financing needs of MSMEs. In Southeast Asia, around 39 million MSMEs (51%) are either unserved or underserved by financing services.
Established in 2015 in Singapore to provide financial and business support to underserved MSMEs, they have helped MSMEs to grow their businesses and individual and institutional investors grow their portfolios. Kelvin Teo, Group CEO, explains that Funding Societies’ mission is “to help small businesses in Southeast Asia, who are seen as underdogs, to access the financial services and enabling tools they need to succeed." Following their Singapore launch, Funding Societies expanded to Indonesia in 2016 and Malaysia in 2017, launched a crowdfunding platform in Thailand in 2021, and launched in Vietnam in 2022.
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