Allianz leads $75m round for Hong Kong's WeLab

The German financial services giant is investing via its VC unit, Allianz X, with support from a number of unspecified existing backers. The investment has been billed as an extension of a Series C round that raised $156 million in 2019 from a group including Sequoia Capital China and Alibaba Group. That round followed the abandonment of an IPO that was expected to raise $500 million.

Total private funding to date comes to more than $600 million, with previous investors also including Iconiq Capital, DST Advisors, the International Finance Corporation, Khazana Nasional, TOM Group, and Ule Holdings, an e-commerce platform owned by TOM and China Post. Previous strategic support from banking and insurance operators includes China Construction Bank and ING.

WeLab was set up in 2013 as a peer-to-peer lending services provider under the brands WeLend in Hong Kong and Wolaidai in mainland China, with core operations focused on artificial intelligence-enabled creditworthiness analysis. Expansion in the meantime has included the launch of a digital-only bank in Hong Kong and an entry into Indonesia with a mobile lending platform.

The company now claims to have almost 50 million individual users and more than 600 enterprise customers across the broader region. Business is said to have boomed in light of COVID-19, with the user base growing by 20% in the past year. During this period, WeLab said it doubled its network of enterprise services clients in mainland China to more than 600 and expanded its Indonesia business sixfold.

The partnership with Allianz will focus on the rollout of new insurance and wealth management products. WeLab hopes to become the first digital bank in Asia to deploy a digital wealth management advisory product. This effort will initially target Hong Kong and eventually be rolled out across the Greater Bay area. The broader agenda includes further pan-Asian expansions.

WeLab estimates its total addressable market size for financial services is close to $3 trillion in annual revenue. In Southeast Asia alone, it notes that there are more than 400 million internet users but more than 70% of the general population is underbanked.

The company’s IPO prospectus from 2018 confirmed revenue was $155 million in 2017, up from $30 million the prior year. The net loss during the same period shrank from $5.7 million to $3.7 million.

"In a relatively short amount of time, WeLab has built up a powerful platform for digital financial services and achieved excellent access to retail and business customers in Asia, a region of strategic importance for Allianz,” Nazim Cetin, CEO of Allianz X, said in a statement. “WeLab's high-performance technology platform, in particular, makes it a unique fintech in the Asian markets.”

Allianz X targets fintech start-ups globally with an emphasis on ecosystem building in insurance and wealth management. Previous investments in Asia include Singaporean property portal 99.co, Indonesian healthcare app Halodoc, and Southeast Asian ride-hailing and mobile services giant Gojek.

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• Topics
• Greater China
• Financials
• Technology
• Expansion
• Hong Kong (China)
• Allianz
• Financial Services
• insurance
• Fintech