Why the GrabPay Card has to die for GXS Bank to thrive

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Hello reader,

Some of the best advice about writing I’ve seen is to kill your darlings.

Rather than anything morbid, this simply means that when a particular part of a piece of writing doesn’t work with the overall piece, you have to remove it. No matter how hard you may have worked on it or how beautiful you think the passage is, it must die for your work’s greater good.

Successful writers are great at unsentimentally carrying out this process, and so are successful tech companies.

Instead of consigning flowery metaphors and unnecessary exposition to the grave, tech firms need to look at the new products, services, or features they’ve rolled out, and get rid of those that don’t serve the company overall.

Grab is about to kill one of its darlings, with the Mastercard-issued GrabPay Card set to be discontinued from June 1. As today’s featured piece explores, the death of this card may be necessary for another of Grab’s products to thrive.

Today we look at:

• What the death of the GrabPay Card tells us about Grab’s plans for GXS Bank
• Aeon Bank’s plans for Islamic banking services in Malaysia
• Other newsy highlights such as the latest Chinese EV firm setting up shop in Thailand and Apple removing some Meta apps from its App Store in China.

Premium summary

Change on the cards for Grab

Image credit: Timmy Loen

On the surface, Grab’s decision to discontinue the GrabPay Card could be seen as part of the ride-hailing giant’s efforts to focus on profitability.

However, if you dig a little deeper, the move may indicate Grab plans to push users toward the payment methods offered by GXS Bank, the digital bank backed by Grab and Singtel.

• Taking a bite out of GXS: Grab and Mastercard introduced the GrabPay Card in 2019, offering users loyalty points that could be redeemed on the platform’s app. However, with GXS Bank in the picture after Grab and Singtel launched it in 2022, the card could be seen as potentially cannibalizing the digital bank’s payment business.
• No overlaps: GrabPay also recently closed its investment services AutoInvest and Earn+ in Singapore. While GXS doesn’t yet offer similar services, it likely will add them eventually, given its plans to double its loan disbursals. Scrapping these services is another indicator that Grab is being careful to avoid stepping on GXS’s toes.
• Profit push: The key challenge in GXS Bank’s effort to reach profitability is encouraging customers to use their accounts in a market where the population is highly banked and has plenty of payment options. To this end, it has already boosted interest rates on customers’ main accounts to 2.38% from 0.08% in August 2023.

Bank on it

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