Obsessing over BNPL and Clubhouse

Dear readers,

We’ve been persistent about covering BNPL. (If you’ve been reading Tech in Asia, you’d probably know what that is by now.)

And we’re not stopping – as long as we know you’re interested in the topic. Last week, we brought you this map of the most noteworthy BNPL players in the region.

Photo credit: Atome

Whether you’re an investor, entrepreneur, a job applicant at one of these firms, or a general enthusiast, we bet you’ll find it useful.

We’ve been publishing these landscape reports regularly, and we hope they’ll contribute to helping you understand Asian tech better.

Here are some other topics we went into last week:

• Should Singapore’s e-wallets be threatened by Google Pay? The answer depends on which side you’re on: the traditional banks or the digital banks.
• Vietnam’s first unicorn is finally serious about its global gaming ambitions. VNG and Sea started out as Southeast Asia’s only unicorns. Since then, their paths have diverged, with Sea becoming a US$100 billion behemoth. VNG now wants to capture some of that magic.
• 99.co sees 62% surge in 2020 revenue amid Covid-19 setbacks. The startup has been nipping at the heels of PropertyGuru. We look at whether it’s been making progress in surpassing its rival.

On another note, like many people in the tech scene, I’ve been playing around with Clubhouse, that newfangled audio-only content app.

It seems to have a passionate following, and I can see why. It’s great if you like to express yourself, if you love the sound of your own voice, and if you like spontaneous conversations.

I think it needs a lot of refinement though. I only found something interesting in the one out of 10 times I opened the app.

The most interesting session I was in had Tony Fernandes and Nas Daily founder Nuseir Yassin chopping it up with some senior execs from Grab and Gojek. There were a couple of interesting non-participants in the room that I’d like to get to know too.

It’s not often you can get these people in the same room, even a virtual one.