Tyme CEO on cracking the code to unicorn status

Few people have gone from teaching human rights and the philosophy of law and jurisprudence in South Africa to founding a multi-country digital bank, but Coenraad Jonker has.

His company, Singapore-based Tyme Group, was crowned as Southeast Asia’s newest tech unicorn last month.

It raised US$250 million in a series D funding round at a valuation of US$1.5 billion, drawing big-name investors like Brazil’s Nubank, the world’s most valuable digital banking platform. Tyme said that it plans to use the funds to expand into Vietnam and Indonesia.

Currently, Tyme operates digital banks TymeBank in South Africa and GoTyme in the Philippines. The latter is a joint venture with local conglomerate Gokongwei Group.

Launched in 2019, TymeBank serves 10 million customers and became the first digital bank in South Africa to turn profitable. Meanwhile, GoTyme has onboarded 5 million retail customers since its 2022 launch.

Tech in Asia recently caught up with Tyme Group founder and CEO Coenraad Jonker to dive into what it takes for digital banks to thrive sustainably.

Recipe for profitability

Only around a quarter of digital banks in Southeast Asia are profitable, according to research by McKinsey & Company from last November.

While TymeBank turned net profitable at the end of 2023, making it one of the rare examples of a profitable digital bank, GoTyme is still in the red. It expects to hit profitability in 2027.

Among digital banks in the Philippines, GoTyme had 23.4 billion pesos (US$403 million) in assets as of June 2024, second only to Maya Bank.

Digital banks have to get four things right: acquiring customers fast and cheaply, keeping them engaged, making sure they’re satisfied with the bank’s services, and balancing lending volume and risks, according to Jonker.

He adds that if Tyme’s products and services are both “significantly cheaper” than those of its competitors, and if they provide “a better quality experience,” the rest “looks after itself.”

South Africa to Asia

What brought a South African founder to build multiple digital banks in Southeast Asia?

It was the “entrenched patterns of economic exclusion” that Jonker observed, even after his country had transitioned away from apartheid to democracy in 1994, that planted the seeds of Tyme.

A different approach

Tech in Tyme