We have written extensively about our thesis on employer-led financial services and digital health. In earlier posts we have written about partnering with employers to help employees avoid becoming chronic care patients, the importance of supporting employees to become asset owners, and the importance of employee access to earned wages.
With our recent investment in GIMO, the leading earned wage access provider in Vietnam, we extend coverage of this investment thesis to Vietnam’s 55 million salaried workers. GIMO was recently admitted into the W22 batch of Y Combinator, further validating the potential of GIMO which we are very excited about.
In this post we look at some of the key differentiating factors of earned wage access (“EWA”) companies vis-a-vis traditional consumer financial services companies, and why we believe GIMO is positioned to be a leader in EWA in Vietnam.
We see investing in EWA as an alternative to investing in a consumer lending company. In particular, digital banks (“DB”) have recently received a lot of interest from investors, and have raised large amounts of VC and growth funding. While both EWA and DB share a similar goal; to bring financial services to an underserved market segment, they are typically also different in significant ways. Here’s how they differ:
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Written by Christiaan Kaptein, Partner at Integra Partners. Illustrated by Theodore Ng.