In 2020, WeLab Bank entered Hong Kong’s nascent digital banking scene as one of eight newly licensed virtual banks. The sector, born of optimism and regulatory innovation, was also met with scepticism. Could these agile, digital-first players ever scale in a mature, highly banked market like Hong Kong? Could they be profitable without the backing of a sprawling branch network or legacy customer base?

Fast forward to 2025, and WeLab Bank has emerged as a clear leader among its peers, achieving profitability in December 2024—a full six months ahead of schedule. Globally, most digital banks that reach profitability do so after five to seven years, if at all. For WeLab, which has deep roots in consumer lending across China and Southeast Asia, this milestone is more than just a financial victory. It validates a model that combines product focus, strong unit economics, and disciplined customer targeting with proprietary risk and fraud management technologies.

Simon Loong, who founded WeLab over a decade ago, now presides over a fintech group with operations across Hong Kong, Indonesia, and mainland China, with new expansion plans for Thailand and the broader ASEAN region. He reflected on the digital bank’s path to profitability, the strategic choices in wealth management and digital onboarding, the challenges of scaling the group across markets with different regulatory and cultural dynamics, and its ambitious future in artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous banking.

“We have never competed by being the biggest or oldest,” he said. “Our edge has always come from technology—how quickly we innovate, how we manage risk, and how we stay close to the customer.”

Achieving profitability ahead of schedule and what it proves in Hong Kong’s digital banking market

For many digital banks, reaching breakeven is a distant goal, often elusive and propped up by continuous investor funding. But for WeLab Bank, profitability came not just early, but strategically. In December 2024, the bank turned a profit—beating internal expectations by six months and outperforming the typical five-to-seven-year path seen across digital banking markets globally.

“We were profitable last December,” Loong shared. “It is more than six months ahead of what we originally forecasted. We have shown that a digital bank can both scale and turn a profit in a market as competitive and saturated as Hong Kong.”

Loong is quick to frame this milestone not merely as an internal success, but as a validation of the broader viability of virtual banking in one of Asia’s most mature financial systems. When Hong Kong’s Monetary Authority (HKMA) issued eight virtual bank licences in 2019, questions immediately surfaced: Could digital-only banks survive without the scale or cost advantages of incumbents? Could they generate customer stickiness beyond the tech-savvy few?

WeLab Bank’s full-year 2024 financials provide a resounding answer. Revenue reached nearly $100 million, with a year-on-year growth rate of over 30%. Total deposits grew 120%, and the bank maintained a loan-to-deposit ratio (LDR) of around 80%—a level Loong described as “capital efficient and fit for scale.” Perhaps most impressively, the bank achieved a net interest margin (NIM) of 9.4%, far outpacing many traditional players.

Rather than chasing user numbers or growth for its own sake, WeLab’s model focused on lending and wealth products with clear revenue models. “When many digital banks entered the market, they focused on customer acquisition,” said Loong. “But in Hong Kong, with its small population and dense banking penetration, you need to focus on products that generate real revenue—not just more users.”

This profitability milestone, he added, is not just sustainable—it’s the outcome of strategic choices made early on. “We are not relying on high-margin treasury arbitrage or burning investor cash to subsidise customer acquisition. We’ve built a real bank.”

Foundations in lending and credit risk expertise that underpin growth

At the heart of WeLab’s success story lies a deep and deliberate focus on lending—an area where the group has more than a decade of operational experience. Before it was a licensed bank, WeLab began in 2013 as an online lending platform in Hong Kong. Today, that heritage continues to anchor its approach, not just in Hong Kong but across the region.

“Lending is in our DNA,” said Loong. “We started 12 years ago as a lending platform, and we have grown into one of the largest fintech companies in Asia Pacific with over 70 million users and over 700 enterprise clients.”

This experience enabled WeLab to build its Hong Kong bank on solid fundamentals from day one. Rather than experimenting with new segments or speculative products, the bank leaned into its strengths—digital unsecured personal lending—and quickly became a dominant player in the category. As of the end of 2024, WeLab Bank held a 10–16% share of the new unsecured personal loans market in Hong Kong, placing it among the top four or five lenders in the space.

“One in every six to ten people in Hong Kong who borrows money today does so through WeLab,” Loong noted. “That is a strong testament to our ability to scale not just users, but a sustainable lending business.”

Key to that success is the group’s long-standing commitment to risk management and credit analytics. Unlike many digital banks that entered the market with limited underwriting experience, WeLab brought with it mature credit models refined across multiple economic cycles and geographies. This has translated into real performance gains—particularly in maintaining asset quality.

“Our credit performance continues to outperform the market average, even as delinquencies across the industry have worsened,” Loong said. “That is the benefit of having built this capability over time.”

The group’s risk engines, enhanced with AI and real-time behavioural analytics, allow for high-frequency updates to credit scoring models and fraud filters. As WeLab Bank grew its Hong Kong loan book, it avoided the trap of expanding recklessly, choosing instead to focus on profitable, repeat customers with high lifetime value.

“That is why our lending business is not only a growth engine, but a profit engine,” said Loong. “It brings together our experience, our technology and our ability to price, assess and manage risk in real time.”

Managing credit quality and fraud risk in an age of AI-powered threats

As digital banking becomes increasingly reliant on automation, the threats it faces have evolved in parallel—most notably in the realm of fraud. For Loong and his team at WeLab, staying ahead of these threats has required more than just defensive vigilance. It has demanded building proprietary technology that can adapt faster than the fraudsters.

“Fraud is a global challenge—and fraudsters adopt generative AI faster than banks,” Loong remarked. “That is why we have had to get really good at detecting it, and even anticipating it.”

WeLab’s edge stems from its early start as a digital lender. Unlike many banks that retrofitted their fraud systems to the digital world, WeLab developed its risk and fraud frameworks from the ground up with online behaviours in mind. Over time, it has built a multi-layered system that detects not just obvious signs of fraud, but more subtle syndicate-based patterns that traditional systems miss.

One example Loong cited was the emergence of syndicate frauds during the pandemic. In these schemes, fraudsters would use legitimate personal data from individuals—often unknowingly recruited through job scams or fake employment agencies—to open accounts or borrow money under false pretences. “The trick is, these aren’t bots or deepfakes. They are real people, but the pattern behind them is orchestrated,” he explained.

To combat this, WeLab developed AI models that do not just rely on facial recognition but also analyse the background of selfie images submitted for account opening. “We started detecting similarities—same office setting, same posters, same lighting—indicating these were taken in a recruitment centre,” said Loong. “From there, we trained the AI to spot anomalies that link seemingly unrelated applications.”

The approach goes beyond Hong Kong. In 2024, WeLab signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Royal Thai Police’s Central Investigation Bureau to share insights and fraud detection strategies. It is a rare example of a fintech company working proactively with law enforcement to combat financial crime across borders.

“Digital fraud is a problem that moves faster than regulators can track,” Loong said. “By collaborating with stakeholders—including police, regulators, and other banks—we can help raise the standard for the whole ecosystem.”

WeLab’s fraud defence strategy is tightly integrated with its credit risk management framework, allowing the bank to maintain tight control over both credit losses and operational risks. “It is not just about protecting the bank—it is about ensuring that customers are safe, confident and secure when banking with us,” he added.

This attention to risk and fraud, combined with an ability to translate detection into action, is part of what has enabled WeLab to lend aggressively while maintaining asset quality. “If you want to build a profitable digital bank,” Loong concluded, “you must be excellent at saying no—to the wrong customers, the wrong signals, and the wrong trends.”

Scaling wealth management by simplifying the investment experience

While lending has been the bedrock of WeLab’s profitability, wealth management is fast becoming its next major growth engine—and one that Loong believes can be fundamentally reimagined through digital simplicity and customer-first innovation.

“We saw a gap in the way younger customers were approaching investments,” Loong explained. “A lot of people were learning from TikTok or Instagram—buying one stock, one crypto coin, trying to time the market. That’s not sustainable, and definitely not how long-term wealth is built”.

To address this, WeLab invested in building a holistic digital wealth platform, centred on two key principles: education through intelligent advice and frictionless access to diversified investment options. Partnering with global German-based insurer Allianz, WeLab developed an advisory engine that customises fund recommendations based on each individual’s risk appetite, investment goals, and time horizon.

“Most people do not need a private banker—they need a reliable system to help them invest consistently,” Loong said. “It’s not about timing the market, but time in the market. That is what we’re encouraging.”

The strategy appears to be working. In 2024, WeLab Bank saw its assets under management (AUM) grow nearly 300% year-on-year. Wealth-related fee income increased more than 70%, driven by high uptake of a first-in-market fee model that eliminated traditional entry barriers. Rather than charging front-end fees—common in legacy fund distribution models—WeLab offers a low, transparent monthly advisory fee as a percentage of AUM.

“This was a deliberate departure from the old way,” said Loong. “Charging a big fee up front makes the bank money quickly, but it puts the customer at an immediate disadvantage. We wanted to change that dynamic.”

The structure also encourages users to stay invested, as switching between funds carries no penalty, and ongoing advice is included. This has proven especially attractive to young professionals, who value flexibility, low cost and transparency. The digital interface is clean, jargon-free and fully mobile-native—attributes that Loong sees as critical for broader adoption.

“We are not just selling funds—we are building long-term investing behaviour,” he added. “The more time our customers spend with the platform, the better their outcomes. And that is good for them and good for us.”

To serve different investor profiles, WeLab has expanded its offering beyond portfolio-based solutions. It now provides access to single funds—such as money market instruments—with dynamic recommendations based on macroeconomic trends and customer preferences.

Loong believes this blend of professional advisory, modular product design and no-friction pricing gives WeLab a competitive advantage even against traditional players. “We are not trying to replicate private banking. We are building something new for a generation that does not want to be sold to—they want to be empowered.”

As the bank scales its wealth platform, it is also preparing to replicate it in other markets like Indonesia and, potentially, Thailand. “We see strong appetite for digital wealth solutions across Asia,” said Loong. “The key is localising the interface, the language and the product mix—but the core model is sound.”

Serving mainland Chinese visitors and expanding cross-border banking in Greater China

As Hong Kong reopens and mainland tourists return, WeLab has strategically positioned itself to meet the growing incidental demand for banking services from mainland Chinese Visitors—those seeking not just retail but financial options outside their home market. For Loong, this segment represents both a short-term win and a long-term pillar of WeLab’s cross-border ambitions.

“In the second half of 2024, we saw an eightfold increase in customer onboarding from mainland Chinese visitors,” Loong revealed. “That is not a minor trend. These are individuals with real financial needs—and we are making it effortless for them to bank with us.”

While many traditional banks in Hong Kong still require branch visits, physical documentation, or manual processes, WeLab enables mainland visitors to open an account remotely, using digital onboarding tools built to support cross-border compliance. “A lot of visitors only have a weekend in Hong Kong,” Loong said. “They are here to shop, eat, maybe invest. They’re not going to spend hours queueing in a branch.”

Loong explained that close to 68% of mainland visitors have offshore financial needs—ranging from currency diversification to overseas investments. Hong Kong remains one of the most accessible and desirable offshore banking destinations for these customers, and WeLab has tailored its onboarding, product design, and customer support to reflect this.

“From the moment they land, they can open an account, access investment options, and move funds—all digitally, all on their phone,” he said. “That fits not only their lifestyle, but their expectations.”

WeLab does not currently advertise in mainland China due to regulatory restrictions, but its brand awareness among digitally savvy consumers has grown organically. Loong credits this to two factors: the company’s decade-long history in consumer finance, and the trust it has built by operating under the Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s digital banking regime. “People may not know every feature we offer, but they know we are licensed, we are backed by global shareholders, and we are safe,” he said.

Beyond retail opportunities, this cross-border flow is also laying the foundation for a broader Greater Bay Area (GBA) strategy. With 86 million residents, the GBA—including Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Guangdong—presents one of the largest connected consumer markets in the world. WeLab’s ability to serve customers on both sides of the border, with financial products that move seamlessly across jurisdictions, could offer a major differentiator.

“This is not just about onboarding tourists,” said Loong. “It is about building infrastructure for regional connectivity—something the GBA blueprint calls for but few banks have operationalised.”

As regulators explore deeper integration—such as the expansion of the Cross-boundary Wealth Management Connect scheme—digital-first players like WeLab are well-positioned to lead. “Our infrastructure is already designed for cross-market use. We do not need to retrofit anything,” Loong noted.

By focusing on convenience, compliance and cultural fluency, WeLab has turned a once-overlooked visitor segment into a meaningful source of deposits, engagement and future potential. “For us, this is just the beginning,” Loong said. “We see the GBA as a sandbox—not just for fintech experimentation, but for building Asia’s most interconnected digital banking experience.”

Expanding in Southeast Asia: Indonesia, Thailand and the road to 500 million users

If Hong Kong has proven that digital banks can achieve profitability with discipline and focus, then Southeast Asia represents the next frontier for WeLab’s growth. Loong is clear about the ambition: the group plans to grow from its current base of 70 million users to 500 million across Asia within the next decade. That growth will be anchored in underserved, mobile-first markets where digital financial services can fill deep structural gaps.

“We are entering the second decade of our journey, and Southeast Asia is a key growth pillar,” said Loong. “The opportunity is massive. You have large unbanked populations, rising mobile usage, and consumers who are leapfrogging straight into digital finance.”

Indonesia has already become WeLab’s most significant market outside Hong Kong. After forming a joint venture with a leading local automobile and consumer finance company, Astra, in 2018 and acquiring Bank Jasa Jakarta in 2022, the bank was rebranded as Bank Saqu. In less than 18 months since its relaunch, it has attracted 2.5 million active users—a testament to its differentiated positioning.

Bank Saqu caters to solopreneurs, gig workers and side hustlers—young Indonesians with fragmented income streams from ride-hailing, online selling or freelance work. “We built a product for how people actually live,” Loong explained. Features like “pockets”—customisable sub-accounts for different financial goals—allow users to organise money for groceries, bills, vacations, or gifting. Over 30% of users actively name and manage their own pockets, providing rich behavioural data and reinforcing financial discipline.

Other innovations include roundup savers, which automatically divert spare change into high-interest savings pockets, and group savings accounts that encourage social banking by allowing users to save collectively for shared goals. “We’re not just offering a product,” Loong said. “We’re encouraging better financial behaviour in a culturally relevant way.”

Encouraged by this success, WeLab partnered with Lighthub Asset—a Thai fintech co-founded by Chatchaval Jiaravanon and affiliated with Lightnet Group—to apply for a digital bank licence in Thailand. The consortium submitted its application to the Bank of Thailand in September 2024, proposing to use AI-powered banking infrastructure to serve both consumers and micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs). The consortium highlighted its access to a network of 150,000 service points across agriculture, commerce and payments to boost financial inclusion.

However, in April 2025, the Bank of Thailand announced that licences would be awarded to three other consortia led by Krungthai Bank, SCB X and Ascend Money, with the final approvals pending confirmation by the Ministry of Finance.

Loong spoke about getting an update on the outcome at the end of June. “We see Thailand as a strategic market, and the demand for inclusive, tech-driven financial services isn’t going away. We will know by end of June.” he said.

What distinguishes WeLab’s regional expansion approach is its reuse of core technology and product architecture. “We built Bank Saqu in six months using the same tech stack and team from Hong Kong,” Loong said. “When we go to a new market, we localise the user interface, language and regulatory layers—but the backbone is the same.”

This modularity gives WeLab the agility to scale across markets, including Vietnam and the Philippines, where it continues to explore growth opportunities. “We are not trying to export Hong Kong’s model,” Loong clarified. “We build for each market, based on real user behaviour—but we do it faster and more efficiently each time.”

For WeLab, Southeast Asia is not a testing ground—it is the core of the next phase of its growth. “We want to be the digital bank that builds trust through relevance—not one-size-fits-all services, but personalised tools that help people save, borrow, and grow,” Loong said.

Deploying AI to drive employee productivity, customer personalisation and autonomous banking

As WeLab scales its banking operations across multiple geographies, it is also laying the foundation for what Loong described as the “next evolution of digital banking”—a future where artificial intelligence not only supports internal productivity but also engages customers autonomously and intelligently.

“We do not see AI as a buzzword,” Loong said. “It is a strategic pillar, and it is already changing how we work, how we engage with customers and how we build the next generation of services.”

WeLab has been one of the first financial institutions in Asia to deploy locally hosted generative AI models. This move ensured that experimentation with large language models (LLMs) remained compliant with data privacy regulations.

Today, WeLab’s staff across product, engineering, legal, and marketing functions regularly use AI tools to streamline repetitive tasks. “Our legal team uses AI to summarise contracts, our engineers use it to debug and accelerate development, and our marketers use it to generate campaign content,” Loong explained. “That frees up our people to focus on what they do best—critical thinking, creativity and decision-making.”

But the more transformative application of AI lies on the customer-facing side. WeLab is investing heavily in developing AI-powered personalisation agents—tools that can analyse user behaviour, anticipate financial needs, and offer contextual solutions in real time. According to Loong, these agents go beyond recommendation engines. They are designed to be autonomous actors capable of initiating and executing transactions under customer-defined parameters.

“Think of it like the evolution from Google Maps to a self-driving car,” he said. “Right now, your banking app tells you where your money is. In the future, it will help you decide where it should go—and then move it there for you, safely and instantly.”

WeLab has already begun prototyping such experiences. For instance, it is testing an AI-driven financial planner that nudges users to optimise their savings or rebalance their investment portfolios based on market movements and personal cash flow. Another concept in development is a conversational agent that can serve as a “banking co-pilot,” handling everything from explaining product features to completing transactions through chat interfaces.

Crucially, these systems are being built with ethical considerations at their core. “We are designing our AI agents with a clear rule set,” Loong said. “They do not just act on impulse. They work within user-consented frameworks, and there’s transparency in every decision or action taken.”

WeLab’s AI strategy also intersects with its broader push for hyper-personalisation. By leveraging deep behavioural analytics and historical data, the bank can tailor user journeys, offers, and messaging at a granular level. This not only improves engagement and retention but also allows WeLab to manage risk and pricing dynamically.

Looking ahead, Loong believes the convergence of generative AI and embedded finance will reshape the industry. “Banking will not live in banking apps anymore,” he said. “It will be embedded in your ecosystem—your ride-hailing app, your e-commerce checkout, your accounting platform. AI will make it invisible, contextual, and intuitive.”

As WeLab develops these capabilities in-house, it is also exploring how its AI technology stack can be shared with partners across its ecosystem. “We do not just want to be the digital bank of the future,” Loong said. “We want to be the platform that powers the future of finance.”

Reflections on leadership, tough decisions, and what comes next for WeLab

More than a decade since founding WeLab, Loong still speaks with the urgency and precision of a startup CEO. Yet the journey from a small lending operation in Hong Kong and China to a regulated bank with regional ambitions has been anything but linear. It has required what he described as a series of “calculated pivots”—some of which came at critical inflection points for the business.

“One of the hardest but most important decisions we made was to go from being a pure online lender to becoming a digital bank,” Loong recalled. “That meant taking on new regulatory obligations, building new capabilities, and transforming our identity.”

It was a strategic risk. The company had found success and profitability in online consumer credit in Hong Kong and mainland China. But Loong and his leadership team saw limitations in staying confined to one product or market. “We were clear that if we wanted to shape the future of finance, we could not do it with just lending. We had to become a bank—and not just any bank, but a fully digital one,” he said.

Securing a virtual banking licence from the HKMA in 2019 marked the start of a new chapter. The launch of WeLab Bank in 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, was a trial by fire. “We onboarded customers, built teams, and launched new products while the city was in lockdown. It was the most challenging operating environment I have faced,” Loong admitted.

Still, the adversity sharpened WeLab’s execution. “We had no choice but to automate, to move fast, and to learn from each iteration,” he said. The lessons from that experience would later inform the group’s rapid buildout of Bank Saqu in Indonesia, which went from acquisition to rebrand and relaunch in just six months.
Today, WeLab is one of the few fintech companies in the region that has both a strong digital bank and a profitable lending business, operating under full regulatory supervision in multiple markets. Yet Loong is clear-eyed about what it will take to sustain growth.

“We have been fortunate, but also disciplined,” he said. “The future will reward those who can adapt—who can balance compliance with innovation, scale with personalisation and speed with trust.”

Leadership at WeLab, he added, has always been about solving problems that have not been solved before. “There is no playbook for building the first pan-Asian digital bank. We are writing it as we go. And we know we are not done.”

That sense of unfinished work is what drives Loong—and what underpins WeLab’s long-term vision. From AI-powered banking agents to embedded finance partnerships and regional ecosystem building, the group is laying down infrastructure not just for financial services, but for intelligent financial participation.

Asked what he hopes people associate with WeLab in the next ten years, Loong answered without hesitation: “That we helped people manage their money better. That we made finance simpler, safer, and smarter—not just for the wealthy, but for everyone.”

Building Asia’s first pan-regional digital bank

As the digital banking landscape matures, few institutions have demonstrated both the commercial viability and regional ambition that define WeLab today. From its early days as a fintech startup focused on lending, to becoming one of the few profitable digital banks in Hong Kong, and now expanding its presence across Southeast Asia, WeLab has steadily built the case for what a scalable, sustainable, and intelligent digital bank can look like in Asia.

Loong’s vision is not simply to build more products or enter more markets. It is to reshape how banking is delivered and experienced—removing complexity, embedding intelligence, and aligning services with the rhythm of people’s lives. Whether it’s gig workers in Indonesia saving for their next motorbike, mainland Chinese visitors accessing offshore wealth products in Hong Kong, or AI agents helping customers make smarter investment decisions, WeLab’s value proposition centres on relevance and trust.

The group’s approach also reflects a deeper understanding of how to balance innovation with regulatory rigour. In every market it enters, WeLab has chosen to partner with local giants—Astra in Indonesia, Lighthub Asset in Thailand—and build within formal banking frameworks. This has allowed it to scale responsibly while retaining the agility of a fintech.