Coen JonkerFounder & CEO

Tyme Group is a multi-country digital banking group headquartered in Singapore. We run fully regulated banks in South Africa and the Philippines, and fintech operations in Indonesia and Hong Kong. We also maintain a centralized technology hub with about eight hundred engineers and developers running out of Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam.

We were recognized not just for commercial success, but for the impact of our financial inclusion model. Through operating model innovation, we successfully reduced the cost of serving customers so that we can profitably serve even the poorest consumers. We also developed a unique crossover model that embeds banking in retail environments.

We partner with fast moving consumer goods retailers, grocery stores, and pharmacies. This allows us to extend the frontiers of banking in emerging markets. Instead of relying on expensive bank branches, we place kiosks and services where consumers already shop, making banking highly accessible and cheaper to operate.

We maintained a dogged focus on automation throughout the business to keep operational costs low. However, we also learned that you cannot build a sustainable, inclusive bank by serving only low-income customers. We expanded our services to mass affluent customers and built excellent credit lending capabilities to drive profitability.

In our initial phases in South Africa, we had a cheap and cheerful brand positioning. When we expanded to the Philippines, we changed our brand to be highly aspirational, slick, and focused on younger customers. That approach was very successful, and we brought those lessons back to South Africa.

Stablecoin platforms and artificial intelligence are hitting us like two tsunamis. They allow us to think differently about geographical expansion. Instead of entering one country at a time, we are exploring the opportunity to build the next version of our business as a multi-country, multi-currency digital solution.

In 2001, during my MBA, I read the work of economist Hernando de Soto on the informal economy. I realized that the banking system is one of the most important structural determinants of wealth and poverty. That inspired me to study banking, work inside large banks, and eventually start Tyme.

We grow up with a false narrative that how well people do is purely a function of individual talent and work ethic. While those are important, societal wealth patterns are structurally determined. The banking sector plays a massive role in either reinforcing these patterns or opening up opportunities for inclusion.

Boxing first thing in the morning forces absolute focus on the present moment, because any distraction can be painful. It also puts daily business disagreements into perspective. How we sleep, eat, and exercise is critical to keeping the energy and focus needed to lead a growing business.

Payments and affordable internet data access are the foundational rails for emerging markets. We are at the foothills of a new payments revolution driven by decentralized finance. This revolution will lower transaction costs, speed up transfers, and enrich the transaction data that companies can utilize.

There are still one billion people globally who are entirely excluded from the financial system. It is regrettable that the world's attention span has moved on from this generational problem. Small businesses also remain structurally undercapitalized in emerging markets, even though they act as the engine of the economy.

We use artificial intelligence to improve operational efficiency and accelerate our product development cycles. We closely track our cost per software release. Implementing AI tools has already halved our product release costs, and we expect to halve those costs again over the next six months.

I doubt they will dominate completely. Large companies often believe they can do everything better, but they cannot beat a highly specialized team whose entire livelihood and wealth depend on doing one niche thing exceptionally well. The future belongs to hyperspecialization rather than massive centralized conglomerates.

US dollar stablecoins have become a new way for the Federal Reserve to channel liquidity into the dollar, which threatens currency sovereignty. We should think about this risk more smartly. We need more private sector development of stablecoins denominated in trustworthy currencies like the Singapore dollar or Euro.

Physical bank branches are extremely expensive to operate and create a high cost to serve, which structurally excludes lower-income customers. Digital banking, automated kiosks, and retail store partnerships are far more efficient channels to deliver financial services and represent the clear future of banking.

International money transfers remain a major pain point due to high costs and slow processing speeds. Emerging technologies like stablecoins and decentralized finance rails offer faster, cheaper, and more secure alternatives. These new decentralized platforms will inevitably replace Swift's legacy rails over the next decade.