Recently established peer-to-peer (P2P) lending marketplace, Rai Capital, today announced its official launch in Cambodia.
Licensed and regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission of Cambodia (SECC), Rai Capital is a joint venture with Goldbell Financial Services. It is designed for micro-entrepreneurs and individuals to promote financial inclusion in the country – enabling the local business and small and medium enterprises community the ease of access to credit or investments.
Recognising the emerging gap in the lending market for proper and convenient access to financing in Cambodia, FinTech veterans Eddie Lee, Co-Founder and CEO, and Alex Chua, Co-Founder, founded Rai Capital in 2018. Accessible via a mobile app, the Rai Capital platform eliminates the need for borrowers to travel long distances they previously had to, in order to obtain financing from the banks or financial institutions. Being a marketplace platform, Rai Capital is able to onboard suitable investors around the region such as accredited or corporate investors and financial institutions outside of Cambodia.
Speaking on the launch of the platform, Eddie Lee, Co-Founder and CEO of Rai Capital, said, “We founded the company seeing the opportunity to plug into the financing gap in Cambodia. We noticed the lack of financial inclusion due to the scarcity of financiers, a huge pool of SMEs and micro SMEs who are unable to tap the support offered by banks or financial institutions, as well as the physical barriers borrowers face when obtaining financing – having to take hours or up to a day to travel from rural areas to the city-state, just to spend a few more weeks waiting for the loan application to be approved. Rai Capital was born out of seeing that struggle. Over the years, Singapore has taken the lead in becoming the hub for innovative FinTech technologies. We are playing our part to take FinTech into ASEAN starting with Cambodia.”
Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) account for 99 per cent of the total businesses in Cambodia, with most businesses being micro enterprises with less than ten employees, according to The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific[1]. While P2P lending or other alternative financing is not an entirely new concept in Southeast Asia, Cambodia still has a void to fill for such services – with 66 per cent of MSMEs facing challenges in access to working capital, according to the same report.
One of the potential platform investors of Rai Capital, Alicia Lim, Director of Cambodia-based Himawari Hotel Apartments, commented, “Rai Capital is setting out to build the modern-age, crowdlending platform for small enterprises in Cambodia. We believe that the innovation will bring excitement to the local lending market. With Rai Capital leveraging on technology and reducing the geographical barrier, I believe many of our existing suppliers will stand to gain from a platform like this.”
The firm is on the lookout for potential partners, and is currently in talks with local payment providers in Cambodia. The Rai Capital app is currently available for download on Android, and on iOS come mid-December.
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