Grab Pays $1.49 Billion for 60% of Atome Financial in Its Biggest Bet on Southeast Asian Lending

Grab Holdings (NASDAQ: GRAB) signed a definitive agreement on September 15, 2026, to acquire a controlling 60% equity stake in Atome Financial for $1.49 billion in cash, according to a filing and investor announcement from Grab. Atome Financial is the digital lending arm of Advance Intelligence Group Limited (AIGL) and operates buy-now-pay-later loans, consumer cash loans, BNPL cards, and digital lending across Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand.

Grab has also agreed to buy the remaining 40% of Atome roughly two years after the initial transaction closes, or by the third quarter of 2029 at the earliest, according to Asian Banking and Finance. That second tranche is valued between $2 billion and $4.5 billion depending on Atome's performance, with at least half paid in cash. Add it up and Grab could pay close to $3.3 billion total for a company most Americans have never heard of, as reported by Asia Tech Review's Jon Russell.

The transaction is expected to close by the third quarter of 2027, pending regulatory approval across five markets, according to Asian Banking and Finance.

Why Grab Wants It

More than 70% of adults across Southeast Asia remain unbanked or underbanked, according to a Temasek digital finance report cited by Tech Times. Grab's superapp already serves close to 54 million monthly transacting users across eight countries. Most of them, per Temasek's data, have no access to a traditional bank loan.

Atome's answer to that gap is a three-stage AI underwriting system that skips payslips and credit bureau files entirely. It verifies identity at onboarding, builds a creditworthiness profile from behavioral data like e-commerce transaction history and device metadata, and scores risk transaction by transaction through its network of more than 30,000 merchant partners, according to Tech Times.

"We founded Atome Financial eight years ago on a simple conviction: everyone deserves access to responsible credit and financial services, not just those with a conventional banking history," said Jefferson Chen, Chairman and CEO of AIGL and CEO of Atome Financial, in the companies' joint announcement.

Atome has served 25 million cumulative transacted users across its five markets, Grab said in its investor release.

The Numbers Grab Is Promising

Grab is telling investors this deal will make its Financial Services segment actually matter. The company projects segment Adjusted EBITDA of $500 million and a gross loan portfolio exceeding $6 billion by 2028, including Atome's book, according to Grab's own investor release. Grab also upgraded its company-wide 2028 targets to $1.7 billion in Adjusted EBITDA and a 30%-plus Group revenue compound annual growth rate from 2025 through 2028.

Those are big promises for a segment that has so far been small. Grab's financial services revenue grew 59% year-over-year in the second quarter of 2026, after growing 43% in the first quarter, but it accounted for just $134 million of Grab's total $997 million in quarterly revenue, according to Jon Russell's reporting on Grab's Q2 earnings. Atome adds a loan book that Grab says will more than double from $2.3 billion today to over $6 billion by 2028.

Grab has more than $5 billion in cash and has been actively deploying it, including investments in autonomous vehicle technology, the acquisition of U.S.-based investment platform Stash, and a $600 million purchase of Foodpanda Taiwan, according to Asia Tech Review. The Atome deal was first reported by Bloomberg before the official announcement, per the same outlet.

The Fair Concern Nobody's Answering Yet

Critics of buy-now-pay-later lending have a legitimate point: underwriting credit for people with no formal financial history, using behavioral data instead of income verification, is inherently riskier than traditional lending. Consumer advocates have long argued BNPL products can push financially stretched borrowers into debt they can't track across multiple short-term loans, especially when eligibility is determined by an algorithm rather than a human loan officer reviewing pay stubs.

Grab and Atome say they plan to share risk-management insights, regulatory best practices, and collection strategies once the deal closes, according to Grab's investor release. Grab also points to its own driver-partner lending program, where the company says 68% of borrowers accessed formal credit for the first time through the Grab platform in 2025. None of the source material includes independent default-rate data, delinquency figures, or a third-party audit of Atome's underwriting model. Whether the AI actually manages risk better than it manages growth is not something these announcements demonstrate. It's something the next few years of loan performance will have to prove.

What Happens Next

The deal needs regulatory sign-off in five countries before it can close, targeted for the third quarter of 2027. Grab's shares have swung between roughly $3 and $6.60 over the past year, and the stock fell more than 10% the week the acquisition news broke alongside a scheduled share sale by Grab's CEO under a pre-arranged trading plan, according to commentary posted on the trading platform TradingView. Whether Grab's Financial Services segment actually hits its $500 million EBITDA target by 2028, or whether Atome's AI underwriting holds up once it's carrying Grab's brand and balance sheet, remains to be seen once the ink dries and the loan book starts aging.