Temasek increases investments in Fintech amid global downturn
Singapore’s state-owned investor Temasek is doubling down on fintech this year, participating in at least seven funding rounds involving companies in the sector since the start of the year, an analysis by Fintech News Singapore found.
The figure nearly matches the total number of deals it participated in for all of 2021, which is under ten, according to findings from desktop research that used data from Crunchbase and Dealroom.
Financial services are still the largest representation of Temasek’s portfolio.
In 2022, Temasek continued to demonstrate its bullishness towards the Indian startup ecosystem, participating in at least two fintech deals in the country since the beginning of 2022: FPL Technologies’ US$100 million Series D, and Open’s US$50 million Series D.
FPL Technologies is a credit card-based fintech company that operates the credit scoring platform OneScore and issues credit cards under the OneCard brand, and Open is a small and medium-sized enterprise (SME)-focused neobanking platform. Temasek has been an interested party in Open since 2021.
Temasek, which has doubled its India portfolio in the past five years, has pumped a total of $16 billion into the country so far. India accounts for more than 5% of Temasek’s global portfolio. The investment company is betting heavily on segments such as financial services and agritech, Ravi Lambah, head of the investment group at Temasek, told Moneycontrol in an interview earlier this month.
Besides investments in India, Temasek also participated in funding rounds involving UK fintech companies, led Thought Machine’s US$160 million Series D, and invested more money in a follow-on round for portfolio company FNZ Group.
Thought Machine builds cloud-based platforms for the banking industry, and FNZ Group is a provider of investment platform technology to major financial institutions.
In Asia, Temasek was among the investors in a US$200 million Series B+ round closed in March by Amber Group, a Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency financing provider. It also made a follow-up investment in May in ShopBack, a Singaporean rewards and discovery platform.
Bahamas-headquartered cryptocurrency exchange FTX Exchange is another portfolio company that received further investment from Temasek this year.
Other private fintech companies Temasek has in its portfolio include British payment technology companies Soldo and SumUp, open banking startup TrueLayer, Singaporean payments company Nium and Indian investment platform iCapital Network.
In 2021, some of Temasek’s fintech portfolio companies listed on stock exchanges, including Indian digital insurance marketplace PolicyBazaar, US payments and software company Flywire, US lending platform Blend and US payments company AvidXchange.
Ranked among the top ten investors in the world, Singapore’s Temasek invests in assets aligned with four structural trends that shape its long-term portfolio construction, namely digitization, sustainable lifestyles, future consumption and longevity. It follows a bottom-up investment approach and focuses on assets that are likely to provide consistent returns over the long term.
Temasek’s portfolio crossed the S$400 billion threshold for the first time in March 2022, increasing by S$22 billion from the previous financial year ended March 2021, according to the firm’s annual portfolio performance figures, released on 12 July 2022.
The value of unlisted assets in Temasek’s portfolio rose fourfold to S$210 billion in the financial year ending March 31, 2022, from S$53 billion a decade ago. Unlisted assets took over listed assets for the first time, making up 52% of Temasek’s portfolio.
Temasek net portfolio value since inception, Source: Temasek
Featured Image Credit: Edited from Unsplash
