Asia Tech Lens

Asia Tech Lens

Asia Tech Lens
Asia Tech Lens - The Podcast
The Hard Truths Most Fintech Founders Learn Too Late | Conversation with Kelvin Teo
0:00
-1:10:34

The Hard Truths Most Fintech Founders Learn Too Late | Conversation with Kelvin Teo

From Harvard to Southeast Asia’s biggest SME lender — a masterclass in execution, expansion, and enduring the hardest years.
Asia Tech Lens's avatar
Asia Tech Lens
Nov 25, 2025

This week on Asia Tech Lens, we unpack one of Southeast Asia’s most instructive fintech stories: how Kelvin Teo built Funding Societies | Modalku into the region’s largest SME digital lender — and the painful lessons most founders only learn the hard way.

The spark was unexpected. During his time at Harvard Business School, Kelvin heard Peter Thiel argue that Asia didn’t need “more innovation,” it needed better execution. That provocation pushed Kelvin and his co-founder, Reynold Wijaya, to confront a structural financing gap no one wanted to touch.

What followed was a decade of difficult, often unglamorous work: building credit models with barely any data, engaging regulators before frameworks existed, surviving liquidity crunches and layoffs, expanding across markets with wildly different risk profiles, and learning how founder alignment becomes the decisive ingredient for long-term resilience.

Hosted by Miro Lu, this episode goes deep into what it actually takes to build a regional fintech serving millions of SMEs — not the glossy narrative, but the real operational, cultural, and emotional load behind the scenes.

💡What You’ll Learn

  • How “execution over innovation” became the founding insight

  • Why SME financing in SEA was chronically underserved

  • Building credit models in data-scarce environments

  • Surviving early shocks: liquidity crunches, layoffs, and tough calls

  • How founder alignment shapes resilience

  • Expanding across SG, ID, MY, TH, VN — the real operational cost

  • Balancing aggressive scaling with responsible risk management

  • Navigating regulators and investors across multiple jurisdictions

  • What fintech founders consistently underestimate in SEA

  • What the next decade of SME financing looks like

⏱️ In This Episode

00:00 – Opening provocation & Peter Thiel’s comment
00:34 – Why they aligned early as founders
01:41 – Entering the origin story
02:19 – The comment that sparked Funding Societies
03:10 – Studying US innovation models & scanning opportunities
04:09 – Narrowing down the fintech ideas
07:49 – Kevin’s early career and what shaped him
09:41 – Forming the co-founder relationship
11:49 – Harvard as a launching pad
12:54 – Running a startup from Boston
13:58 – Sequoia’s early engagement & the term-sheet saga
17:34 – Building credit models with limited data
21:22 – Hyper-local risk, experimentation & mitigations
22:27 – How microloans were pioneered
25:59 – Microloans, property-backed lending and product evolution
28:10 – First major shocks: bank partnerships & credibility
29:47 – Surviving the early bank relationship winter
31:24 – How the fintech landscape matured
33:11 – Profitability by country
33:43 – Lessons from M&A through CardUp acquisition
37:50 – Regional expansions: Singapore, Indonesia and Beyond
40:55 – Balancing group discipline with local autonomy
41:32 – Mission, vision & preventing Southeast Asia’s “middle-income trap”
42:45 – Surviving early shocks and hard lessons
47:25 – Retaining sanity & emotional management
49:21 – How Southeast Asian founders build support infrastructure
50:33 – Scaling responsibly vs scaling fast
52:38 – The AI frenzy & distinguishing real from “fake AI”
54:19 – Looking ahead: the next decade of SME financing
58:48 – Leadership, culture and founder resilience
01:02:21 – Advice to his younger self
01:03:48 – If Kelvin weren’t building FS
01:05:08 – The future of SME financing in Southeast Asia
01:06:58 – IPO vs trade sale
01:08:14 – Outside of work
01:09:20 – Book recommendation
01:10:15 – Closing

📚 References

People & Founders

Companies, Platforms & Brands

  • Funding Societies | Modalku — Southeast Asia’s largest SME digital finance platform — https://fundingsocieties.com

  • Carro — Online used-car marketplace in Southeast Asia — https://carro.co

  • ShopBack — Rewards & cashback platform founded by NUS Overseas Colleges alumni — https://www.shopback.com

  • Lego — Global toy company; referenced via an SME distributor client — https://www.lego.com

Consulting, Finance & Tech Firms (Kelvin’s Background & M&A)

Universities & Entrepreneurship Programs

Fintech, Banking & Ecosystem Players

Investors, VCs & Impact Capital

Tools, Hiring & Ops Mentioned

Books & Ideas Referenced

  • The Hard Thing About Hard Things — Ben Horowitz (on the brutality of startup decisions)

  • The Philosophy of Money — Classic work on money and human behaviour (title referenced)

  • “Radical Candor” & Netflix-style feedback cultures — referenced when discussing performance, culture, and how Western management ideas translate (or fail) in Southeast Asia

🎙️ About Asia Tech Lens

Produced by Perspective Media (Singapore), Asia Tech Lens explores the technology, trends, and people shaping Asia’s innovation landscape — and its global impact.

For enquiries about:

#Fintech #FundingSocieties #KelvinTeo #SMELending #SoutheastAsia #DigitalLending #FintechFounders #AsiaTechLens #FounderStories #SEAStartups

Discussion about this episode

User's avatar
© 2025 Asia Tech Lens
Start your SubstackGet the app
Substack is the home for great culture