{"id":266523,"date":"2026-07-31T10:57:23","date_gmt":"2026-07-31T02:57:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.grab.com\/sg\/?post_type=editorial&p=266523"},"modified":"2026-07-31T10:57:23","modified_gmt":"2026-07-31T02:57:23","slug":"watch-cfo-peter-oey-reveals-the-levers-behind-grabs-superapp-flywheel","status":"publish","type":"editorial","link":"https:\/\/www.grab.com\/sg\/inside-grab\/stories\/watch-cfo-peter-oey-reveals-the-levers-behind-grabs-superapp-flywheel\/","title":{"rendered":"[Watch]: CFO Peter Oey reveals the levers behind Grab\u2019s superapp flywheel"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t

Grab CFO Peter Oey joined The Intrinsic Value Podcast to speak about Grab\u2019s superapp flywheel and ecosystem growth drivers. The Intrinsic Value Podcast is hosted by Shawn O\u2019 Malley and Daniel Mahnke to help everyday investors learn about companies and inform their personal investment decisions.\u00a0<\/p>

Peter\u2019s conversation with Shawn and Daniel covered Grab\u2019s evolution from a local ride-hailing app to becoming critical infrastructure in Southeast Asia, as well as how Grab\u2019s leaders led the business to become profitable.<\/p>

Peter\u2019s full interview is available on Youtube<\/a>. It supplements the deep-dive about Grab\u2019s business conducted separately by Shawn and Daniel which you can find on Apple<\/a> and Spotify.<\/a><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t
<\/div>\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t

When global tech giants look at emerging markets, they often assume that a playbook built in cities like San Francisco or London can be scaled up across the globe. However, when it came to winning Southeast Asia\u2019s ride-hailing market, it became obvious that global players did not hold the upper hand.\u00a0<\/p>

Grab\u2019s Chief Financial Officer, Peter Oey, pulled back the curtain on how Grab\u2019s hyper-local approach laid the groundwork for Southeast Asia\u2019s leading superapp ecosystem in his interview for The Intrinsic Value Podcast.<\/p>

How understanding local realities beats global scale<\/h5>

In 2013, Uber arrived in Southeast Asia with plenty of capital and a globally recognised brand. Going head-to-head with the company in the battle for market share was a turning point for Grab.\u00a0<\/p>

\u201cIn Southeast Asia at that time, credit card penetration was in the low single digits,\u201d Oey explains. Whether in Jakarta, Manila, or Bangkok\u2014people were primarily transacting in cash. Meanwhile, \u201cyou could only use an Uber with credit cards.\u201c<\/p>

So, one of Grab\u2019s solutions to win in the region was to invest in building or partnering with local digital wallets in each of its operating markets. Grab doubled down on offering services tailored for the realities of everyday life in the region, which ultimately turned into its advantage.\u00a0<\/p>

Grab operates in 8 countries and 900 cities across Southeast Asia. It is a fragmented region of enormous diversity; a fabric of different cultures, regulatory regimes, and economic realities.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>

\u201cIf you think about Southeast Asia, there are over 700 million people, thousands of cities, thousands of languages spoken. We came in with a lens that required us to make our business hyper-local to every city.\u201d<\/p>

One way in which Grab continues to live this philosophy is through its approach to driver recruitment. In each city, \u201cwe set up driver centers, we had locals doing all the recruiting,\u201d says Oey.\u00a0<\/p>

Understanding how to effectively work with local regulators also became a key advantage for Grab. Grab became a partner to local governments by collaborating to solve the same problems, \u201cwhether that\u2019s transportation in those cities, or food quality,\u201d says Oey.<\/p>

These early investments into localized digital infrastructure, relationships with local governments, and recruiting local talent, laid the foundations for what is now Grab\u2019s superapp ecosystem, spanning financial services, rides, food, grocery, and more, across Southeast Asia.<\/p>

Data: the motor of Grab\u2019s fintech business<\/h5>

The range diversity of its services and scale of its user base today gives Grab a unique vantage point when it comes to understanding consumer behaviour in Southeast Asia. Grab processes some 10 million transactions a day.\u00a0<\/p>

\u201cWhat is unique about a superapp is the ability to collect data points,\u201d Oey explains. \u201cIf you know someone is taking a ride to a restaurant or ordering a meal, you get a data point. This tells you, for example, whether they like street food, or upmarket food. This data point allows you to try to upsell this person. Or you could try to nudge them toward a Thai food delivery because they just went to a Thai restaurant.\u201d<\/p>

What\u2019s more, Grab\u2019s ecosystem data insights extend beyond consumer behaviour. From a driver’s daily earnings and their efficiency on the road, to a merchant\u2019s real-time sales, this trove of data unlocks a range of opportunities for Grab, for instance, offering tailor-made loans.\u00a0<\/p>

Many driver- and merchant partners are unable to secure loans from traditional banking institutions because they lack a formal credit history. But Grab built proprietary AI and machine learning credit scoring models that harness user data to gauge their ability to repay loans, lowering the credit risk for Grab.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"parent":180237,"menu_order":0,"template":"grab21-default","acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grab.com\/sg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/editorial\/266523"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grab.com\/sg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/editorial"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grab.com\/sg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/editorial"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"https:\/\/www.grab.com\/sg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/editorial\/266523\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":266548,"href":"https:\/\/www.grab.com\/sg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/editorial\/266523\/revisions\/266548"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grab.com\/sg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/editorial\/180237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grab.com\/sg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=266523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}