19 SEP 2026 — Grab is paying US$1.49bn in cash for 60 per cent of Atome Financial, and the price of the other 40 per cent is already written into a formula.
The company said so itself. Chief executive Anthony Tan told an investor call that Atome's existing scale was "exactly why we chose to acquire rather than build this ourselves."
What Grab is buying
Atome Financial runs buy-now-pay-later lending, consumer cash loans and BNPL cards across Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand. Grab's announcement of 15 September puts it at 25 million cumulative transacted users and more than 30,000 brands in its merchant network.
Its gross loan portfolio is around US$1bn, its adjusted earnings are positive, and its gross merchandise value has grown more than ninefold in six years. The deal includes US$0.26bn of primary growth capital, and Grab is funding the whole thing from cash it already holds without touching its share buyback.
The price of the other 40 per cent
The second tranche is the unusual part. Grab will buy the remaining 40 per cent about two years after the first deal closes, at a price nobody has to negotiate then, because the formula is agreed now.
That formula weights 13.0 times annualised adjusted earnings at 75 per cent and 2.5 times annualised revenue at 25 per cent, with the resulting valuation floored at US$2.0bn and capped at US$4.5bn. At least half of it settles in cash.
Our arithmetic puts the first tranche at a valuation of roughly US$2.5bn, inside that band rather than at either end; neither company published the figure. The floor and cap exist to bracket how much the second payment can move if Atome grows fast or stalls.
Why buy rather than build
Grab has been trying to build consumer lending for years and has the licences to do it. We covered its move to majority control of Superbank in Indonesia in May, alongside its GXS banking operations in Singapore.
What Grab lacked was a buy-now-pay-later engine that worked at regional scale. Vincent Fong, chief editor of Fintech News Singapore, put the gap bluntly to Inside Retail Asia: "They don't have the well-honed BNPL engine that Atome does. They've been trying for a couple of years, but they're still falling behind players like Shopee Pay Later and Atome."
Buying gets Grab several years of underwriting history that cannot be acquired any other way. A lender's model is built on the repayment data behind it, and Atome brings both the data and the merchant distribution that produced it.
What the targets commit to
Grab put numbers on the deal rather than leaving it strategic. It expects its financial services segment to reach US$500m in adjusted earnings by 2028 and a gross loan portfolio above US$6bn, up from Atome's current US$1bn.
At group level it raised its 2028 targets to US$1.7bn in adjusted earnings and compound annual revenue growth above 30 per cent from 2025. A listed company will be measured against those commitments, which is more useful than another paragraph of deal rationale.
The market was unimpressed. CNBC reported the purchase as Grab aiming for the next level in financial services; shares fell 3.64 per cent that day, closing near a 52-week low and down roughly 40 per cent over the year.
What is not yet settled
Regulatory approval is the main obstacle. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2027, and it needs clearance in five markets whose consumer-credit rules are tightening rather than loosening.
Atome's own profitability is reported at the adjusted level only. Adjusted earnings exclude items that a lender's statutory accounts must carry, and credit provisioning is one of the line items that separates the two measures.
What this does to pricing is untested. Two of the region's largest consumer platforms now own lending books built on their own transaction data. Whether that concentration produces cheaper credit or simply a larger share of the same borrowers is still an open question.
