Two senior Grab executives have quit as the company is reorganizing a unit to stop losing money.
SINGAPORE – Two top executives at Grab Holdings’ fintech business have left, adding to other high-level departures in recent months. This is part of the Southeast Asian ride-hailing and delivery company’s plan to reorganize the group’s most important unit, which is losing money, according to two sources.
Reuters sources said Chris Yeo, who has been with Grab for almost six years and runs the payments and rewards business, and Jeffrey Goh, who runs the payments gateway business, are both leaving.
Yeo and Goh both worked at the GrabFin unit of the Grab Financial Group. GrabFin offers digital payment, financing, insurance, rewards, and wealth management services, and it is a key part of Grab’s plan to grow in the region.
Grab’s losses rose from $2.7 billion in 2020 to $3.6 billion in 2021, while its revenue went up by 44%. Investors are now interested in how the company plans to stop losing money.
Grab cut its loss by a little bit in the first quarter.
Grab’s shares have lost three-quarters of their value since it went public on Nasdaq in December after a record $40 billion merger with a blank check company. This is because tech stocks have been falling and Grab has been losing money.
One of the sources said, “Many business groups within GrabFin have been put on notice with important performance metrics.” “The goal of making money is given a lot of attention.”
The sources, who did not want to be identified because they were not allowed to speak to the media, said Yeo and Goh, the managing directors of Grab, whose biggest shareholders are SoftBank Group Corp’s Vision Fund and Uber (NYSE: UBER), are giving notice.
Their leaving and the changes at GrabFin were not known to the public before.
The departures at GrabFin come a month after Grab’s head of lending, former banker Ankur Mehrotra, quit after six years. Mehrotra was a key part of the fintech unit’s growth.
This year, one of Grab’s top tech executives left to run a cryptocurrency gaming company, and Grab’s head of insurance and wealth also left to start a new business.
Grab didn’t say anything about the departures of the executives in particular. When Reuters asked Yeo and Goh something, they didn’t answer right away.
Grab told Reuters in an email that its main goal was to grow its regional fintech ecosystem and that it saw a lot of business opportunities in Southeast Asia for all of its businesses.
It said that its country teams would now be in charge of its fintech work.
GROWTH POTENTIAL
Grab said last week that its main businesses, ride-sharing and food delivery, will get better as Southeast Asian economies recover from a drop caused by a pandemic.
Anthony Tan, the co-founder and CEO of Grab, told analysts that the company was moving toward making money by carefully managing costs.
Sources said that GrabFin was reorganizing its regional and country teams so that it could focus on making money. One of the sources said that the company was trying to cut losses in all the places it did business.
Grab is used in more than 480 cities in eight Southeast Asian countries. It has more than five million registered drivers and more than two million registered merchants. The company thinks that GFG is a business with a lot of room to grow.
GFG also includes Grab’s digital banking business in the region, which includes a joint venture in Singapore and Malaysia. This year, Grab also bought a small share of an Indonesian bank.
