Shefa Capital has partnered with V Capital Investments to lead the Series C PRE IPO US$100m investment in Cross River Bank (CRB).
The deal was announced in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, following the 2018 round of financing led by KKR together with Battery Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Ribbit Capital and Credit Ease.
V Capital, which is headquartered in KL, also announced that it has become CRB’s strategic partner in the South East Asia region. It is also working towards the application for a Digital Bank Licence in Malaysia. This will allow V Capital to offer its fintech offerings to a larger section of the public.
V Capital chairman Tan Sri Mohamad Fuzi Harun said: “This partnership will ensure that VCI and CRB will be the leading players in the South-East Asian fintech ecosystem in the next five years.”
CRB’s main target is the US commercial banking industry. The golden pot at the end of the US rainbow, reckons CRB, is the roughly 5,000 commercial banks which generated around US$250bn in annual revenue in 2019.
CRB’s pitch is pretty straightforward. It said that it has built a modular approach that provides its consumers, including fintech companies and others such as Amazon, Google, Uber and Coinbase, with access to the digital payment services, digital lending options and digital deposits services.
CRB is said to be setting itself up for an IPO in the US next year. Ring that bell.
