Fingular secures US$20M debt line to bet on Malaysia’s near-prime borrowers

Fingular, the Kuala Lumpur-headquartered fintech group behind the AhaPay buy now, pay later (BNPL) service, has secured a US$20 million credit facility from Silverstreak Group, a Singapore-based private credit investor.

The money will expand Fingular’s near-prime consumer and SME financing, taking total funding for its Malaysian lending business past US$50 million. Near-prime borrowers sit just below the line banks consider safe. They have thin credit files, irregular incomes, or perhaps a missed payment in the past. They are creditworthy, just not creditworthy enough for a bank.

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This is debt, not equity, and that distinction matters. A credit facility is borrowed money that Fingular lends on at a higher rate, so the business lives or dies on the spread between what it pays Silverstreak and what its borrowers repay. Neither side disclosed pricing, tenor or covenants.

What Fingular actually sells

The Malaysian business runs conventional and Shariah-compliant versions of three products: consumer financing, micro-SME financing with terms of up to 14 months, and AhaPay. AhaPay counts more than 2,000 merchants and offers merchant BNPL and QR-linked payments. The group says its Malaysian platform has more than 2.6 million registered users. That is registered users, not active borrowers, and Fingular did not say how many people took credit in the past year.

The company also says it ranks as Malaysia’s second-largest non-bank lender by financing disbursed, behind only Shopee. It is a bold claim, it is self-reported, and Fingular provided no disbursement figures to support it.

The balance sheet numbers are more concrete. General Manager Konstantin Barabanov says paid-up capital has grown fivefold since the start of 2026, to US$37 million. He adds that the capital adequacy ratio now exceeds 25 per cent and the group has been profitable every quarter since Q4 2025. Four straight profitable quarters is a short track record in consumer credit, where loan books often look healthiest just before they age. Still, in a region where lenders spent years burning investor cash, profitability before scale is not nothing.

Fingular’s story has also changed. Earlier announcements described Fingular as a global neobank whose first Malaysian digital lending business ran under the Tambadana brand, and its then-CEO Maxim Chernuschenko named the Philippines, Indonesia and Qatar as the next expansion targets.

Today the headquarters is Kuala Lumpur and Malaysia is, in Barabanov’s words, the “priority market”. Narrowing its focus is arguably the most sensible thing a mid-sized lender can do right now. finextra

Why private credit, and why now

Silverstreak holds a Capital Markets Services licence from the Monetary Authority of Singapore. Its long-term private credit strategy lends to non-bank financial institutions across emerging Asia. It will monitor this facility continuously through SilverstreakIQ, its in-house risk analytics platform. That can be read as reassurance. It can equally be read as a lender that wants its hand near the brake.

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Chief Investment Officer Rajarajan Mohan framed the deal as backing lenders that use technology to widen financial inclusion. The bigger pattern is regional. Banks rarely lend to companies that serve customers the banks themselves turn away, and private credit has stepped into that gap. Salmon’s US$140 million bet on secured lending in the Philippines and the IFC’s US$20 million cheque into Boost’s digital lending business are recent examples of the same thing: wholesale capital flowing to whoever owns the borrower relationship.

The regulator has arrived

Fingular’s timing is not accidental. Malaysia’s Consumer Credit Act 2025 came into force on 1 March 2026, alongside a new Consumer Credit Commission, with licensing and registration requirements taking effect from 1 June. BNPL firms were given six months from June to comply with the licensing rules, which puts the deadline around the end of this year. Affordability checks under the Act are expected to weigh a borrower’s existing commitments, not just the value of a single BNPL purchase. Malaysia: A Summary of the Consumer Credit Act 2025 +2

The stakes are not small. Malaysia recorded 140.4 million BNPL transactions worth RM12 billion (roughly US$2.8 billion) in the second half of 2025, and a deputy minister has said under-30s account for about 40 per cent of BNPL use. Meanwhile, licensed moneylenders remain under the Moneylenders Act, administered by the Ministry of Housing and Local Government. A group that does both BNPL and moneylending therefore answers to two regulators. A 25 per cent capital buffer reads, in part, as a message to both. Malaysia: A Summary of the Consumer Credit Act 2025 +2

A crowded field with deep-pocketed rivals

Fingular’s own release names Shopee as Malaysia’s largest non-bank lender, and the e-commerce giant’s embedded credit has a distribution advantage no standalone player can match. Atome, Malaysia’s best-known independent BNPL brand, is being absorbed into Grab through a US$1.49 billion deal for a controlling stake. That gives a ride-hailing superapp a scaled lender to plug into its own payment rails.

On the SME side, Funding Societies has fresh backing from MDV. At the other end of the household budget, earned-wage access players like Salary Hero are pitching themselves against loan sharks, arguing that some borrowers need their own wages sooner rather than new debt.

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Fingular’s differentiators are its dual conventional and Shariah product range, its QR-linked merchant BNPL and its micro-SME loans. What it lacks is an ecosystem of its own, which is why it has leaned on partners. AhaPay struck a deal with Malaysian payment gateway Paydibs to embed instalment plans into that firm’s merchant network. paydibs

The real test

US$20 million is a modest cheque by regional standards. The more interesting question is what it is lent against. Near-prime lending is where financial inclusion and debt traps sit closest together. The same 14-month micro-loan can keep a hawker’s stall stocked, or it can carry a household through one more month it cannot afford.

Fingular says it wants to serve underserved communities with a full suite of financial services. The Consumer Credit Commission’s affordability rules will soon test that pitch in practice. Credit only counts as inclusion if borrowers can actually pay it back.

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