“Can a legacy ASEAN commercial bank become the embedded-finance rail for SMEs across Southeast Asia and Greater China?”
OCBC is a 90+ year old Southeast Asian commercial bank rather than a startup. Its strategic movement in embedded finance is developer- and API-driven: the CONNECT2OCBC API Store has 200+ partners across Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Indonesia, powers ~600k daily API calls and ~US$60M in transactions, and drives an SME Embedded Financing programme now extended into Indonesia via the 2025 Ant International partnership. The bank is positioning itself as the ASEAN/Greater China embedded-finance rail rather than a client of BaaS infrastructure.