London-headquartered startup Lendable, which provides capital to emerging and frontier market fintech companies, has made its foray into the Vietnamese market with a US$10 million secured loan facility to financial services platform F88.

Established in 2013, F88, which operates a network of 525 stores across Vietnam, provides secured lending services, insurance products, utility bill payments, money transfers, and e-wallet deposits and withdrawals.

It recently received a credit rating of BBB- from Vietnamese credit rating agency Fiin Ratings. The stable outlook reflects Fiin’s expectation that F88 would continue to maintain its leading position in Vietnam’s alternative lending sector.

“F88 is aiming to disburse half a billion US dollars in 2022,” says F88 founder and CEO Phung Anh Tuan. “We are planning to use this facility to serve millions of unbanked and under-banked individuals and micro, small and medium-sized enterprises [MSMEs] in Vietnam.”

“F88’s impressive growth, robust asset quality and strong earnings profile are a testament to its leading position in Vietnam,” says Hani Ibrahim, chief investment officer at Lendable. “We look forward to this facility being the start of a close partnership with F88 in its exciting growth journey.”

The Lendable facility comes one month after Malaysia’s CIMB launched its strategic partnership with F88 to promote financial inclusion to the unserved and underserved segments across the country.

Other foreign investors have recently been taking stakes in the Vietnamese financial services market. For example, last October, Japan’s Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp (SMBC) completed its 150 billion yen (US$1.4 billion) purchase of a 49% stake in FE Credit, the consumer finance division of the VPBank, one of Vietnam’s major commercial banks. FE Credit, an established consumer finance company in Vietnam, has subsequently been renamed as VPBank SMBC Finance.

And, late last August, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group’s Bank of Ayudhya in Thailand signed a deal with Vietnam’s Saigon-Hanoi Commercial Joint Stock Bank (SHB) to totally take over SHB Finance for 5.1 billion baht (US$156 million).

Under the deal, SHB is to transfer 50% of SHB Finance’s charter capital to Bank of Ayudhya, also known as Krungsri, and will do likewise with the remaining 50% after three years when the seller and the buyer complete conditions and meet the regulatory requirements. SHB Finance’s charter capital is 1 trillion dong (US$43.5 million), all owned by Hanoi-based SHB.