🤯 How Oriente Burned $160M Trying to Bank the Unbanked

Offline growth. Flashy GTM. Then COVID hit. Data breaches followed. Here’s how to not die the same way.

Author

Admond Lee
August 03, 2025

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Hey Founders,

Welcome to The Runway Ventures — a weekly newsletter where I deep dive into failed startup stories to help you become the top 1% founder by learning from their mistakes with actionable insights.

Today’s story is about the rise and fall of one of the largest fintech companies despite raising $160 million. Let’s get to it! 🚀

Today at a Glance:

  • ☠️ 1 Failed Startup → Oriente

  • ⚠️ 2 Mistakes → Ignored data security

  • 🧠 3 Lessons Learned → Focus on online + offline distribution

  • 🔗 The Runway Insights → The 5-part cold email tactic (with 37% open rate + 7% reply rate)

  • 💰 Southeast Asia Funding Radar → SixSense raises $8.5M (Series A) to help semiconductor manufacturers predict and detect potential chip defects on production lines in real time

☠️ 1 Failed Startup: Oriente

🚀 The Rise of Oriente

🇭🇰 Founded in 2017 by 3 heavyweights — Geoffrey Prentice (co-founder of Skype), Hubert Tai (CTO of China’s Lufax), and Lawrence Chu (founder of BlackPine Private Equity) — Oriente unlocked economic potential for consumers and merchants in emerging Asia by powering mobile credit and commerce.

  • The Problem — 🏦 Millions of people in countries like the Philippines, Indonesia, and Vietnam had little to no access to credit or banking.

    • Financial inclusion in emerging Asian markets was broken as over 70% of adults were either unbanked or underbanked.

  • The Solution — 🤑 Oriente built tech-driven lending apps to offer quick loans and “Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL)” services to consumers and small businesses who couldn’t get traditional bank loans.

    • 🤖 How? By analysing alternative data (your smartphone usage, shopping patterns, and even how you filled out their application forms), their advanced machine learning models could assess creditworthiness for credit scoring.

    • 🛍️ For small merchants and mom-and-pop shops, Oriente’s platform could even offer point-of-sale financing and working capital loans.

💳 Essentially, Oriente promised “financial inclusion” — giving the unbanked a way to participate in the digital economy and build credit histories.

Their target audience?

The street vendors, small shop owners, and everyday workers whom banks wouldn't touch.

🌏 Southeast Asian markets are notoriously hard to penetrate due to fragmented demographics, culture and user behaviour.

So Oriente’s figured out a brilliant go-to-market (GTM) approach.

They partnered with big-name local conglomerates instead of going it alone.

🇵🇭 Cashalo

In the Philippines, it teamed up with JG Summit (one of the country’s largest business groups) to launch a mobile lending app called Cashalo in 2018, reaching millions of unbanked consumers.

🤳 Cashalo was marketed as providing “quick, easy, and affordable” credit for Filipinos at the tap of a button.

In its first year, Cashalo gained around 60,000 borrowers in the Philippines, and Oriente’s team across Asia swelled to over 1,200 employees (including a 200-person engineering hub in Shanghai).

🇮🇩 Finmas

Around the same time, Oriente expanded to Indonesia with a similar platform named Finmas, launched as a joint venture with the Sinar Mas group (another huge conglomerate).

Finmas started beta testing in late 2018 and was officially rolled out in early 2019 with full approval from Indonesia’s regulators (OJK) by September that year.

📈📈📈  Explosive growth

Investors liked the story. In November 2018, Oriente announced a massive $105 million initial funding round, one of the largest ever Series A raises in fintech at that time — backed by big family offices like Berjaya Group (Malaysia), JG Summit (Philippines), and Sinar Mas (Indonesia).

The company boasted of explosive growth in 2019 – 700% year-on-year — as it expanded services and acquired new users. By early 2020, Oriente’s apps had served over 5 million users and onboarded more than 1,000 merchant partners across the Philippines and Indonesia.

🇻🇳 Finizi

The founders saw this as proof that their model worked — If you give underserved communities access to credit and do it responsibly with tech and data, they will jump on it.

So Oriente even had its sights on a 3rd market, Vietnam, with a new product called Finizi. Finizi was meant to offer credit to Vietnamese consumers and small businesses, and by mid-2020 it was in beta testing (there were some delays, partly due to the COVID-19 pandemic).

🤯 COVID-19? Not a problem.

By April 2020, despite the looming COVID recession, Oriente raised another $50 million in a Series B round, led by Hong Kong property tycoon Peter Lee and even joined by tech company Wix, effectively bringing total funding to ~$160 million.

With millions of users, deep-pocketed backers, and plans to conquer Vietnam next, Oriente seemed to be at the top of its game.

Everything looked perfect. Too perfect.

📉 The Fall of Oriente

Well, Oriente’s golden moment didn’t last.

🦠 The first big plot twist was the COVID-19 pandemic. Practically overnight, the very strengths of Oriente’s model turned into weaknesses.

🧑🏻‍💻 To make matters worse, Oriente got slammed by a major data breach scandal in early 2021.

The expansion into Vietnam with the launch of Finizi? It never happened…

📌 Here’s what happened to Oriente:

❝

Our focus is to conclude strategic discussions we currently have under way. Thus we are not inclined to revisit the past several years, which have had peaks and valleys across the fintech lending industry – both regionally and globally – including Oriente.

— shared by Oriente spokesperson

💃 The Happyness (pre-COVID)

  • 2017 – 🌏 Oriente was founded in Hong Kong by Geoffrey Prentice (Skype co-founder), Hubert Tai (ex-Lufax), and Lawrence Chu, with a mission to provide digital financial services to Asia’s unbanked populations.

  • 2018

    • Jun – 🇵🇭 Launched Cashalo in the Philippines, a mobile lending app co-developed with JG Summit’s subsidiary Express Holdings. Cashalo quickly gained tens of thousands of users seeking quick, collateral-free loans.

    • Aug – 🇮🇩 Soft-launched Finmas in Indonesia (beta phase) as a joint venture with the Sinar Mas group, bringing its fintech lending model to Southeast Asia’s largest economy.

    • 23 Oct – Cashalo’s official launch event is held in Manila with VIPs, highlighting Oriente’s partnership with JG Summit and its goal of boosting financial inclusion in the Philippines.

    • 28 Nov – 💰 Raised $105 million in an initial funding round (Series A) led by family offices of Berjaya, JG Summit, Sinar Mas, and others. It’s one of the world’s largest fintech Series A rounds, fuelling further expansion.

  • 2019 – 🔥 Oriente experienced rapid growth. By year’s end, it reports 700% YoY growth, and serves about 4 million new users in 2019 alone.

    • The company hired aggressively, reaching ~1,200 staff across offices in Manila, Jakarta, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.

    • Feb — Finmas officially launched in Indonesia with a gong-strike ceremony in Jakarta.

    • Sep — Finmas secured its full business license from Indonesia’s Financial Services Authority (OJK), marking it as a fully regulated P2P lending platform.

  • 2020

    • Mar – 💰 Oriente secured a $20 million debt financing facility from Silverhorn Group, providing fresh capital to expand Cashalo’s loan book in the Philippines.

      • This came just as COVID-19 began to impact its markets.

      • ⚠️ Oriente’s offline lending business was hit hard by the pandemic. Why?

        • Suddenly, the largely offline customer acquisition strategy couldn’t operate when people were stuck at home.

        • Most borrowers were low-income folks and small businesses and hit hard by the pandemic.

        • Jobs were lost, incomes shrank, and suddenly a lot of borrowers struggled to repay their loans.

    • Apr – 💰 Announced $50 million raised in Series B led by Peter Lee of Henderson Land, with participation from Wix.com.

    • Total funding to date reached roughly $155–160 million. Oriente was beta-testing Finizi in Vietnam and planning a launch once conditions allowed.

🥵 The model showed cracks (post-COVID)

  • Feb 2021 – 🚨🕸️ Suddenly, a data breach was discovered in Cashalo: personal data of 3.3 million users was found being sold on the dark web.

    • Usernames, passwords, emails, phone numbers — a trove of personal data was being peddled by hackers (one hacker ironically named “creepxploit”) in underground forums.

    • Regulators in the Philippines probe the incident as Cashalo patched the security gap and urged users to change passwords (but the damage was done).

  • Late 2021 – 🛍️ Oriente rolled out BNPL (Buy Now, Pay Later) features in its apps (e.g. Cashalo’s “Cashacart”) to tap into the e-commerce instalment trend.

    • 😟 However, the core lending business was struggling with pandemic-driven loan defaults and slower growth.

    • But implementing BNPL wasn’t enough to save the business, especially since offering interest-free instalments can be costly without a strong capital buffer.

  • 2022 – 💸 Funding crunch and downsizing.

    • Oriente was essentially fighting on many fronts — recovering from loan losses, repairing user trust, and fending off agile new competitors — all while the investment climate was turning cold.

    • It failed to raise further major funding and started running low on cash. The company cancelled its Vietnam expansion (Finizi never officially launched).

    • It significantly scaled down Finmas in Indonesia and laid off dozens of staff, many of whom went unpaid. Operations concentrated on the Philippines as the last major market.

  • Early 2023 – ☠️ Oriente shut its Vietnam unit and kept Indonesian activities minimal, essentially retreating to one market.

    • 🤯 Another security report in March 2023 revealed the Cashalo breach had left over 5.2 million users’ data exposed (12/12/2018 — 03/27/2023) until it was finally fixed that month, compounding the company’s woes.

🤔 Today, Oriente exists in a strange state of corporate purgatory. Their main website still operates, and Cashalo still functions in the Philippines. In fact, as recently as June 2025, Cashalo secured a $75 million funding facility from Community Investment Management.

🌏 But the grand vision of Southeast Asian financial inclusion?

The revolutionary AI-powered credit scoring?

The dream of being the "Skype of fintech"?

All of that seems to be a far-fetched idea, at least for now.

Want to learn more about Oriente’s downfall?

⚠️ 2 Mistakes

Skype and Oriente co-founder Geoffrey Prentice

Mistake 1: Betting big on “offline” in an online world

🤝🏻 Oriente’s genius GTM move was its offline-first customer acquisition — using field agents in malls and stores to educate and onboard users. It made sense: many unbanked users weren’t tech-savvy.

🦠 But when COVID-19 hit, this model literally shut down overnight.

No field agents.
No onboarding.
No revenue.

While nimbler, digital-only competitors like Kredivo (Indonesia), Akulaku (Indonesia), Atome (regional), and FinAccel pivoted online, Oriente was stuck in retail lockdown.

Oriente’s own moat became a landmine as it failed to diversify early into online acquisition, and that left them brutally exposed when physical mobility froze.

Mistake 2: Ignored data security

Cashalo data breach (from a leaked database)

You can raise $160M. Build sexy ML credit scoring models. Expand to three countries.

🔐 But if you forget basic database security?

You're done.

🚨 In early 2021, Oriente’s Cashalo app leaked the personal data of over 3.3 million users — passwords, phone numbers, the works — on the dark web. It wasn’t fixed until 2023. That’s 2 years of exposed user data.

Fintech is a trust business. Once that’s gone, growth dies.

🧠 3 Lessons Learned

Finmas (Oriente’s brand name in Indonesia)

Lesson 1: Focus on online + offline distribution

If your acquisition strategy depends on one single distribution channel, you’re building a house of cards.

Oriente nailed hyperlocal GTM by partnering with conglomerates (JG Summit in PH, Sinar Mas in ID), and deploying field agents for onboarding.

Great for trust-building.

But terrible for resilience.

🌮 Key Takeaways:

  • 📈 Treat offline as your trust engine, online as your growth engine

    • Offline = onboarding, brand trust, education

    • Online = scale, automation, lower CAC

    • For example, you can use field agents or partner merchants to explain your product once — then hand users a QR code or WhatsApp link that kicks off an automated onboarding sequence.

    • In markets with low financial literacy, human trust opens the door. But digital follow-ups (chatbots, drip emails, in-app nudges) close the sale at scale.

  • 💬 Use WhatsApp as an onboarding channel

    • In Southeast Asia, WhatsApp is the default channel of communication.

    • Run WhatsApp onboarding flows where users can apply for credit, ask for support, or refer others — all without leaving chat.

    • It’s frictionless, especially for non-tech-savvy users who don’t want to download yet another app.

Lesson 2: Data protection builds trust, and trust is your competitive advantage

Data breaches are more than PR disasters. They erode user trust — the lifeblood of any financial business.

Oriente had the right tech headlines: ML credit scoring and AI-powered approval. But then they left an open database sitting around with no protection… for over 2 years.

💧 One leak. 3.3 million users exposed. Reputational damage forever.

🌮 Key Takeaways:

  • 🔐 Encrypt data at rest and in transit — always

    • Encrypt all PII fields in your database.

    • Use HTTPS + TLS for all data transfers.

    • Apply role-based access control (RBAC) — even your intern shouldn't be able to view customer KYC.

  • ✅ Do regular penetration tests (pen tests)

    • Minimally, you should do a pen test every 6 months, more frequently after major releases.

    • Toss, the Korean fintech unicorn, has a “Hack Me” bounty for anyone who finds a vulnerability — they even gamified it internally.

Lesson 3: Validate PMF in one market before conquering the continent

🌏 Oriente’s playbook was: launch PH → launch ID → prep VN → raised more.

But the fundamentals weren’t stable. Loan default rates post-COVID spiked. BNPL economics didn’t hold. And Vietnam turned out to be a regulatory maze. Yet, they still scaled up hiring and ops in Vietnam.

🌮 Key Takeaways:

  • 🤑 Don’t expand until CAC:LTV is proven and repeatable

    • Before entering Market B:

      • Is CAC stable or declining in Market A?

      • Is LTV improving with user retention, upsells, or repayments?

      • Can you replicate the acquisition funnel in a new geography without re-inventing it?

    • Kredivo, another Southeast Asian lending platform, waited years before expanding to Vietnam — only after nailing their lending + collections engine in Indonesia.

  • 🎯 Validate GTM + regulatory playbook before scaling

    • Checklist before you enter Market B:

      • Have we identified the right local partner?

      • Do we fully understand licensing requirements and risk exposure?

      • Can we localise our product fast enough without bloating our team?

    • Oriente spent months in Vietnam, only to kill the launch due to regulation and market readiness.

🔗 The Runway Insights

  • The 5-part cold email tactic (with 37% open rate + 7% reply rate) (Link)

  • How to generate millions in pipeline from in-person events (Link)

  • How to get warm intros to VCs without a network (Link)

  • 5 harsh truths of managing product feedback (Link)

  • Why we choose tasks that feel more urgency (Link)

  • Linear’s path to product-market fit (Link)

💰 Southeast Asia Funding Radar

  • SixSense raises $8.5M (Series A) to help semiconductor manufacturers predict and detect potential chip defects on production lines in real time (Link)

  • Hydroleap raises $4.75M to accelerate sustainable water technologies in APAC (Link)

  • Metaforms secures $9M (Series A) led by Peak XV to automate workflows for market research agencies (Link)

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  2. Promote your business to 18,000+ founders: Acquire high-value leads and customers for your business by getting your brand in front of highly engaged startup founders and operators in Asia.

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That’s all for today

Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed today's issue. More than that, I hope you’ve learned some actionable tips to build and grow your business.

You can always write to me by simply replying to this newsletter and we can chat.

See you again next week.

- Admond

Disclaimer: The Runway Ventures content is for informational purposes only. Unless otherwise stated, any opinions expressed above belong solely to the author.

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