Grab Expands Financial Services Beyond GrabPay: Listed here are 4 What exactly you need To understand about New Investment, Loans And Payment Products

Besides using Grab for food (GrabFood), groceries (GrabMart) and transport, Grab also really wants to be part of your wallet (GrabPay) and financial life. Included in Grab's continued effort to grow their product offerings and repair to customers, they're expanding into micro-investing, consumer lending and versatile payment solutions.

Here are 4 what exactly you need to know about their new releases: AutoInvest, Consumer Third-Party Loans and Buy Now, Pay Later.

#1 Micro-Invest With AutoInvest

Micro-investing is purchasing tiny amounts. Grab's AutoInvest is really a bite-sized method of investing. Every time you spend or create a transaction (i.e. using Grab, GrabFood, GrabMart, GrabPay), additionally you top-up a small amount that goes into AutoInvest. Every time you spend, you are also investing. As the process is automated, you are building an investing habit with little additional effort.

With AutoInvest, there isn't any transaction fees to make an investment and also the minimum investment sum per transaction can be as low as $1.00. The funds are invested into actively managed portfolios by having an estimated return of 1.8% p.a. and expense ratio of 0.45% p.a. Currently, the investment partners for AutoInvest are Fullerton Fund Management and UOB Asset Management.

#2 AutoInvest Isn't a Substitute For Regular Investing

However, as AutoInvest is associated with transactions, you cannot make lump-sum investments. This means that if you have substantial savings that you wish to invest at a similar yield, you should consider a cash management account instead.

Additionally, the funds invested by AutoInvest are restricted. In order to make investments that yield higher returns or select your investments with similar digital convenience, you can look at using either a web-based brokerage or a robo advisor.

#3 Take Loans With Third-Party Institutions Through Grab

As area of the Grab eco-system, Grab is also introducing Consumer Third-Party Loans. This distribution service aims to provide quick access to loans from third parties (e.g. banks) inside the Grab platform. Grab won't offer loans directly and can behave as a platform to enable users to look for licensed loans from bank partners for their everyday borrowing needs. User may then access and securely apply for the loans directly within the app.

Full information on this particular service is going to be released later after Grab finalises their listing of bank partners. While this service makes it easier for people to consider loans to meet their cashflow needs, do remember that the possibility pitfalls of taking a loan still applies.

#4 Buy Now, Pay Later

Aptly named, Buy Now, Pay Later allows users to create an instantaneous purchase but defer the payment to a later time at 0% interest. There's two options: one for monthly instalments (PayLater instalments) and something for deferral of payment towards the following month (PayLater Postpaid).

Grab will be rolling out this feature first to some select number of users in October 2021, who'll have to develop a GrabPay Know-Your-Customer process before they could use the service. Grab plans to onboard more than 100 merchants, including beauty, fashion and furniture retailers in Singapore and Malaysia, by the end of the entire year.

While these features sound exciting, specially in the context from the Grab app, they are still while rolling out. For those who have an urgent need for services for example unsecured loans and instalment payment plans, there are pre-existing similar solutions in the market, albeit without the ultra-convenience of utilizing Grab.