Investing in Sirius Technologies:
Empowering scalable enterprise architecture for financial institutions
Since the advent of fintech, the prevailing narrative has consistently pitted traditional banks against fintech startups.
Banks are often seen as dinosaurs, grappling to adapt to evolving consumer needs. In contrast, fintech players are regarded as agile market disruptors, and these perceptions are accurate.
However, startups are not licensed banks — they cannot lend and take deposits unless they acquire a license from regulators, a relatively rare occurrence. Yet, while they face limitations disrupting the banking industry, fintechs can still be hugely powerful enablers or tools to assist traditional banks in shedding their legacy infrastructure constraints.
Rising consumer expectations and the competitive landscape force banks to accelerate digital transformation, reduce operational costs and tap into new customer segments at scale. Does this mean that banks will have to fork out hundreds of millions of dollars for a full-blown migration of their core banking system and run the risk of services failing during the shift? It’s a daunting prospect.
How can banks speed up their progress without going through a Big Bang migration? Given the multitude of “as-a-service” options available, the question arises: How many service providers should banks collaborate with, and which ones can successfully meet their requirements for scalable, cost-effective and compliant solutions?
Bangkok-based Sirius Technologies aims to tackle this significant challenge. Since its inception in 2021, the company’s solution has been deployed in various financial institutions which in turn, empowered more than 50 million users across diverse financial services applications.
Central to Sirius Technologies is Multiverse, a composable application platform that enables financial institutions to build and manage embedded finance applications throughout the entire software development cycle.
In simpler terms, Sirius Technologies helps banks extend their current setups by bridging their existing capabilities with digital goals. This allows banks to build and scale both existing and new financial products without the need for a full-scale migration. Furthermore, Sirius Technologies’ solutions are fully compatible with any pre-existing third-party integrations used by its banking clients.
To date, Sirius Technologies’ product has gained validation through its collaborations with major financial institutions in Southeast Asia and Latin America, considering challenges faced by banks in emerging markets are rather universal. It’s also not surprising that the market potential for Sirius Technologies goes beyond the banking sector, encompassing all financial institutions, including credit card companies, brokers, insurers and eventually any industry dealing with large amounts of transaction data.
“The market opportunity for Sirius Technologies’ solutions in developing markets is immense. Financial institutions, hindered by legacy IT systems, encounter resistance to digitalise due to substantial costs and logistical hurdles. Our solution offers a cost-effective modernisation path, eliminating reliance on third-party technologies while delivering the advantages of scalability,” says Sirius Technologies’ founder Jing Li.
Jing was the former lead architect at China’s first and largest digital bank, WeBank, which serves over 350 million customers today. At Sirius Technologies, he oversees a team of talented engineers across Bangkok and Shenzhen.
We are delighted to back the Sirius Technologies team in sharing their best practices in enterprise technology across Southeast Asia and Latin America.
This is made possible by our co-lead of this transaction, Integra Partners, and a strong team of co-investors including M Venture Partners and some of Thailand’s foremost fintech angel investors. We’re also happy to see South Korea’s investment community make further inroads in the region as Shinhan Ventures joined the round.
You can learn more about Sirius Technologies here.