Grab’s rise from rideshare to superapp in Asia, with Anthony Tan

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**Anthony Tan** (1:07)
You can come out as a lion and be proud and be fierce. You're willing to chew anything in your path, but at the same time also sort of have the humility of a lamb. It's like showing love all the time and caring for your people, while at the same time holding a really high bar because you love them, because you want them to do better, because you believe that customers expect much more from us. And society wants to see many companies that have triple bottom line fail. So you got to prove to them that a triple bottom line company can not only survive but thrive.

**Bob Safian** (1:47)
That's Anthony Tan, CEO of Grab, the Southeast Asian rideshare super app that's rapidly growing from Singapore to Vietnam. As Uber expands globally, I wanted to talk to Anthony about how Grab outmaneuvered Uber in Southeast Asia, eventually acquiring its operations in the region. I also wanted to know how Grab has unexpectedly become a pioneer in AI implementation. Anthony talks about how he quote shocked the system at Grab to shift mindsets. Grab may not be a household name in the US, but it's a public company valued at over $20 billion dollars that's in many ways setting the pace for how rideshare and super apps will evolve globally, from electric vehicles and autonomous driving to interacting with local and national governments. So let's get to it. I'm Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.
I'm Bob Safian. I'm here with Anthony Tan, co-founder and CEO of Grab. Anthony, thanks for being here.

**Anthony Tan** (2:51)
It's a real honor.

**Bob Safian** (2:52)
So Grab started in 2012 as a rideshare platform. It's since grown into Southeast Asia's largest super app, providing food delivery and financial services is more.
The term super app is this increasingly popular concept.
What does super app mean to you?

**Anthony Tan** (3:14)
Well, the super app just means an app that has multiple services. If you look at how it's evolved here in Southeast Asia, we started just to solve Southeast Asian problems. For example, safety. Safety was a major issue. We wanted to make sure rides were safe for women and children. That was a real problem and we solved that. And we're now at 99.9% safety. And then we said, okay, what's next? We realized, wait, but to get drivers, you needed to lend them a phone. How do you lend them a phone? Because many of them didn't even have a smartphone. So we said, we'll start a financing business. So we have FinTech built into the Grab app.
So it was just like one service after another. And then when we said payments, we said, hey, you know, the driver became an ATM, you know, a mobile ATM and it wasn't safe for them. So we said, you know what? Let's just take out cash out of the system. The drivers have a Grab Paywallet, the customer has a Grab Paywallet. So all this just helped build more and more services on one app.

**Bob Safian** (4:25)
I was going to ask you about the Fintech stuff because like, obviously you're providing a service, but also Fintech tends to have better margins than rideshare and delivery, which are tough businesses, right? Like how much of the economics was part of the decision where like, oh, that's a gap that is valuable for us to fill.

**Anthony Tan** (4:46)
The key is two things. One, how do you create amazing data?
And two, how do you create an amazing collection, right? It's easy to lend money out. The issue is collecting it, right Bob? So as more and more services are rolled, everyday services are rolled out, more and more data is gathered. As more and more data is gathered, that data has given us an advantage to lend because we basically create a credit score across a hundred distinct data points. But it's that massive data advantage that allows us to price risk much better and to collect much better.