Financial apps are proliferating across Southeast Asia, making things like bookkeeping, or securing an online loan easier. But this means fintechs need access to large amounts of data that they can use to verify customer identity, creditworthiness, or aggregate information from online accounts. Brick wants to simplify the process with a suite of APIs that connects financial apps to “hyper-local” sources of data, including banks, mobile wallets, and telecoms. Founded in 2020 by Tan and CTO Deepak Malhotra, Brick now has more than 50 paying clients and supports more than 13 million API calls and almost one million consumers a month. Tan was an early employee at Aspire, the neobank, while Malhotra was co-founder and CTO of Indian neobank Slice. Brick’s 25 data partners include some of Indonesia’s largest banks, moved away a bit from the focus on just banking because of the local landscape and huge unbanked/ underbanked population in Indonesia and Southeast Asia. Only 25% of adults regularly use a bank account in Indonesia expanded to covering mobile wallets, e-commerce, telcos, and government social security data, which has proven to be very popular.
Brick’s APIs include Brick Data, Brick Verification and Brick Payments, which can enable an end-to-end process for online loans, including verifying user identity, underwriting, and making sure that funds are disbursed into the right bank account. Many of its customers were online lending providers, but it has since expanded into new verticals. Its second most popular vertical are personal financial management apps, where its APIs powers the budgeting function. Its third-largest vertical are bookkeeping, and accounting apps used by businesses. Other customers include investment firms, banks, and some of Indonesia’s largest conglomerates, including Sinarmas Group and Astra Financial.