Shares of Grab Holdings traded choppily through the past week as investors continued digesting the terms of the company's $1.49 billion deal to take control of Atome Financial, the buy-now-pay-later lender owned by Advance Intelligence Group, with the stock swinging between gains and losses even as management laid out an ambitious new set of financial targets built around the acquisition.
Under the agreement, first announced last week and detailed in a regulatory filing from Grab, the company will pay $1.49 billion in cash for an initial 60% stake in Atome, including $260 million earmarked as fresh growth capital for the lender. Grab has also agreed to acquire the remaining 40% roughly two years after closing under a performance-linked framework tied to Atome's revenue and EBITDA, a structure that could ultimately value the business at between $2 billion and $4.5 billion, according to an updated summary from Stockopedia. Completion is expected by the third quarter of 2027.
Grab executives framed the deal as a shortcut past years of costly trial and error in consumer lending. "This allows us to leapfrog the timeline" for expansion into the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand, said President and Chief Operating Officer Alex Hungate, rather than "spending years developing credit models and absorbing the losses often required to refine them." Chief Financial Officer Peter Oey said the combined financial-services unit should generate $500 million in adjusted EBITDA by 2028 on more than $6 billion in combined gross loan portfolio, funded from existing cash and expected to be accretive to group earnings once the deal closes.
A Mixed Read From Analysts
Not every observer is convinced the price is cheap. Jianggan Li of Momentum Works said Grab is essentially "buying time and scale," arguing that as underwriting technology becomes increasingly commoditized across Southeast Asian consumer credit, distribution and existing customer relationships — which Atome brings in abundance, with its network of more than 30,000 merchant partners — have become the more defensible asset.
Jefferson Chen, chairman and chief executive of Advance Intelligence Group, cast the deal in more mission-driven terms, saying "everyone deserves access to responsible credit" and that the combined platforms could "close the financial inclusion gap" across a region where most consumers remain unbanked or underbanked.
The transaction still requires regulatory sign-off across the roughly five Southeast Asian markets where Grab and Atome overlap. Investors will be watching Grab's next earnings update for early evidence that the newly enlarged lending book is performing in line with the company's revised targets — and whether the market ultimately rewards the bet on distribution over Grab's own credit-model buildout.
