WeLab, a leading pan-Asia fintech platform, and Google today announced an AI-focus partnership to revolutionize digital banking in the region, and advance WeLab’s goal of delivering AI-powered financial services to 500 million users by 2032.
The collaboration will involve WeLab leveraging Google's advanced AI models and agents to rapidly accelerate every facet of its business—from optimizing core operations and innovating product design to boosting the efficiency of its marketing strategies—solidifying WeLab's position as a technology leader in Asia Pacific.
WeLab will also leverage Google Cloud’s infrastructure and AI solutions to underpin its regional growth strategy as one of its preferred cloud partners. Doing so will also allow WeLab to roll out its AI-powered solutions to new geographical markets quickly, giving it a vital edge in innovation over incumbent competitors. To date, WeLab has already successfully established its business on Google Cloud in Indonesia, enabling WeLab to rapidly scale with performance, compliance, and security. This milestone serves as a blueprint to support WeLab’s broader regional growth strategy across Asia.
“Our AI vision at WeLab is to enhance the adoption and diffusion of AI technology to amplify human potential. Our early efforts have already shown tangible benefits, based on our internal data, we estimate to deliver an impressive 42.4% efficiency gain for WeLab in the next five years. By partnering with Google, we can leverage its advanced AI and agentic capabilities to further accelerate adoption, explore new use cases, and deploy tools faster across our business ‒ empowering our teams to focus on higher-value analytical and creative work, driving cost savings, and ultimately delivering even greater value for our customers,” said Simon Loong, Founder and Group CEO of WeLab.
AI agents for wide-ranging efficiency dividends
Under this collaboration, WeLab will deploy AI agents built with Google Cloud’s capabilities to accelerate time to value across a range of areas, starting with an internal AI Investment Research Agent that employees can consult for near-instant investment insights drawn from a combination of external trusted data sources as well as WeLab’s internal data. WeLab’s AI Research Agent will be built with Gemini models on Vertex AI and Google’s Agent Development Kit (ADK) to ensure agents work seamlessly and precisely with one another.
Hyper-personalization for wealth management
WeLab’s financial solutions will increasingly tap Google’s AI models to drive greater customer personalization and engagement across a range of disciplines including FX, lending, and broader wealth management.
For example, WeLab plans to develop AI agents that its customers can directly engage with for instantaneous, personalized financial insight and recommendations, democratizing access to high-quality financial research that was once limited to institutional and professional investors.
By embedding these capabilities directly into customer experiences, the partnership not only unlocks immediate innovation but also accelerates WeLab’s ability to expand into new markets, ensuring full compliance with local regulations and responsible AI frameworks, and advance its goal of creating an AI-first financial ecosystem that delivers truly personalized finance for everyone.
Modernizing marketing with AI
Google AI tools have also begun to enhance WeLab’s marketing efforts with more personalized and precise campaigns.
Recently, WeLend, a subsidiary under WeLab, launched its first-ever 100% AI-generated TV commercial using Google’s Gemini and Veo models on Vertex AI. AI is also being actively integrated across WeLab’s marketing efforts, including improving ad relevancy based on real-time user queries with AI Max for Search Campaigns, and identifying market trends and new audience personas in real time with AI-assisted insights.
Building an AI-first culture at speed
WeLab has a vision to enhance the adoption of AI technology to amplify human potential. Key to achieving this is its partnership with Google to provide comprehensive AI engineering and AI leadership support to WeLab’s employees. This will enable WeLab team members to build and hone their Google Cloud technical skills and capabilities, especially those in pertinent areas such as AI, data and security, topics through a range of workshops, hackathons, and other channels.
“AI is creating immense opportunities for Hong Kong's world-class fintech industry. We're proud to support innovators like WeLab to leverage our full AI stack as they transform their business, from building new, secure, and personalized services to powering their marketing and customer growth, and continue on its growth in Hong Kong and the Asia Pacific region,” said Michael Yue, Managing Director and General Manager, Google Hong Kong.
About WeLab
WeLab, a leading pan-Asian fintech platform, operates two digital banks as well as multiple online financial services with leading positions in Hong Kong, Mainland China, and Indonesia, with over 70 million individual users and over 700 enterprise customers. WeLab uses game-changing technology to help customers access credit, save money, and enjoy their financial journey.
Powered by proprietary risk management technology, patented privacy computing techniques, and advanced AI capabilities, WeLab offers mobile-based consumer financing solutions and digital banking services to retail individuals and technology solutions to enterprise customers.
WeLab operates in three markets under several key brands, including WeLend, and WeLab Bank in Hong Kong, various business lines in Mainland China, and Bank Saqu in Indonesia.
WeLab is backed by the most renowned investors including Allianz, China Construction Bank International, International Finance Corporation, Malaysian sovereign wealth fund Khazanah Nasional Berhad, TOM Group, and Sequoia Capital.
To learn more, please visit: www.welab.co, or follow WeLab on LinkedIn and Facebook.
About Google Cloud
Google Cloud is the new way to the cloud, providing AI, infrastructure, developer, data, security, and collaboration tools built for today and tomorrow. Google Cloud offers a powerful, fully integrated and optimized AI stack with its own planet-scale infrastructure, custom-built chips, generative AI models and development platform, as well as AI-powered applications, to help organizations transform. Customers in more than 200 countries and territories turn to Google Cloud as their trusted technology partner.