Sea plans to spin off its fintech arm Monee into a separate IPO

Sea Limited wants to take its financial services unit public on its own, breaking off the business that now grows faster than Shopee or Garena.

Sea Limited told employees this week that it plans to pursue an initial public offering for Monee, the financial services arm formerly known as SeaMoney. That’s according to an internal memo reviewed by Reuters. Founder and CEO Forrest Li sent it on Tuesday, the ninth anniversary of Sea’s own listing on the New York Stock Exchange. Going public, he said, would give Monee the “resources and the room to go further and faster than it can today.”

That timing wasn’t an accident. Li used the anniversary to note that Sea’s quarterly revenue has grown more than 80 times since its 2017 debut, to $7.8 billion. Monee is a big reason why: its revenue climbed 70% year over year in the second quarter of 2025, to $882.8 million, according to Sea’s own filings. Its loan book expanded 90% in that same quarter, to $6.9 billion. By the end of 2025, that loan book had grown to $9.2 billion, up more than 80% year over year. Credit quality hasn’t slipped to pay for that growth: the 90-day non-performing loan ratio has held steady at around 1%.

Monee now operates across eight markets, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan and Brazil, offering mobile wallets, payment processing, consumer credit, buy-now-pay-later products and banking services. It started as a checkout tool bolted onto Shopee. It’s become something closer to a regional digital bank.

Sea’s e-commerce margins have been tightening as Shopee fights TikTok Shop and Lazada across Southeast Asia, even as Shopee’s own numbers stay strong. A standalone Monee listing would let investors value the fintech business on its own growth curve, rather than having it buried inside a conglomerate’s blended multiple. That’s the same logic that has pushed other Asian tech groups toward separating their financial arms, from Alibaba’s Ant Group attempt in 2020 to Grab’s earlier carve-out conversations. The memo also disclosed that Sea intends to launch Sea Cloud, a new AI-first enterprise platform, alongside the Monee listing push. Li framed both moves as evidence the group is no longer just an e-commerce and gaming company.

There’s a balance-sheet angle too. Raising equity capital through a Monee offering would give Sea room to pay down debt and lower its weighted average cost of capital, according to reporting on the memo. Sea took on real debt to fund Shopee’s expansion and Monee’s own lending book. A separate listing turns part of that fintech growth into fresh capital instead of more borrowing.

No valuation, listing venue, or timeline has been disclosed. Reuters’ report, based on the internal memo, doesn’t specify whether Monee would list in New York alongside its parent, in Singapore, or elsewhere. Sea hasn’t confirmed numbers publicly.

That leaves plenty of open questions for a business this size. Grab’s fintech arm and GoTo’s financial services unit in Indonesia have both drawn comparisons from analysts watching Southeast Asian digital banking. Neither has produced a standalone listing of Monee’s scale yet. If Sea pulls this off, it would likely be one of the largest tech-adjacent listings to come out of the region in years.

Sea’s stock has had a strong run in 2026, with shares climbing after both first-quarter and second-quarter results beat expectations on the back of Shopee, Garena and Monee growth together. Whether investors treat a Monee spinoff as value unlocked or as the parent giving up its best growth engine will depend entirely on the terms Sea eventually puts on the table. For now, Li’s memo answers the question of intent. It doesn’t yet answer price.

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