The path to profit for digital banks

OF THE approximately 200 digital banks of all forms, both startups and within incumbent banks, I found only 4 that were profitable in 2019: Kakao Bank, WeBank, MYbank and Tinkoff Bank. My research showed that the first 3 had a huge benefit in the form of low cost of acquisition and activation due to their association with their parent companies (KakaoTalk, WeChat and Alibaba, respectively), which had lots of potential customers and data on which the banks could leverage.