No such thing as a free lunch (or chocolate) - Walter de Oude reflects on Chocolate's withdrawal crisis
60/40 Podcast19 Maj 2025

No such thing as a free lunch (or chocolate) - Walter de Oude reflects on Chocolate's withdrawal crisis

Walter de Oude is the founder and CEO behind Chocolate Finance, the Singaporean fintech company that got swept up in a mass withdrawal debacle in March (check out episode 2 for more details about that!). In this episode, Walter chats with the 60/40 team about lessons learned from March, what keeps him building, and how he's cracked the most important part of any startup journey - scaling.

Hot takes of the week cover the prospects for a merged Grab/GoTo financial services platform and the demise of Skype, the OG video calling service.


Timestamps

00:00 Intros by Prashanth!

03:08 The world’s most exciting actuary?

06:10 The journey of building SingLife

14:02 How to raise $50M

16:00 The joy of building

17:10 Why the Chocolate product works

21:03 There’s no such thing as a free lunch (or chocolate)

24:20 The dark side of super scaling

27:55 What Walter would have done differently

33:00 The power of finfluencers

35:00 Where does Chocolate go from here?

37:00 Ain’t my first rodeo

39:20 Chocolate AI

41:28 Where AI will impact the financial services industry first

42:58 The joy of doing fun stuff

44:30 A blessing in disguise

46:20 Grab/GoTo - how the financial services support each other

50:34 Farewell to Skype, the end of an era


Give us feedback or nominate topics & speakers at 6040podcast@techinasia.com


60/40 is co-hosted by: Prashanth Ranganathan, Peter Bithos, and Maria Li. Special thanks to our guest, Walter de Oude of Chocolate Finance.


A podcast by Tech in Asia, a member of The Business Times.

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