Despite the artificial intelligence (AI)-related Shopee uncertainties, Maybank Investment Bank sees Sea Ltd‘s Monee well positioned to benefit from AI-driven payments while also capturing a portion of Shopee’s monetization upside.

The research house said in a note on Tuesday that AI introduces new monetization vectors for Monee across defensible financial layers.

“As agentic transactions scale, licensed wallets remain central to authorization, settlement, fraud controls, and embedded credit/buy now pay later (BNPL), supporting ShopeePay/Monee’s role as a critical execution rail,

“Sea’s early collaboration with Google on AP2 highlights potential participation in emerging agentic payment flows. Beyond payments, AI lowers advisory and servicing costs, enabling scalable small-ticket wealth products, evidenced by MariBank’s more than $1 billion money market fund and USD1-entry gold-linked trust,” said the research house.

According to Maybank, AP2 standardizes how AI agents initiate transactions but still relies on licensed wallets and settlement rails.

ShopeePay, through Monee, already controls key components — stored value balances, KYC-linked identities, merchant acceptance, and embedded credit — positioning it as a natural execution layer within emerging agentic commerce architectures.

Strategically, it noted AP2 compatibility could strengthen ShopeePay’s role as a wallet of choice, particularly in ASEAN where credit card penetration remains low and wallet-native behavior dominates.

As AI interfaces increasingly influence discovery and checkout, it opined that globally scaled agents will require trusted local payment endpoints.

“ShopeePay’s integration into agentic payment flows may accelerate adoption beyond the Shopee ecosystem, consolidating consumer usage across a wider set of online and offline payment scenarios rather than remaining tethered solely to marketplace activity,” it added.

From defensive angle, Maybank highlighted the issue of protection against AI disintermediation.

According to the research house, this evolution is economically meaningful for Sea’s digital financial services strategy.

Even if AI agents compress marketplace monetization levers, it noted payments, credit authorization, and fraud management remain structurally defensible layers.

“Expanding ShopeePay’s relevance from transaction support to ecosystem-level infrastructure preserves value capture while creating new demand vectors,

“In this context, agentic payment standards such as AP2 could act as adoption catalysts, deepening ShopeePay’s utility, reinforcing network effects, and supporting monetization durability at the Monee level,” it said.

For Maybank, Sea’s Monee business presents structural expansion opportunities beyond core payments and credit, particularly in AI-assisted wealth and investment products.

Globally, it noted platforms such as PayPal and Alipay have demonstrated that scaled payment ecosystems can successfully layer on investment and treasury products, including money market funds and low-ticket savings vehicles.

Wealthfront, Robinhood, and Nubank similarly illustrate how technology-led models enable small-balance investing by structurally lowering distribution and servicing costs, according to the research house.

“Monee to an extent has demonstrated this — 1) Monee operates the 4th largest money market fund in Singapore, which has surpassed $1 billion in asset under management (AUM) and 2) Monee recently launched Singapore’s first physical gold-linked unit trust. Users can invest starting with $1 in these funds/trusts,

“AI capabilities further accelerate this transition by compressing advisory and customer acquisition frictions,” said Maybank.

It also said that automated portfolio construction, risk profiling, and conversational interfaces materially reduce the cost-to-serve for mass-market users — a dynamic visible across digital wealth platforms and neobanks.

“This shift is particularly relevant for emerging markets, where traditional wealth management models remain inaccessible due to
high minimum balances and limited financial advisory penetration, it added.

It is noted that AI commerce has rapidly progressed from early plugin-based models focused on assisted discovery all the way to native in-chat checkout (WalmartOpenAI). OpenAI (ACP) & Google (UCP) are advancing open protocols to standardize agent-led transactions.

Adoption signals are encouraging: Adobe reported a 47 times year on year surge in generative AI-driven retail traffic, Salesforce estimated AI influenced about 20 percent of global holiday sales, while Similarweb observed ChatGPT drove 15 percent of Walmart referral traffic in Sep-2025.

“As AI interfaces move closer to checkout, they increasingly influence discovery, advertising, payments, data control & broader platform monetization layers,” said Maybank.

The research house also evaluated three scenarios for Shopee, ranging from a bear case where it risks becoming merely a logistics utility to a positive outcome where AI acts as a
gross merchandise value (GMV) capture funnel while Shopee retains its platform moats, by varying unit economics & GMV.

The scenarios differ across key AI-driven levers, including AI-sourced GMV share, agent channel fees, ad revenue migration, take-rates, corporate affairs commission (CAC) relief, and incremental technology costs.

“Based on differing value leakage or accretion assumptions across monetization layers, we estimate Shopee’s long-term margin outcomes could range between 0.6 percent and 2.8 percent, versus our base case of 2.5 percent,” said Maybank.

Incorporating potential GMV impacts under agentic commerce pathways, it sees Sea’s valuation exposure spanning a material downside of -54 percent to upside of +21 percent, highlighting asymmetric risk reward dynamics as AI interfaces increasingly influence platform economics.

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