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Indonesia’s fintech DANAdidik.id becomes country’s first minister-approved student loan provider

Indonesia’s Ministry of Research, Technology, and Higher Education has confirmed that it backs DANAdidik.id’s student loan service

DANAdidik.id, an education-focussed fintech from Indonesia, officially announces the support from the president of the country, Joko Widodo, through his Ministry of Research, Technology, and Higher Education.

Also Read: Go-Jek funding round aims for US$3 billion

The ministry provides its support through the program called PPBT (Perusahaan Pemula Berbasis Teknologi) or translated as Tech-based Startup program. The program is designed to back startups with funding, mentorship, and other facilities.

The program is essentially an incubator by the ministry to encourage entrepreneurship.

“All DANAdidik team welcomes the ministry’s program and we hope that more people, hopeful students can access DANAdidik’s benefit, fulfilling our mission #SemuaBisaKuliah (translated as #EverybodyCanGotoCollege),” said Nurlaila, Head of Marketing.

The ministry’s program aims to have the trust of the government, investors, and students in the student loan industry while also making sure everyone can have fair access to education without worrying about tuition fee.

Also Read: These 7 startups will be early 5G adopters under the guidance of APTG Accelerator Programme

The support through the ministry reflects the President’s mission that seeks to build student loan industry in Indonesia, announced in April last year.

DANAdidik is leveraging on crowdfunding to connect sponsor with university students under its platform. Launched in 2015, the fintech gives long term loan for four years.

Photo by MD Duran on Unsplash

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Ofo operating license suspended in Singapore

Ofo must remove all bikes from public spaces by March 13 or else risk having its operating license fully voided

Chinese bike-sharing startup Ofo has had its operating license pulled by the Singapore Land Transport Authority and all bikes must be removed from city streets by March 13, according to Channel News Asia.

Ofo runs the risk of having its license fully cancelled if it does not remove the bikes by the deadline.

It is possible Ofo may not be able to remove the bikes because two weeks ago the company fired all of its staff in Singapore, some of whom were let go over the phone. The LTA said it will remove the bikes on March 14 to prevent public clutter.

The LTA is suspending the license because it failed to comply with regulatory requirements in Singapore — specifically the proper implementation of their QR code system. This means the company was not following new rules that requires bikes to be parked within designated parking areas. Furthermore, Ofo did not reduce its fleet to below the 10,000 maximum requirement.

In mid-January, the LTA gave Ofo one month to comply with the regulations or risk suspension. The company missed the deadline.

Also Read: Bike-sharing startup Ofo terminates staffs over the phone without compensation

Ofo is struggling to stay afloat in China and the Singapore situation feels like a company that is fighting to survive domestically and thus is struggling to manage its international business interests.

Ofo is backed by Alibaba. Last December the CEO Dai Wai said his company is facing “immense cashflow problems”.

Also Read: Kick start your Echelon experience with Echelon Roadshow 2019 Singapore

Once awash in pay-per-use public bicycles, the bike-sharing bubble has popped in Singapore, highlighted by the disgraceful exit of oBike last July.

MoBike and the smaller SG Bike are the two companies left with operating licenses. MoBike appears to be benefiting from the upheaval in the Singapore market, having applied to grow its fleet in the next licensing cycle, according to The New Paper.

In China (the global bike-sharing headquarters), it looks as if MoBike has the inside track for what will be an important, disruptive and rocky year for the industry.

 

 

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3 trends that will drive Vietnam’s e-commerce sector in 2019

Online shopping games and digital payment are among some of the things Vietnam can expect


Last year, Vietnam’s e-commerce went through its most exciting year yet, starting with big funding news across the board and ending with Google and Temasek’s optimistic prediction of a 43 per cent growth from now till 2025.

This positive growth seems very likely to continue into 2019 along with that would be some interesting market movements.

Here are 3 things to expect from the Vietnamese e-commerce sector this year, according to experts from iPrice Group.

The rise of single-market merchants

According to iPrice’s data on the Vietnamese market, single-market merchants such as Tiki, Thegioididong, and Sendo.vn made several encouraging improvements in 2018 in terms of attracting both user traffic and investment.

The most impressive improvement belongs to Tiki.

Their monthly website traffic increased by a whopping 80 per cent within only six months, which took them from the fourth highest position among e-commerce websites in Vietnam to second place by December.

Similarly, Sendo.vn also grew by 55 per cent in monthly website traffic within a period of six months and maintained a healthy fifth place in Vietnam, one rank behind Thegioididong.

the most visited e-commerce platforms in Vietnam by Nov 2018

All three of these merchants also did well enough in 2018 to rank among the top 10 merchants with the highest monthly web traffic in Southeast Asia.

These positive results arrived soon after Tiki and Sendo.vn announced their success in raising new funding.

In particular, Tiki received US$44.04 million from JD.com in late 2017 while Sendo acquired US$51 million from various investors last August.

It seems that by focusing on one market and utilizing their knowledge on local shopping behaviour, single-market merchants like Tiki and Sendo.vn have a certain advantage over the multinational competitors Lazada and Shopee.

Now that they’re starting to gain access to better funding, Vietnamese single-market merchants might surprise everyone and win big in 2019.

Digital payment gaining popularity

Right in the first month of 2019, MoMo – one of the most popular digital wallets in Vietnam, announced that they had successfully closed their series C funding round.

Before that, in 2018, Moca – a local competitor, also started a partnership with GrabPay and expanded their digital payment services.

In a similar fashion, other online payment services like ZaloPay and ViettelPay have been showing signs of becoming more serious in their attempts to acquire users.

All these movements promise to make digital payment more popular with Vietnamese online shoppers.

According to Google and Temasek’s report, only 25 per cent of Vietnamese chose to use digital payment, while the rest still prefer CoD (Cash-on-delivery) for their only transactions.

Digital payment service adoption rate in SEA

While CoD helps ease the minds of customers, extra charges on CoD transactions for logistics are a problem for e-commerce merchants.

Moreover, CoD is also shown to increases the risk of product return.

Therefore, the increase in popularity of digital payment in Vietnam thanks to advocating efforts from service providers like MoMo, GrabPay, ZaloPay, etc. will bring a lot of benefits to the whole e-commerce sector in Vietnam in 2019.

Entertainment and engagement while shopping

After focusing on price-based promotion campaigns in previous years, e-commerce merchants in Vietnam have started to adopt some innovative strategies in their user acquisition efforts in 2018.

In particular, they began to provide customers with more entertainment values.

The most prominent follower of this trend must be Shopee.

For this year’s Singles Day, besides their usual promotions, Shopee also introduced several interactive games for their app users as well as a live TV show featuring some of the biggest Vietnamese pop stars, the first of its kind in Vietnam.

Shopee's live Singles Day TV Show in Vietnam

Shopee’s main competitors in Vietnam, Lazada and Tiki also created interactive games on their apps and websites.

As we can see from these programs, e-commerce merchants in Vietnam have finally realized that the most effective way for them to acquire users and keep them around is by engaging with them and making them feel more involved.

This trend will certainly become even more notable in the upcoming year.

Image Credits: amadeustx

Source: iPrice Insights

All data on the total visits on desktop and mobile web in this study were taken from global traffic figures from the respective regional sites. Insights based on SimilarWeb data.

iPrice Group is a meta-search website operating in seven countries across Southeast Asia namely in; Malaysia Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, Vietnam, and Hong Kong. Currently, iPrice compares and catalogs more than 500 million products and receives more than 15 million monthly visits across the region. iPrice currently operates three business lines: price comparison for electronics and health & beauty; product discovery for fashion and home & living; and coupons across all verticals.

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Social media hacks for improved customer acquisition

Make sure your customer service is on point!

With the advent of web-based advertising campaigns for internet companies, measuring customer acquisition metrics has become crucial for marketers everywhere.

Whether you are generating leads that bring actual revenue, or tracking consumer behaviour to improve the decision making process – analysing key parameters associated with customer acquisition can do wonders for your business

Understanding the customer acquisition cost (CAC) for your social media channels helps you assess your marketing spend, allocate a marketing budget, and determine the value proposition from conversion tracking. If you’re looking for effective ways to acquire customers online, try putting the following methods to test:

Superior social media customer service

Customers that have had an unsatisfactory experience with customer service are more inclined to take their business elsewhere. Therefore, investing in high-quality, solution-driven and attentive customer service is crucial for customer retention.

Responding to grievances and maintaining a direct line of communication with users also prevents negative publicity, especially in the digital age where word gets out fast and is never forgotten.

Once you are approached by a customer on any of your social media channels, acknowledge them, apologise for the inconvenience, and promise an estimated time-frame for resolution. Avoid being defensive and keep a professional tone even when you’re dealing with an impatient customer. Don’t try to shift the blame, and focus on escalating the issue as soon as possible.

As shown in the example below, the customer service of Victoria Bella Spa responds to its request on Facebook a customer seeking an appointment at the establishment.

Leverage the power Of LinkedIn

The majority of traffic on your platform consists of anonymous users, unless they’re specifically logging in, or identifying themselves in some form while browsing. Understanding user behaviour and creating buyer personas can be a game changer.

If you have at least the basic information about the person visiting your platform, and what they came looking for. With Leadfeeder, you can categorize your visitors according to their company’s IP addresses, by sifting through their browsing logs to get a valuable insight into what kind of websites, and portals each visitor is interested in.

What’s more? The app easily synchronises with your LinkedIn profile, to show you a list of closest connections at visiting companies, and also push all this data to your Customer Relation Management (CRM). Utilize the knowledge you obtain from Leadfeeder as a starting point for personalized, proactive engagement with new and existing customers.

Learn more about your customers

Nobody wants their identity to be reduced to a faceless individual, with an email address that invoices get sent to –  especially not the customers you do intend to do long-term business with. To understand the psyche of an average customer, you need to know more about them as a people.

This helps you identify their pain points, anticipate their needs, fill the gaps in your CRM strategy and offer customized solutions to their problems.For a quick example, connect Salesforce with Clearbit, a nifty profile enrichment tool that will scour through all possible data sources, including social media, to create a detailed profile of every customer.

Also Read: 3 trends that will drive Vietnam’s e-commerce sector in 2019

These insights can come in handy for your team for when they need personalized sales pitches that directly appeal to the customer’s interest.

Experiment With The Most Popular Promotional Tactics

Although persuasive copy and creative call-to-actions (CTA) are crucial for garnering potential customers,  you can always rely on a few tried and tested methods to promote your brand on various social media channels like LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Here are a few excellent ways that are known to work for any brand, product or service:-

Conduct engaging polls: Get instant engagement from asking people to vote on a relatively easy, but interesting questions.

Host a contest or giveaway: With an enormous virality potential, contests are a great way to attract new customers, engage with the existing ones, and increasing your post reach or followers. To get more attention to your contest, you can also create a separate tab on your page that either redirects to your website, or takes you to the contest page on Facebook itself.

For example, Eggo, a popular brand of frozen waffles in the United States, created a separate ‘Recipe Contest’ tab to their page, and featured the same under ‘Apps’.

Ask for customer input on upcoming features and services: A successful business takes  customer feedback into account while pushing out new updates, features, products and services.  Use your social media channels to improve your digital marketing strategy, by asking your customers directly about suggestions!

Lions Club International, a non-political service organization from Illinois posted a simple text update, encouraging users to making suggestions on improving club meetings.

Use hashtagsCreate a company hashtag and encourage your followers to use it. You can also capitalize on the trending hashtags in your posts to piggyback your way into ‘popular’ tweets.

KitKat created the #HaveAbreak hashtag for their campaign, urging users to take to time out from their day to enjoy a KitKat.

Also Read: Go-Jek funding round aims for US$3 billion

Post motivational images, quotes and videos: Emotionally connect with your users, by sharing an inspiring story or a few words of wisdom from the experts.

In the above example, a Facebook user puts up a motivational quote image to increase engagement.

Recognizing your most engaging users:Create a quick list of users that frequent your page more often than the others, and reward them with a small feature in a post, or grant them access to exclusive events, contests, promotions, and services.

ModCloth, an American online retailer for women’s clothing, explains what features their ‘superfans’ will get access to.

Employ paid marketing: With the new Facebook algorithm, organic reach seems to be on a decline, and you should consider investing in paid promotions on social media. Experiment with A/B split testing to determine what works the best with your target audience, and the performance of your ads.

In the above example , Jasper’s Market, an ultra-premium prepared food market uses a carousel-type Facebook ad to promote their products.

Post incentives, deals, and discounts:Nothing attracts potential customers more than a post about a well-timed sale, discount, deal, or incentive, containing appropriate call-to-action (CTA) and trackable links.

As shown above, Amazon announces a Bonus Deal with an appropriate call-to-action to drive traffic to their website.

Post more native videos:Most platforms are now giving preference to natively uploaded videos over other types of content, so hop on the video marketing trend. Familiarize yourself with the best practices, concepts, and formats to post interactive, engaging videos.

Let customers spread the word about your brand

Approximately 39 per cent of adults have admitted to posting on social media about their experience with a product, service or a brand.

Regardless of you tapping into these conversations, it’s undeniable that they’re happening and you are missing an opportunity to tap into an important emotional trigger.Use Mention to get notified every time your business is mentioned across the internet. Share customer testimonials and experiences, and let the word-of-mouth do the marketing for you.

The simple approach to keeping your customer acquisition is understanding that customer loyalty can always be improved upon by implementing an efficient CRM, marketing campaigns can be optimized to succeed by keeping tabs on what your audience responds to , and the user value can be enhanced by upgrading your product or service to make it more appealing to your customers.

Break out a spreadsheet and closely document your customer acquisition budget (pay-per-click), customer lifetime value, and direct sales generated from your efforts for each channel.

For a dramatic increase in revenue, you should aspire to a social media strategy that directly contribute to conversions by bringing in new customers, and produces interesting content to engage the existing users.

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Blockchain is paving the way for something new: Smart Companies

Smart Companies are globally-connected and blockchain-compatible companies with their own legal identity

The focus of most companies in the blockchain space is to empower users and give them a level of autonomy that they can’t find in centralised systems (formal institutions such as banks, for example).

A key part of the move for empowerment is to reward users for their contributions within the blockchain system.

Every company has tried to implement a form of rewards system, and while these systems may differ, the goal is the same — to give users a reward that empowers them financially.

Credits given within the blockchain system hold monetary value – or a value that is essentially equivalent.

These rewards can be used within a particular blockchain-linked industry or they can be exchanged for money.

The idea is to give users a strong incentive to continue with blockchain technology.

There are a few obstacles, however, that need to be dealt with in order for users to fully benefit.

With the growing developments in the blockchain space, and with the decentralised nature of blockchain, it is important that businesses ensure that they are in compliance with Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti Money Laundering (AML) regulations.

KYC is the process where a business verifies the identity of its clients and assesses potential risks of illegal intentions for the business relationship.

These are regulations that ensure that criminal activity is prevented, and transactions can occur securely and confidently.

In order for any financial institutions, regulated industries, merchants and/or service providers to run in any industry, they need to be in compliance with these regulations.

The same goes for many businesses in the blockchain space.

Companies are working their hardest to ensure that they follow these rules, but their implementation of these standards is very costly and has led to a major inconvenience for users, leading to a high drop-off rate in consumer onboarding.

In order for users of regulated blockchain applications to use a company’s services or purchase products, they typically will need to fulfil the KYC requirements.

For every application they make use of, they have to fill in the same details which very time consuming and cumbersome.

To deal with these gaps, one major field of interest among blockchain companies is identity verification, and this is one focus of platforms like Blockpass, which focuses on practical solutions in dealing with KYC.

A mobile approach to identity

The user-focused, user-controlled mobile identity application designed for smooth and immediate access to regulated services.

In its initial iteration, Blockpass is a KYC and AML application-as-a-service.

Its aim is to solve the current KYC problem that is present in the blockchain system and bring the blockchain industry into the mainstream with streamlined identity verification services.

Also read: Blockchain companies need to strengthen brand credibility for sake of ecosystem

Users can establish, verify, store and manage their identities while still maintaining full control over all personal data involved – something that plays well with current privacy regimes like the European GDPR and other regulations across Southeast Asia and beyond.

With an initial focus on human identity, such platforms provide a reliable and cost-effective KYC and AML services for regulated industries, merchants and service providers of all types. This means that the process of complying with these regulations will become easier for both users and companies.

Beyond transforming the way KYC and AML verification, a blockchain-based approach can also offer an opportunity for other companies to leverage the advantage of next-level technologies through API-based verification solutions.

It’s essentially a plug-and-play means to do KYC and verification without the need to build an entirely new solution from ground-up.

Mainstreaming the “Smart Company”

One concept being introduced into the mainstream is the idea of the “Smart Company”, which a startup called Korporatio is focusing on.

Simply put, Smart Companies are globally-connected and blockchain-compatible companies with their own legal identity.

Korporatio’s service creates legally recognised trading entities which can own assets and capital, and employ people – all through a blockchain approach.

Using smart contracts and blockchain technology, the platform is already changing the way that businesses start up and operate by removing the bureaucracy and red tape that often hampers progress.

The solution integrates with Blockpass’ KYC verification process, thus leading to a seamless and compliant user onboarding for new users.

With a tokenised approach, users also get benefits in the form of tokens as an incentive for signing up during a limited time.

Similar blockchain companies that are employing this KYC compliance solution include Infinito, GoSecurity and DSTOQ – all with focus on security, privacy, and ease of use.

Also read: Blockchain-based e-KYC platform claims the throne at Binar Academy and Tokopedia’s Hack of Thrones

The long-term goal: A seamless blockchain ecosystem

With all the new and different blockchain solutions being launched of late, the main goal is perhaps gearing toward a seamlessly functioning blockchain ecosystem that will allow more inclusiveness for users across the globe for individuals, businesses, or other organisations.

With secure verification, users will be able to participate in the ecosystem knowing that their information is secure, while being financially empowered at the same time.

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