Day: January 27, 2020

When you’re planning to expand your startup abroad, the “where” will determine the “how”. Numerous factors will help you make the right decision.

Some will be related to your product. Others will be about the differences between your home and the target markets. 

For instance, if you sell physical products, you’ll need to have shipping costs in mind. But, regardless of whether that’s the case, it will be crucial for you to understand whether there’s an untapped need in your target market that you could fulfill.

And localisation is always key for a successful expansion, so you’ll always need a deep understanding of regulatory, linguistic and cultural differences.

The Caribbean might not be the first region to come to your mind, but that doesn’t mean that it has nothing to offer. In this post, we’ll take a look at five reasons why you should consider doing business in the Caribbean.

Plenty of room for innovation

In this region, governments, NGOs and private enterprises are joining forces to, for instance, guarantee better telecommunications. 

Technological progress is arriving at the Caribbean with a delay, which gives us an opportunity to accelerate this process while growing our business. For example, it’s worth mentioning that local players are mostly lagging behind in disciplines like digital marketing and web development.

Also Read: Why startups need to localise to expand overseas successfully

In the Caribbean, you’ll have an impressive competitive advantage just by guaranteeing the quality you normally deliver to clients in your home country. 

Social entrepreneurship

Understanding your target region’s entrepreneurial ecosystem is key to make the strategic partnerships that drive good business.

In a 2016 paper about social entrepreneurship in Haiti, Oumar Diallo and Marie Evadie Daniel explain that “the main objective of social entrepreneurship is to solve social, economic and environmental problems for sustainable development goals.”

Effective social entrepreneurship is about understanding the business and popular cultures in the region, being aware of social and financial shortcomings, and creating growth that won’t only drive sustainable growth for your stakeholders, but also to local communities.

If you’re up for the challenge, the Caribbean not only has a solid tradition of social entrepreneurship but also solid institutional support.

Tax benefits

Expanding your company to the Caribbean might have amazing tax benefits. Some companies are even choosing to incorporate in the Cayman Islands.

The Cayman Islands is the world’s fifth finance and banking centre, and it offers companies an incredibly favourable tax climate, similar to Singapore in Southeast Asia.

Aside from lower taxes, Caribbean countries can offer you stability, fast incorporation processes and cost-effective legal counselling. 

But, incorporating offshore, while cost-effective, might dissuade some investors, who might want the transparency that they know that their local institutions guarantee. This can be fixed by having your funding agreements designed for transparency by an experienced law firm. 

The Blue Economy

“The blue economy” is defined as “[t]he economic activities that take place in the ocean, receive outputs from the ocean, and provide inputs to the ocean”.

For decades, experts have stated that the new frontier for the Caribbean’s economic growth is the ocean. And NGOs are working to help preserve the Caribbean sea, as a way of preserving the countries’ capital. More specifically, their ocean’s natural capital assets. 

During the 2015 G20 Development Working Group, several Caribbean countries expressed their desire to make policy-related moves towards a Blue Economy. Since then, organisations such as the World Bank have collaborated with governments, research institutions and private entities to lay the groundwork for a solid, sustainable blue economy.

Since 2014, five National Ocean Policies have been created in the region, along with a series of institutions that make the scientific and governance-related leap to a blue economy possible.

For ocean-focused startups, the Caribbean is the place to be.

An educated, multilingual workforce

While English isn’t the official language of all Caribbean countries, you can make yourself understood while speaking English, practically anywhere you go.

With a complex, culturally diverse past, and tourism as one of their highest-grossing industries, Caribbean countries are mostly multilingual. And, with geographical proximity to Mexico and the US, comes a set of shared cultural codes. 

You’ll need to localise your message to your new audience and translate employee handbooks and other material, in order to minimise misunderstandings. But, the cultural gap you’ll have to close isn’t as wide as it would be in other countries.

Also Read: 3 ways to know if your startup is ready to go international

On the other hand, it’s worth noting that higher education is either very affordable or tuition-free in most Caribbean countries. So, by establishing a branch of your company here, you’re getting access to a culturally-aware and highly-educated workforce.

Strategically located

The region’s location is linked to one of the region’s greatest downsides: Its vulnerability to natural disasters. But it can serve as a bridge between the US and one of the most promising markets in the world: South America.

If you’re in the US, you’re nearer than you think to a whole new market with enormous innovation potential. You can go global with the help of a highly-educated and multilingual workforce, in a culture similar to your own, and your product is unlikely to get lost in a sea of competition. 

Of course, innovative startups need supportive and resourceful ecosystems to thrive. While the World Bank Group, as well as several NGOs, are starting and incentivising incubators in the region, the Caribbean ecosystem is still in its very early stages. International investors who don’t shy away from ventures in foreign economies might be your best possible partners. 

As Southeast Asian startups look to expand and grow beyond the region, the Caribbean could be a far-out but probable destination.

Instead of competing with giants in India and China which are the obvious gateways for rapid expansion, startups can use the learnings from overcoming regional diversity and slow regulatory growth here and excel in the multicultural islands of the Carribean.

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In 2018, the Indonesian economy was said to record a growth rate of 5.2 per cent, making it the highest in five years, all in spite of a slump in the rupiah and a trade imbalance. According to Oxford Business Group’s The Report: Indonesia 2019, the country’s emphasis on industrialisation and infrastructure development helped lay the foundations for continued economic growth.

According to the former Minister of Communications and Informatics Rudiantara, Indonesia still has a huge untapped market by any new business processes and that the country can take account in the fact that it has around 80 million Millennials with 65 per cent of them having access to the internet just in 2018.

“It’s more than any market in Southeast Asia and the government is ready to maintain the purchasing power of its people,” Rudiantara said during his keynote speech in Nexticorn International Summit 2019 in November last year.

So with the positive outlook on financial and overall economic power of the country and its people, online P2P lending platforms are one of the multiple types of fintech that will thrive, especially when it addresses the immediate need for financial inclusion by providing access to an underserved market, such as SMEs.

KoinWorks, an Indonesia-based P2P lending fintech startup, claims to be the P2P lending company that owned the majority of the retail lending market in the country. In 2016, the company received its operational permit from the Financial Services Authority (Otoritas Jasa Keuangan, OJK).

Also Read: Fintech startup KoinWorks acquihires Yogyakarta-based software engineering firm, adding more talents to its hundreds headcounts

In 2018, it announced a total of US$15.7 million funding led by Mandiri Capital Indonesia (MCI), with Gunung Sewu and Convergence Venture taking part.

At that time, as reported by e27, the company used the funding to focus on developing a “safe, innovative, and relevant finance platform and financial products for digital SMEs in Indonesia”, something that they have been working on for the past two years.

“Seeing that almost every SMEs have adopted the digital market, this is a market potential that KoinWorks has been focusing on. We aim to have financial inclusion in the country,” said Benedicto Haryono, Co-Founder and CEO of KoinWorks.

Combining the rapid growth of smartphone usage in Indonesia and its affordable and risk-transparent investment offer (as little as US$6.80), the company believes that it can change the public’s behaviour towards investment. KoinWorks aims to bring its existing products one step further by introducing what it called a “Super Financial App” in the near future.

Below is the edited excerpt of e27‘s conversation with Haryono:

What was the idea and consideration behind turning into Super Financial App?

With the rapid growth of technology, we’re willing to continue innovating and evolve into more than just a P2P platform, to serve the market even better and compete with other players.

The initial idea of the new evolution was to design a multifunction app that serves purposes of lending, borrowing and investment alternatives. We’re adding and developing more products gradually and present them in 2020.

How does this differ you from your competitors?

We no longer differentiate the access for borrowers and lenders; they can access diverse financial needs in one platform.

Lenders can start investing from IDR100,000 (US$7.32). The objective is to engage more millennials, who are our target market and to make sure we can provide easy access for users.

Furthermore, we also provide multiple investment alternatives with various grades to cater to lenders’ risk preferences.

What about on the lending side?

On the lending side, we focus to support digital SME both running in e-commerce or social commerce. With the latest feature, we can group the loan according to each lenders’ social interest for funding purposes, such as Woman Led, Made in Indonesia, and more.

Aside from that, we provide student loans for formal and non-formal education purposes.

We’re still the financial platform with the largest numbers of retail lenders and borrowers with almost 270,000 lenders and over 200,000 borrowers.

Due to the nature of our users and what they want, we provide the app that combines the functionalities and added products to answer the needs of our users to help them find more solutions.

How does the “Super Financial App” work?

In the current app, we don’t differentiate borrowers and lenders like we used to. They all merged into users and they can access various financial solutions in just one platform.

We have several running products, which is more than what we offered on a previous app. There are loan marketplace KoinP2P, an automation lending activity with social touch KoinRobo, and business loans up to IDR2 billion (US$146,000) KoinBisnis.

Also Read: P2P lending fintech startup KoinWorks just capped a total of US$15.7M funding

We plan to offer various range of financial products and we will present more products which make us going ‘super’ with various options.

With our current portfolio management, the new app enables users to monitor their assets and loan in the same app. We also ensure transparency with clear and detailed reporting for all activity in the apps.

What would be next for KoinWorks in terms of innovation?

Currently, we are combining retail and financial institutions on our platform. We’re evolving from P2P lending to a marketplace lending platform.

We want to present more for the users so we are working on more advanced technology, preparing more products, and designing the most in terms of appearance. We want to make sure that all of the users are satisfied and have a convenient experience.

We also will present a unified credit limit where the users are provided with a certain amount of credit limit, so the borrowers don’t have to re-apply their loans like they used to.

With more investment alternatives, we would like to be the platform that helps our users maximise their finances even better.

Any funding development or partnership that KoinWorks can disclose to us?

Aside from our past fundings that include Series A led by Mandiri Capital Indonesia, Gunung Sewu, and Convergence Ventures, Series A+ led by Quona Capital, Series B led by EV Growth & Quona Capital, and Series B2 led by Saison Capital, we have closed and in deeper talks with more local and international FI’s for collaborations.

We are also going deeper into our older partnerships and opening new industry partnerships.

Can you share with us what is your prediction of the future of the fintech industry in Indonesia and Southeast Asia?

The numbers of digital businesses are still growing rapidly. Over the past four years, the growth of e-commerce in Indonesia has increased by 500 per cent.

General Director of Informatics Applications at the Ministry of Communication and Information, Septriana Tangkary also stated that Indonesia is the 10th largest country of ‘e-commerce’ growth with a 78 per cent growth and is ranked first.

With the huge amount of Indonesian population (which is 268.2 million as per 2019), 49 per cent of the total numbers are still living in rural areas with the issue of financial access and lack of financial literacy.

Also Read: P2P lending platform KoinWorks raises US$16.5M in Series B funding round

That being said, fintech will grow to provide and could potentially be a part of the national economic infrastructure to tap those who have no access to financial services.

According to data, there is still 74 per cent of Indonesian SMEs that have yet to be served to financial access so the market is still wide open for the Indonesian fintech, especially fintech lending, to target potential SMEs. This, I believe, will affect the sustainability of the national economy where SMEs provide more than 90 per cent of the total national workforce.

With this many players running a similar fintech business, Indonesia will probably own a firm regulation for fintech. Various payment, funding, saving and investing options, basically multiple financial services will appear in more advanced technology.

As more Indonesians grow into the middle-income bracket and the population becomes more educated, they will be more financially savvy and would be willing to have a smarter way of managing their finances.

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Image Credit: KoinWorks

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This world is getting digital-faster than we could imagine. Technology is taking new shapes every day, molding according to the people’s needs, bringing us new ideas in the form of innovation. 

One such advancement seen in recent years is the digital workforce, estimated to become pretty popular among marketers in the coming time. Now, before we get started with any further discussion, let’s know some basics about a digital workforce. 

What is a digital workforce? 

The term might sound a bit like science fiction. Google about it, and you will find a myriad of people stressing the importance of a digital workforce, but, ironically, no one knows what it means exactly.

In a broader term, it refers to a team of AI and software that work along with the human employees to perform a task in a way that it requires an input of less labour and yields faster results.

Is there a difference between a bot and a digital worker?  

Though the terms might sound a bit similar, they are different in real life. Software robots or bots are task-oriented and function as directed or programmed. A digital worker, on the other hand, supplements human activity.

It draws a pattern out of the steps taken in performing a task, applies machine learning, improves from experience, and delivers better results without being programmed extensively for it.

How to grow your business 

Digital working is an amalgamation of AI, analytics, and machine learning and comes with virtual employees that, in some context, work better than their human counterparts.

They make the business processes much faster, perform automation and analytics, and accomplish IT operations smoother with very little to no human supervision. 

Any startup that introduces the digital workforce to its marketing strategies effectively leverages its employees’ work efficiency.

How to manage

As you might decipher the importance of the digital workforce in the development of a company, you might understand why it is so important to shape and manage our strategies in a way that can multiply the productivity of digital workers.

Here is what you need to do to never let your digital strategies go out of your hands:

Build a vision, not just a workplace 

You cannot suddenly transform your traditional workforce into a digital one if your business culture doesn’t support it. Having a digital workforce is, thus, not enough. You need to shape the vision and work ethic of your employees effectively. You need to bring employees of all levels on board and start working according to a digital platform beforehand.

Know AI’s limitations and bridge the gaps 

Folks often perceive AI to be more mature than it actually is. One needs to overcome this misconception for a successful business operation. Understanding the areas where AI lacks and deploying a human brain there to handle such situations can serve the purpose. 

Hire people who can employ their experience and expertise for business processes, and let AI assist them in repetitive and routine tasks via automation.

Pursue technology, don’t just embrace it 

Don’t just use technology to assist your workers, utilize it to transform the way you operate your workplace. Infusing tech developments in various areas like communication, banking, financial reporting, customer relationship management, etc. accelerates many manual operations and yields more cost-effective results for a company.

Develop a change management plan 

Recognise that change is a dominant part of your strategy. AI and automation can transform entire business operations. Thus, never overlook the downsides of your digital workforce as it can later cause disruptions in your startup. The negative consequences of digitalization can pile up and decrease your employee productivity up to a large extent.

Avoid AI biases issues 

AI Bias can creep into business practices in various ways and can lead to unintended results while managing a digital workforce. These biases stem from the person coding them. This flawed data can cause the AI to behave in a biased way when performing a task.

These implicit biases may be racial, behavioural, etcetera. One must keep a strict check on their conscious and unconscious bias while training an AI to avoid any such mishap. 

Say yes to BYOD 

The productivity of an employee escalates faster when they get to work on the devices that they used to at home. It has two advantages- one, the employees feel more familiar and work faster; two, you get to cut the cost of buying those devices for your workplace! You can also monitor their work remotely via employee monitoring tools like EmpMonitor, Task Doctor, Monitask, etcetera.

Establish a strong protocol for governance 

Governance is very crucial at any digital workplace as it involves AI and software with very little intelligence of its own. Companies must centralise their workflow management and surveillance. There should be a single place for the visibility of entire locations and systems. This way, you can identify disruptions fairly quickly and deploy fixes for the issue fairly quickly.

Recognise the importance of communication 

It is one of the most crucial, yet most ignored skills by capitalists. Digitalisation doesn’t imply to eradicating the need to communicate. 

The digital market comes with a lot of challenges, and the employees need to maintain sound communication to overcome all that. Data can never survive in the absence of knowledge. Focus on establishing a stable communication to bring out more innovation and productivity over time. 

Learn at the moment 

Hiring people for their skills is clever unless you find them unable to adapt to upcoming trends and new technologies. The digital is continually evolving, and one must know how to learn faster to keep up with its pace. As an employer, not only should you look for such individuals, but also develop this ability yourself. 

Let loose 

Employees today are more concerned about their flexible shifts than they are for their job titles- it’s a fact. The usual methods of management don’t work when going digital. Many tools have made communication and engagement more easygoing. 

Utilise them to let your employees participate in decision-making processes, focus more on the number of tasks each of them performed instead of counting the working hours, monitor their growth, and so on.

Know what works and what doesn’t 

As already stated above, traditional strategies don’t walk the digital path. It doesn’t matter if you graduated from Oxford University or a local one, you may never succeed in the online market if you don’t focus on micro-management. Introducing new and upcoming technologies is not enough in an online workforce. You first need to understand what leads to conversions and what drives sales.

Wrapping it up 

AI and software may be matured enough for your everyday technology, but they don’t possess the capability to substitute human intellect and intelligence. Digital workers carry the potential to effectively reduce your mental and physical labour up to a large extent. Yet, they come with some limitations that you need to deal with for the best results at your workplace. 

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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing contributions from the community. Become a thought leader in the community and share your opinions or ideas and earn a byline by submitting a post.

Join our e27 Telegram group, or like the e27 Facebook page.

Image Credit: Hannah Wei on Unsplash

The post 11 tips for managing the digital workforce of your startup appeared first on e27.

 

Malaysia-based e-commerce and logistics service provider Epost has closed US$700,000 in seed funding according to a press statement. Vynn Capital, an early-stage venture capital from Kuala Lumpur, is leading the round.

The newly raised capital will be used by the company to expand business operations in Southeast Asia, acquire talents, and enhance marketing efforts.

Founded in Eastern Malaysia back in 2018, Epost has developed an online platform that serves the logistics services where businesses can connect with domestic and international customers. Its current customers include Airbnb operators, bubble tea shop businesses, pet shop businesses, supermarkets, gyms and fitness centres, traditional mom-and-pop storefronts, etcetera.

Epost also stated that it has also been rapidly growing with operations in seven Southeast Asian countries, including Malaysia, China, Singapore, Vietnam, the Philippines and Brunei. It serves five online marketplaces with 13 e-fulfilment warehouses located at key locations throughout.

“In Southeast Asia, the e-commerce logistics industry has plenty of room for growth, especially in services that enable connectivity across national borders. With Epost, we hope to transform the industry and create more value to all players throughout the e-commerce value chain with Epost’s solutions and technology,” said Tobin Ng, co-founder of Epost.

Also Read: Logistics is finally evolving and ecommerce is the culprit, a fireside chat at Echelon Asia Summit 2017

Ng also told e27 that the Indonesian logistics market will be getting more support from the government. Unlike Vietnam, where most transactions happen to be cross border, the Indonesian government is boosting the local market by limiting the number of imported goods that can come in the region.

“The opportunities in cross-border e-commerce are tremendous. In addition to creating greater activity between markets, it also enables smaller merchants and individual consumers to tap into new revenue streams and better service. This fits into our view that eventually there will be convergence—between markets, industries, and sectors—leading up to a better ecosystem for each economy in the region,” added Victor Chua, Managing Partner at Vynn Capital.

“With our investment in Epost, it represents one of the first venture capital investments in the Borneo region and we believe that there will be more quality startups and founders coming out of the Sabah, Sarawak and Kalimantan region as a new potential business market,” he said.

As an island with territories belonging to three countries, Borneo has plenty of potentials.

The startup ecosystem in Brunei is blossoming with players such as Memori and Agrome raising funding rounds. Singapore-based multi-family office and digital consulting group Golden Equator has announced its expansion into Brunei with the launch of Golden Equator Wealth (GEW), Golden Equator Consulting (GECo), and SPECTRUM in the country.

Also Read: Indonesian logistics tech startup Waresix adds US$11M more to its war chest

In Indonesia’s side of the island, the country is currently preparing to set up a new capital city in the province of East Kalimantan. Regional tech giants such as Grab and its investor SoftBank have expressed interest to invest in projects in the new capital.

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Image Credit: chuttersnap

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Plenty has been written on venture capital (VC), private equity (PE) and mergers & acquisitions (M&A) as subsets of the financial industry. Despite the extensive coverage the concept of deal flow (sometimes written as dealflow or even deal-flow) remains vaguely formalised – partly due to lack of coverage, and partly due to the fluidity of the concept itself. Then, what exactly is a “deal flow”? Why is it important to investors; GPs, family offices, and business angels alike?

Key definitions
Simply defined, a deal flow is the total amount of investment opportunities a company has, as per the consensus in definition from Wikipedia, Investopedia, and NASDAQ. Some pages don’t even define the term, even though they recognise its usage. Google Search’s own smart definition follows the same line as can be seen from the pic below.

But that is still not clear enough. What is a deal? Don’t all businesses involve dealing of some kind? And what is this flow? Does “flowing” imply that the deals will consistently go from one place (or phase) to the next?

Deal making
Depending on the industry, a “deal” can mean different things. For early stage venture capitalists, a deal can signify a potential startup company that has, at the very least, expressed interests in being funded by investment firms. For private equity firms, it may refer to a company with potential to be acquired of taken over. And finally, for M&A teams, this may just mean potential companies to acquire or merge with.

Also Read: RealVantage introduces co-investment platform, to allow cross-border real estate deals

You can see part of the definition dilemma here. Since investing in a company is by itself already a fluid activity that morphs throughout the evaluation and negotiation process, and that adapts to the type of activities the firms cover, there is no one single way to tell when the interests (whether mutual or not) in a company start and end.

Even though there is somewhat of a consensus on utilising the term deal flow there is much less agreement on whether the deal flow consists of deals, opportunities, cases or investment opportunities, which all are terms referring to the target company that has a potential to be invested in by the investor.

Getting to the flow
The definition dilemma is further complicated by the term “flow”. Unlike other businesses where the flow of opportunities (leads, sales leads, opportunities, etc) is scarcer, a typical investor faces a flow, and quite often an overflow, of investment opportunities causing a paradox: on the one hand each investor want to see as many deals as possible (for a classic FOMO or to build sector insight) and on the other hand most deals are clear “no-go”s causing extra clutter, headache and work creating very little value.

The problem is not only the amount of investment opportunities but also the natural complexity of the deal-making process. Depending on the investment opportunity at hand the companies can go through multiple different phases in the investment process and the negotiations can pause at any time, and very often for indefinite time. So we are optimistically aiming to steady deal flow, but in reality it’s more a long and winding road with occasional pit stops and u-turns.

Companies who are in the business of selling have a big variety of CRM-systems to choose from, but investing is not selling. And what can be a great system to support selling is most likely less so for running investments. That’s probably one of the main reasons many investors still rely on spreadsheets to keep track of their deal opportunities.

Also Read: Indonesian legal tech startup Legalku raises seed funding from UMG Idealab

Managing the deal flow
The idea of deal flow management is to ensure that investors get all the possible investment opportunities on their radar and get the best of them into their portfolio companies. Deal flow management is about finding potential companies, killing the not interesting investment opportunities as soon as possible and converting the interesting opportunities further into the deal flow and ultimately into investments quicker than the competing bidders.

Importance of deal flow management
There is one simple fact to say about deal flow management: deal flow is your lifeblood and it has to be managed properly. Generally speaking, the more investment opportunities you are exposed to and the more structured data you have on them, the better-informed decisions you can make. However, since nobody likes data entry unless there’s an immediate benefit, this often gets neglected causing a lot of extra hassle further down the road.

Bartosz Jakubowski – a VC in Paris, in one very well-written piece, agrees that although the concept of “deal flow” is sometimes too flexible to be useful, the more deals one VC can source and the higher quality these deals are, the higher returns the firm can drive for their LPs. Jakubowski also takes an interesting view on deal flow, thinking it as a funnel of leads, which is visualised in the pic below.

This sentiment is further confirmed by Dave McClure from 500 Startups, in “99 VC Problems” and Hunter Walk, in “You Lose 100% of the Deals You Don’t See”. Simply put, the more exposure, the better and quicker capital utilisation, less costs and more returns.

Also Read: Fashion tech startup Zilingo acquires software company nCinga Innovations for US$15.5M in cash, stock deal

The concept of “proprietary deal flow” is given fair treatment by Gil Dibner and Mark Suster, both important figures in the VC scene. The common perception is that some high-quality deals are made in exclusivity, and the more access to these deals the investors have, the better investments they will have in their portfolio. This, in turn, will generate higher returns to LPs, build firms’ reputation, and expand the proprietary deal flow, going full circle and creating a positive feedback loop.

Conclusion
In brief, deal flow can be summed up as the funnel of investment opportunities. The larger the funnel, the more can come out at the end – in this case, more profitable investments to make. The real outcome is related to the efficiency and quality of the investor’s deal flow management process, which is what we will deal with in our next posts. Tune in!

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The article was syndicated from nfinitiv and first published on Zapflow.

Image Credit: Frank Busch on Unsplash

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