Fave, Southeast Asian fintech platform providing QR payments and loyalty cashback to restaurant and retailers, has announced a strategic partnership and investment from Pine Labs, Asia’s digital payments and merchant commerce platform.

The partnership will see Fave’s QR code become interoperable and integrated with Pine Lab’s terminals, enabling a single and seamless platform for digital payments and loyalty solutions in Southeast Asia.

Furthermore, Fave’s merchant payment acceptance and loyalty cashback solutions will expand into both debit and credit cards platforms via Pine Labs payment terminals.

For merchants working with Pine Labs in Southeast Asia, they will gain access to Fave’s loyalty solutions and reward their customers with cashback. In addition to that, they will get consolidation of payments and access to transparent reporting, payment reconciliation, customer insights and demographic data via access to Fave’s digital dashboard, Favebiz.

Fave’s collaboration Pine Labs is an extension of its ongoing focus on working with major banks, fintech firms and e-wallets in Singapore and Malaysia via SGQR, Paynet, and DuitNow QR to bring about customer loyalty solutions to the broader payments ecosystem. The collaboration is also crucial in furthering each company’s market positioning and value proposition in Southeast Asia.

Also Read: O2O platform Fave raises US$20M in Series B round

Fave Co-Founder and CEO Joel Neoh, said, “With digitalisation playing an increasingly critical role in the recovery of Southeast Asia’s economy, merchants recognise that they need to accelerate the development of digital solutions to ensure they remain competitive. We will work with Pine Labs to further strengthen Fave’s mission of helping merchants adapt to and digitalise in the new normal.”

Southeast Asia’s post-pandemic recovery has started with promising signs that it is underway with specific sectors such as automotive sales and F&B reporting business recovery and pent-up demand from customers.

According to research by Mastercard’s Impact Studies, there has been a notable decrease in cash usage since the start of the pandemic. The Asia Pacific region is leading the surge in digital payments with the majority of consumers believing it is the cleaner, safer way to pay. Ninety-one per cent of those surveyed reported that they are now using tap-and-go payments.

The commercial partnership between Fave and Pine Labs seeks to support this recovery.

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Image Credit: Fave

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AwanTunai, a supply chain financing services startup in Indonesia, has raised up to US$20 million, led by private debt investor Accial Capital.

Also Read: Fave raises funding from Pine Labs to expand cashless payment solutions to SMEs

The fintech startup intends to use the funds to accelerate the expansion of its wholesaler supplier financing and AwanTempo, its flagship inventory purchase financing programme that enables merchants to seize the opportunity to sell more, earn more and improve cash flow management.

For Indonesia’s 60 million micro-merchants, cash remains a mainstay of doing business. Major hurdles in lending to merchants have traditionally been a lack of data for formal credit underwriting and market fragmentation.

Founded in 2017 by Dino Setiawan, Windy Natriavi and Rama Notowidigdo, AwanTunai seeks to digitise the country’s offline, fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) and food supply chain by providing micro-merchants access to supply chain financing services.

Leveraging valuable merchant transaction data that is predictive of credit performance, AwanTunai can originate low-interest financing to this underserved and unbanked segment.

Working with wholesalers, AwanTunai serves underserved micro SMEs (‘warung’ grocery stores) with inventory ordering, digital payments, and low cost inventory purchase financing.

“Our vision is affordable financing for the millions of underserved micro businesses that employ 90 per cent of Indonesia’s workforce. We collaborate with banks and funds that understand our transaction data based risk management. Low-cost institutional capital accessing Indonesia’s vast unbanked and underbanked market is the way to achieve impact at scale,” said Dino Setiawan, CEO of AwanTunai.

In brief: Singapore’s crowd influencer marketing platform Partipost raises US$3.5M

In 2017, AwanTunai raised a US$4.3 million Series A round, led by Insignia Venture Partners and AMTD group.

Accial Capital is an impact-focused, tech-enabled investor in small business and consumer loan portfolios in Latin America and Southeast Asia.

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Image Credit: AwanTunai

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Following the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a huge debate on whether a company should focus on ramping up marketing or cutting back costs.

While some are opting for the latter, others are being more perceptive and coming up with innovative ways to engage customers during the crisis.

In an interview with e27, Marketing Director of AppsFlyer (APAC), Beverly Chen points out how marketers are using retargeting method as a popular choice to gain traffic or installs during the pandemic and some ways to measure its effectiveness.

Also known as remarketing, retargeting is a method used by marketers to keep customers hooked on to a brand after they leave a website or an app.

This can be done by showing targeted ads to users that have previously shown an interest in a brand or similar brands. Popular brands such as Instagram and Facebook are notoriously known for utilising this.

Also Read: Is virtual reality the next big marketing channel?

Measuring effectiveness

On being asked about the KPIs that can be used to measure the effectiveness of the retargeting marketing campaign, Chen notes that measuring conversions is the most effective technique to check the efficacy of a retargeting marketing campaign.

She lists down two ways to look at the type of user conversion:

1. A re-engagement is recorded when an existing app user opens the app after engaging with a retargeting campaign

2. A reinstall is recorded after a past user engages with a retargeting campaign

She concludes saying that retargeting is often looked by marketeers as “the holy grail” and can be an effective solution to shopping cart abandonment.

Retargeting trends during COVID-19

According to Chen, app marketers in APAC have the highest rate of retargeting across all verticals, compared to other regions.

“App stores have become increasingly crowded and marketers find it more difficult to gain the attention of users and drive conversions. In this scenario retargeting proves to be a reliable engagement tactic, with conversions the highest
in APAC at 36.4 per cent,” she says.

Also Read: What you need to know about digital marketing for the new normal

During a time when app usage and sessions were peaking due to the lockdown, companies are using retargeting methods to meet user expectations and keep customers engaged to avoid stagnant apps.

“Indonesia recorded a growth of 400 per cent in two weeks (from February 24 to March 3) in retargeting conversions.  However, the rates decreased considerably after ‘living with the pandemic’ became more normalised.”

Chen continues to elaborate that, according to the company’s report, shopping is one of the verticals with the highest share of retargeting.

“It has also rapidly grown by 27 per cent in the Asia Pacific,” she says.

“Finance apps also grew by 30 per year on year, reflecting the increasing popularity of this vertical in Asia-Pacific. With finance known for the diversity of solutions and high adoption rate by users, Indonesian marketers turned to owned media to ramp up their marketing with paid media to increase their emphasis on retargeting through owned channels like email, push notifications and SMS,” she continues.

In addition to finance and shopping, gaming was also the vertical that experienced significant growth during the pandemic. In fact, they are often dubbed as the winners during the global health crisis.

AppsFlyer is one of the market leaders in mobile attribution and marketing analytics that empowers marketers to grow their business and innovate with a suite of comprehensive measurement and analytics solutions. Some of the brands it works with include giants such as Grab, Agoda, eBay, and Nike.

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It seems that Elon Musk has departed from his earlier position that the Singapore government was unsupportive and unwelcoming of Tesla, if the job postings made by the company on LinkedIn is any indicator.

As per the LinkedIn post, Tesla, one of the most valuable car makers in the world, is looking to hire people to the following positions in the Singapore market — Parts Advisor, Service Advisor, Service Manager, Vehicle Readiness Specialist, and Vehicle Service Technician.

Musk, who is known for using Twitter to share his widely controversial ideas, often takes the unconventional routes when hiring candidates. In the past, he had said that candidates applying for a job in his billion-dollar company need not graduate high school.

Also Read: Ecosystem Roundup: Grab reportedly in talks for US$500M bank loan; SCB to launch food delivery service in Thailand

In a 2014 interview with German tabloid Bild, he had said: “A PhD is definitely not required, I don’t care if you even graduated high school.”

The way he identifies potential candidates is through “evidence of exceptional ability”. “If there is a track record of exceptional achievement, then it is likely that that will continue into the future,” he said.

Today, Tesla’s parent company is worth nearly US$304.6 billion, and Musk’s relentless innovation has certainly disrupted, not just the auto world but also the outer space with the mission to colonise Mars.

Hong Seh Motors, a local dealership, claims on its website that it is the only retailer of Tesla cars in Singapore, according to Straits Times but it is still yet to be confirmed.

 

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Image Credit: Unsplash

 

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Percipient funding

The story: Singapore’s digital banking technology company Percipient has raised US$5 million funding.

Investor: Silicon Valley-based VC firm Stat Zero.

Plans with the capital: To support the launch of its digital twin solution TWINNTM.

What does Percipient do?:

Founded in 2015, Percipient is a financial services digital transformation company. TWINNTM is a digital twin for financial services that enables banks and insurers choked by legacy systems to “rapidly create a lightweight, enhanced and API-ready representation of enterprise data and processes”.

By implementing the TWINNTM, AI-powered digital services, partnerships and customer experiences are realisable without retiring or rearchitecting legacy systems. Organisations can add or transition to new-age product processors, cloud platforms and fintech solutions without the high costs, disruption risks and long project cycles of big-bang migrations.

Partipost funding

The story: Partipost, a crowd influencer marketing and commerce platform in Singapore, has secured an investment of US$3.5 million.

Investors: SPH Ventures (lead), Quest Ventures, and other unnamed investors.

Plans with the funds: To further develop Partipost’s tech platform and accelerate business expansion into Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia, as well as strengthen current operations in Singapore, Indonesia and Taiwan.

What does Partipost do?:

It matches brands to influencers with the highest brand affinity to drive authentic word of mouth marketing.

With data insights collected through its in-app polls and user behaviours, Partipost’s data-centric framework crowdsources influencers with follower sizes ranging from a few hundred to millions of followers.

Driving from consumers’ familiarity and increasing trust for influencer marketing and commerce, Partipost rewards influencers for both their media reach and message impact in their curated social media content message, measured in their followers’ responses.

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Image Credit: Partipost

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