Bangkok Bank (BB) acquires 1 per cent stake in gojek; The Indonesian tech firm now commands US$11-12B valuation; BB is the 2nd bank after SCB to own a stake in gojek; In Thailand, gojek operates under the GET brand. DealStreetAsia

Grab in talks with Prudential, AIA for fintech investment; The tech major is seeking US$300-500M for its financial services unit; Grab aims to reach agreements as early as Oct; Grab Financial Group’s pre-money valuation has been estimated at about US$2B. Reuters

Indonesian logistics-tech firm Waresix closes US$100M Series B; Investors include EV Growth, Jungle, SoftBank, EMTEK group; This round comes six months after it secured US$25.5M Series; Waresix claims it serves 250+ corporate clients, has operates 40K+ trucks and has 375 warehouses in more than 100 cities and towns across Indonesia. e27

Naver, Sea, Vertex invest in Vietnam’s Do Ventures’s US$50M fund I; The early-stage VC firm on an average will invest US$500K-US$5M each in startups; The VC looks to invest 30 startups; It will also help set up an automatic reporting system that empowers founders to understand real-time performance of the biz. e27

SoftBank wants to burn money; As an investor, it has been an enthusiastic proponent of burning cash, spending freely to back its champions in virtually every tech market-share war witnessed in Asia over recent years; The VC firm, however, is now desperate to win; It is struggling after a series of tech bets gone badly, including WeWork and Uber’s underperformed IPO. Nikkei Asia Review

Temasek’s portfolio in China exceeds Singapore home base; Financial services remains the largest sector in its portfolio at 23%, with the fund being an investor in Ant Group; Temasek’s portfolio has its largest weighting in Asia, amounting to 66% of its exposure by underlying assets; China, at 29%, and Singapore, at 24%, are the top two countries by concentration. Nikkei Asia Review

Singapore B2B cross-border payments network Thunes raises US$60M led by African VC Helios Investment; Checkout.com, Future Shape also joined; The money will fuel expansion and growth in Africa, Asia, LatAm; Thunes connects different payment players in more than 100 countries. e27

Edutech firm Edukasyon.ph extends Series A round; Investors include Alternate Ventures, French Partners, Lorinet Foundation; The education marketplace enables students to search, compare and apply to higher education institutions and online courses; Since Dec. 2019, it brought in 700 listed school partners and achieved 500K registered student users. e27

Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam the most attractive fintech hubs in SEA, says study; The combined value of all the fintech startups in SEA has reached US$108B in 2020; Indonesia and Singapore are the most valuable ecosystems, which are worth US$60B and US$35B, respectively; The two countries are also home to 9 unicorn startups each. e27

Qapita secures US$1.8M seed funding to help startups manage their cap tables, ESOPs digitally; Investors include Vulcan Capital, Koh Boon Hwee, K3 Ventures; Qapita has offices in India and Singapore, and will initially serve customers based in Singapore, India and Indonesia before expanding into other markets. e27

Funding Societies appoints GoBear co-founder Frank Stevenaar as CFO, Nihit Nirmal as CPO, Ishan Agrawal as CTO; The SME digital SME lending platform has disbursed over US$1.2B in financing across more than 2.8M loans so far; In April, it raised US$40M Series C; Its investors include Sequoia India, Softbank Ventures Asia. e27

Quest Ventures, ScaleUp Malaysia team up to scale the growth of  local startups; The deal brought in US$1M in FDI to develop startups; 24 firms shortlisted from the 2nd cohort’s applications will start the programme in Oct; As part of the partnership, the programme will invest at least US$60,250 in up to 12 of these companies. e27

Accelerating Asia announces cohort-3 startups; Each will receive US$36.5K while top performers will get US$110K; The programme has an acceptance rate of less than 2% with only eight selected from 450 applications; The accelerator-cum-investor is also approaching the final close of its current fund. e27

Why GERO is optimistic about its chance in the race for anti-ageing drug; The Singapore- and Russia-based biotech firm is developing drugs for complex diseases with a focus on anti-ageing and says it successfully demonstrate it on mice; The firm, however, says it is hard to tell what the side effects of the drug yet. e27

How startup founders can protect themselves from getting sued; The smart solution is management liability insurance, commonly referred to as D&O or directors and officers; This is an absolute essential insurance for startup founders that covers a wide array of messy lawsuits. e27

‘There is always an opportunity to be found within a crisis’: Ben Mathias of Vertex Ventures; COVID-19 forced startups to be more efficient and they realised they can still hit their business plans with far less expense, so the path to profitability is quicker. e27

App Annie co-founder Bertrand Schmitt on why he built the leading mobile analytics platform in China; In 2020, starting a tech business in the mobile analytics space in China makes sense; But 10 years ago, the situation was vastly different and it would seem almost ludicrous, given how small the market was. e27

Growing up in coastal villages, Aruna believes in empowering fishermen as the key to prosperity; The startup has established a collaborative effort with the communications and ICT ministry to provide online programme for fishermen; It has also worked with the ministry of rural and disadvantaged regions development to provide financial access to them. e27

Most APAC consumers prefer staying at home, businesses are responding; According to a Digimind study, top on the list were consumers from India (87.8%), followed by Hong Kong (78.2%), Indonesia (77.5%), Singapore (76.6%) Malaysia (71.3%), Philippines (70.3%); The report found that consumers tend to find alternative solutions that allowed them to remain at home while supplementing their past routines and fixes, including shopping, socialising, and seeking entertainment. The Star

Accelerating the demand for proptech in APAC; The pandemic has prompted more real estate companies to consider incorporating proptech into their operations; But real estate companies are still very viscous and slow. UrbanLand

Launcho Ventures sets up startup studio in Singapore; Startups will be created in-house through internal ideation as well as co-created with other founders in the region; It will inject up to US$220K into new companies; Funders will get US$2,560monthly salary. TechInAsia

Singtel unveils 5G services at pop-up retail store UNBOXED; The telco claims it demonstrated speeds of more than 1Gbps using 5G: For instance, a 2-hour HDR movie can be downloaded in just 40 seconds; 5G can also power IoT and AI, enabling real-time intelligent connectivity and analytics in-store. Singapore Business Review

Here’s the most important thing digital leaders get right; It doesn’t matter how sophisticated your tech is; If the user experience isn’t right, the investment you’ve made isn’t going to succeed; If your organisation remains focussed on operating a process rather than delivering an outcome, you’ll struggle. The Next Web

Homegrown Thai foodtech startups race to meet plant-based demand surge; While mainstream restaurant chains expand their plant-based offerings, startups in the country are also emerging to accelerate the dietary shift to more sustainable proteins. GreenQueen

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Panic buying, at-home needs, livestream shopping, and e-commerce accelerated the shopping landscape in Southeast Asia (SEA) during COVID-19. Thanks to these shopping trends, Shopback –which has recently expanded to South Korea– is able to continue running its annual mega shopping festival ShopFest from September to December this year. Yes, even amidst the pandemic.

“Many consumers look forward to the year-end shopping season as that is when brands compete to run attractive sales and promotions. However, it can be overwhelming for the consumer as more and more online retailers participate each year,” says Henry Chan, Co-Founder and CEO of ShopBack.

So, ShopBack created a unified platform to seamlessly connect these brands and consumers –at the same time help consumers cut through the noise and better navigate through the various sale events and deals. This is how ShopFest was born, as the first stop for a consumer’s online shopping journey.

The four-month-long ShopFest includes key dates such as 9.9, 11.11, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday. In order to enhance their value offering for the 20 million user base, ShopBack has added new in-app features targeted at growing conservative shoppers that are seeking out more ways to maximise their savings. These new features will help consumers make better purchasing decisions and will roll out across ShopBack’s nine markets at different times over the next year.

Rolling out new features at a time when startups are hibernating or even shutting down, is almost like music to one’s ears. Amidst global uncertainty, how could ShopBack be so sure their new features will be well received by their 20 million strong user base spread across nine countries in SEA?

In an effort to dig deeper into how ShopBack measures customer value and used customer feedback metrics to shape its product development journey, e27 speaks to Candice Ong, Chief Commercial Officer, and Justin Lee, Chief Product Officer, at ShopBack.

What we will learn in this article:

1. The essential effect: Customer behaviour during a crisis
2. Consumers show the way: Utilising customer feedback in the product development process
3. But the process goes on: Preventing analysis paralysis

The essential effect

In the earlier stages of the pandemic, there was a natural rise in the sales of essentials and groceries across the region via e-commerce. This was unsurprising as consumers were required to stay at home to effectively manage the rapid spread of COVID-19, and therefore turned to online shopping to purchase their daily necessities.

But something interesting to note is that although consumers generally reined in their spending, the idea of what a ‘need’ is shifted during this period, says Ong.

“As consumers spent more time at home, we found that they became more willing to spend on home appliances, fitness equipment, and apparel, entertainment and gaming equipment, and food delivery.”

“These were once considered ‘peripheral’ luxuries but as people were forced to stay at home, they seem to have transitioned to be part of a ‘new normal’ of spending, where spending on these categories replaced expenditure on travel and outdoor entertainment,” adds Ong.

For instance, in Singapore alone, ShopBack saw a four-time surge in orders for product categories such as fitness and electronics, while the internet services category (e.g. VPN, anti-virus) increased by around 70 times from Q1-Q2.

The trend of consumers seeking greater value and becoming more conservative in their spending only aggravated during the pandemic as cash flow became a challenge for all societies. According to a recent report by Facebook and Bain & Company, there has been a shift to value-for-money purchasing across Southeast Asia as conservatism sets in. A survey found that on average, 57 per cent of respondents cited “value” among their top purchasing considerations.

Also Read: Building great customer experience when it matters the most

“When COVID-19 hit, we quickly ramped up on building and rolling out new features to further simplify the shopping experience and help our users make better purchasing decisions. One such feature was a price comparison feature, where users can compare prices of similar items across different online stores,” says Ong.

Others included ‘Voucher’ where users can enjoy attractive discounts and cashback when they purchase vouchers from a wide variety of ShopBack’s merchant partners, both online and offline. This also helped merchants lock in sales, while users find value in the cashback from these vouchers and store credits.

And then there is ‘Challenge’ where users can complete specific tasks or challenges set by ShopBack and receive bonus cashback and other attractive rewards.

Consumers show the way

Ong shares that while these innovative value-added features were released in response to the changing shopping behaviours during COVID-19, they were based on their continued data-centric approach to understanding customer behaviour.

Users are big contributors to the ideation stage of the features that Shopback builds. Be it in-person or virtual interactions the tech and product teams take note of the candid suggestions and enhancements consumers wish to see.

“Listening to your customers is a deceivingly simple idea, yet it is often forgotten. No matter how large a business grows, we need to remember that actual human beings are behind every click, impression, and sale,“ says Ong.

In a pre-COVID-19 world, they collected user feedback through focus groups and invited users down to test the product, and they continued to do so during the pandemic via more calls and virtual meetings with users.

“Getting early anecdotes from our customers has been instrumental in shaping the roadmaps of each of our product lines,” says Lee.

Whilst all of Shopback’s products are built with user feedback in mind, the tech and product teams decide the best time to launch these features. “To do this, we need to take into consideration supply-side dynamics and the competitive landscape,” he elaborates.

When the product first goes live, it often starts as a customised version of a design sprint, he adds. And once the feature starts taking shape, it goes into the development pipeline where the team turns their attention to key areas such as operations, sales, and marketing.

The development team does keep track of a development schedule and will also organise demos and internal usability testing prior to the official launch.

The product development cycle largely depends on the size and complexity of the features. For bigger features such as the new Vouchers, the teams involved going beyond just the standard two-pizza development scrum teams.

Vouchers had to be tightly integrated with other parts of their existing product so multiple development teams were combined into a ‘taskforce’ to accomplish the mission, says Lee. And hence it took the team six weeks, including lots of late nights and weekends –from ideation to shipping the feature to production, he continues.

Also Read: A multi-disciplinary approach to product development requires collaboration

Lee stresses the power of OKRs at ShopBack to guide product development and said they were a great way to merge top-down priorities with bottom-up problem statements.

“This (OKR) method has allowed us to stay aligned across all levels on what the focus areas are –be it new features or product improvements, how we define success, and when we aim for changes to take effect,” he says.

But the process goes on …

But it just doesn’t end there. Dishing out changes to your consumer base in such fragile times is full of risks. Which is why ShopBack teams process user feedback equally minutely.

One has to be careful with data. Metrics, if identified correctly, can yield great insights but if overdone, it can lead to the common ‘analysis paralysis’ problem.

So, in addition to dashboards that help track customer responses to the newly launched features, ShopBack also collected valuable insights directly from users. “COVID-19 has not deterred our efforts in this area, our product managers and designers work hard to ring up users who are early adopters of our features to solicit feedback,” says Lee.

For newly launched features, it also helps in quickly gauging user response and re-define ways if it becomes clear that the team is heading in the wrong direction. The user research teams also disseminated email surveys to gather feedback.

Ong says, “We also created ShopBack community groups in several local markets, including Singapore so that local teams can directly engage with customers and collect their feedback. User feedback is extremely important to us, as it helps us to understand their pain points and identify the problems to solve.”

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JazzyPay, a fintech startup based in the Philippines, has raised US$500,000 in a seed round from Singaporean venture capital firm Cocoon Capital.

The company said that it will use the fresh funds for product development, to build its management team and grow its network of partner merchants across the country.

Founded in 2018, JazzyPay provides payments and invoicing solutions to consumers across Southeast Asia. It already has hundreds of partner merchants which include hospitals, schools, clinics, medical suppliers across the country. Some of them are Adventist Medical Center Manila, Adventist Hospital Santiago City, Manila Adventist College and the Dr Arturo P. Pingoy Medical Center.

According to co-founders Kathleen Acosta and Joshua Marindo, traditional players in the Philippines require businesses to pay deposits of US$10,000 per payment terminal, making it difficult for businesses to access digital payments because of its large ticket size.

They also added that they had both experienced personal difficulties of having delayed medical treatment due to an insufficient amount of cash in hand. This particularly inspired them to ensure that essential services and other businesses had easy access to cashless payment options.

Also Read: Grab launches new card to encourage cashless payments in the Philippines

“In an emergency, the payment method should be the least of your worries. With JazzyPay, all Filipinos, including overseas workers, are now empowered to pay for hospital bills and tuition fees for themselves and their families. Our secure platform gives overseas family members assurance that their funds go directly to the intended recipients,” said Acosta.

JazzyPay is fully licensed by the Philippine government and is a registered Operator of Payments System (OPS) regulated by the central bank of the Philippines.

The pandemic’s outbreak has prompted people to adopt cashless payment methods as a form of payment and, in turn, contributed to the rise of a new cashless society that would reduce the risk of the virus. Businesses in the Philippines are now striving harder to digitise themselves.

“COVID-19 has shown how businesses have to adapt fast to a new world to survive and enabling contactless payments is a key step to build resilience,” said William Klippgen, Managing Partner at Cocoon Capital, who recently joined the JazzyPay board of directors said.

The investment by Cocoon also reflects investor’s long-term confidence in the new norm of a growing cashless society.

In the Philippines, recently, notable funding round in the fintech sector includes a US$21 million Series A for Tonik Financial. In a recent survey, it is revealed that the Filipino customers are “more open” to create bank accounts via their smartphone, indicating readiness for more fintech services.

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Image Credit: JazzyPay

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SEA’s farmers can now monetise livestock through blockchain

The story: Singapore-based fintech startup InfoCorp has launched Sentinel Chain, an international platform to accept the use of livestock as collateral via a consortium blockchain.

The platform allows investors from around the world to finance smallholder farmer via livestock-backed financing companies.

About the market: Southeast Asia’s poultry production is expected to reach 12.3 million metric tons (mmt) by 2028 from 9.2 mmt in 2018, up to 80 per cent of which is provided by smallholder farmers.

One of the limitations faced by smallholder farmers in collateralising their livestock includes the lack of a systematic approach to verifying their ownership of livestock. There is also no verified system to help convert the value of livestock into dollars and cents.

Also Read: Hunger for no hunger: How Agrisea grows rice in the ocean to address food scarcity

This leaves farmers helpless in the face of uncertain times such as the COVID-19 pandemic when they require bank loans but are unable to provide legally recognized collateral in return.

What does Sentinel Chain do?: It addresses this issue by creating a digital system to quantify, identify and verify livestock ownership at the local market level, enabling unbanked farmers to finally unlock the value of their livestock assets.

This, in turn, paves the way for them to receive livestock insurance and collateralizable loans. Coupled with a pool of offshore investors, access to credit becomes cheaper and faster, providing these farmers with a comprehensive suite of financial services that empower them to partake in the global economy.

EduSpaze, Kaplan join hands to support Singapore edutech startups

The story: EduSpaze, a Singapore-based edutech accelerator supported by Enterprise Singapore, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Kaplan, a large and diverse education provider, to support the edutech startup community and provide real-world learning opportunities for students in this sector in Singapore.

Also Read: Why edutech is becoming an investor favourite this season

The objectives: With this partnership, both parties seek to collaborate to provide a group of over 20 Singapore-based startups with the opportunity to learn about innovative edutech solutions that can help them with different significant aspects of their business, including on-boarding, better logistics and operations, and eventually help them scale.

The partnership will tap on Kaplan’s expertise in developing industry-ready talent to grow the local talent pool for edtech entrepreneurs and professionals. Where appropriate, Kaplan will leverage its global presence to help these Singaporean startups expand and grow overseas.

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Both developed and developing countries are experiencing a shift in consumers’ patterns. Consumers today are increasingly concerned about the content of their food, its origin, freshness, and safety.

Demand for buying locally and organically grown food is gaining momentum. While e-commerce has had an impact on every industry, but the full presence is yet to be felt in the agriculture sector.

In developed markets, online bulk orders of fresh produce are already a norm amongst businesses like restaurants and wholesale retailers. However, amongst consumers, a change in the buying behavior has been seen in the light of the current COVID pandemic, where most of the consumers began the online purchase of fresh vegetables, fruits, and meat.

There is tremendous potential for Agri e-commerce businesses, but they will need to overcome barriers around customer’s preferences and concerns around buying fresh produce online.

Transparency and trust between the buyers (consumers and businesses) and sellers (farmers) will go a long way to mitigate concerns of customers and motivate them to shift to online purchases with Agribusinesses.

For the startups who are planning to venture into the Agri e-commerce space, managing the food value chain to build customer’s confidence around the quality of produce, food safety, and best value is essential for customer engagement.

Pre-orders through customer aggregation and demand forecasting

Balancing demand and supply is of utmost importance to avoid wastage in the food value chain. Pre- accumulation of orders from large buyers like wholesale retailers and restaurants and small buyers like individual customers, is a way to efficiently plan the demand-supply situation based on the future stock volume requirement.

Crofarm is one such Indian Agri e-commerce venture, that gets an aggregate demand from the buyers ahead in time and notifies the farmers about the harvest requirement based on the secured demand. Since the order volume is pre-planned, therefore the delivery from farm to consumers/buyers only takes 12 hours.

Pre-orders can be incentivised amongst the buyers by group buy promotions. This is one such practice followed Dropee (Malaysia), that enables higher savings, especially for business and retailers.

Also read: How Crowde aims to empower smallholder farmers in Indonesia

Additionally, in case of extra produce, the regular customers can be notified 2-3 days in advance about the availability. This way, all the products can be transferred together during the pre-planned dispatched cycles saving any additional operational cost.

Once pre-accumulation of orders is efficiently embedded in the supply chain, Agri e-commerce start-ups can then use data analytics to forecast demand for future consumption requirements to increase sales. Freshket (Thailand) is one such Agribusiness firm that uses demand forecasting for the same purpose.

Decimating uncertainty about product quality

One of the challenges faced by e-commerce businesses is to mitigate concerns about the quality of the product. Such concerns are more pronounced amongst Agri e-commerce customers, who need assurance about the nutritional value of the food.

A strategy for addressing this concern is to incentivise farmers to share their crop production journey with customers. The farmers who provide proof and detail of the seed quality, crop nutrition, farming technique, etc. can be honored with high-quality premium badges from the Agribusinesses.

While at one hand, this will assure customers about the quality of the food, but on the other hand, it will also justify the premium price paid for the product as per the nutritional value. GoFarmz- Know your farmer (India), provide detailed information about the farmer who is cultivating a particular product, to ensure customers about the quality of the organically grown food.

Another strategy to build trust amongst customers is to enable them to provide feedback about the quality of delivery from a respective farmer. This will serve as a motivator for farmers to increase sales through quality products and packaging.

Enabling food traceability

Food traceability is another way of building a consumer’s/business’s confidence in Agri e-commerce start-ups. With the food traceability feature in the e-commerce platform, consumers can track the live status of their product at any stage of the supply chain.

Food traceability is also important to ensure food safety and operational efficiency. Therefore, an Agri e-commerce startup that invests in minimizing food safety problems is seen as trustworthy by the consumers. Ninjacart (India) will soon be launching end to end food footprint traceability for fruits and vegetables, which will provide details about the farmer; a warehouse that handled the produce; trucks that carried the item, etc.

Servicing customers via various communication channels

Customer convenience should be the center of customer engagement strategies.  Apart from regular communication channels such as email, hotline number, Facebook messenger, small businesses should provide continuous support and quick revert through Whatsapp.

Also read: Thailand’s Freshket raises fresh funding to connect food suppliers with restaurants

The Agri e-commerce platform should connect the buyer with the seller (farmer) to build a trustworthy and long-lasting relationship between them. Trust is important to both farmers and consumers on an Agri e-commerce platform, and higher transparency translates to long-term business and consumer satisfaction. E-commerce platform such as Lazada connects buyers with sellers and enable them to seek information regarding a product.

Assuring quality products through stringent quality checks

A higher rate of a product return from customers can harm the reputation of an Agri e-commerce startup. It also accounts for a higher cost of delivering a replacement or a refund. Quality control at a purpose-built facility enables the to grade produce and discard any defects.

Alternatively, Agri e-commerce businesses can employ a third-party verification team to save the operational cost of physical control checks. Lima Links (Zambia) outsources quality control to farm leaders and farmers.

However, this approach has a problem that the less-skilled farmers might be inclined to ship even a low-quality product, which can potentially harm the reputation of the Agri e-commerce business.

Managing the customer side of the food value chain involves providing improved nutrition and quality product. An Agri e-commerce start-up will have to be sensitive to the growing customer’s need for good quality food that is affordable and acceptable.

Apart from the above-mentioned steps, an Agri e-commerce start-up should aim to build a strong farmer community that is well equipped to meet the nutrition demand of the customers.

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