Millennials make 75 per cent of the global workforce. But as a generation, they’re deeper in debt, only half as likely to own a home, and more likely to live in poverty than their parents. The same forces that are driving massive inequality between the top one per cent and the rest, are also creating a vast wealth gap between Baby Boomers and Millennials.

So what are the core reasons that drove Millennials to the brink of distress? And what could be the possible respite?

Firstly, its stagnant wages. Median wages grew by an average of 0.3 per cent per year between 2007 and 2017, just as Millennials were beginning their careers. Before that, between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s, wages grew at three times that rate.

While the wages have stagnated, the costs of essentials such as housing and education have been going through the roof. Millennials own fewer homes, the most common way Baby Boomers built their wealth in the past. Education costs have soared. Incremental technological advances are so rampant that many jobs and roles are increasingly becoming obsolete. An average millennial is expected to take a couple of college degrees and change their career at least twice to land a secure job.

Adjusted for inflation, the average college education in 2018 cost nearly three times as in 1978. That expensive college education means that the average graduate carries a whopping US$28,000 in student loan debt. As a generation, Millennials are more than US$1 trillion in the red. In addition, the average young adult carries nearly US$5,000 in credit card debt, and this number is growing.

Also Read: Top 9 data and analytics trends to watch out for in 2020

Millennials are finding it harder than previous generations to save for the future. Among Fortune 500 companies, only 81 sponsored a pension plan in 2017, that’s down from 288 twenty years ago. Employers are replacing pensions with essentially “do-it-yourself” savings plans.

All of this means that fewer millennials are entering the middle class than previous generations.  Most have less than US$1,000 in savings. Many young people today won’t be able to retire until 75, if at all.

So what is the escape?. So what is that one thing that this generation has that can be considered the most valuable weapon in their arsenal?

The answer is data

While this generation is living in distress, on the other side of the coin, markets have never seen the trillion-dollar tech giant sprung up like this before. Through their murky policies, tricky wordings, and sneaky details about consent, tech giants have been collecting insane amounts of data about the millennials.

Whether data is used for targeted advertising, predicting buyer behaviour, deploying AI, or buying or selling to third parties; it is clear that the fortune of these companies is built on the intimate information of the users.

Companies can take a customer-driven approach to information sharing, empowering the consumer to share and rescind their consent. Instead of simply asking for consent, organisations can capture gained consent in an auditable workflow; one which enables an automated and secure digital communication link with the customer.

Also Read: News Roundup: Carousell launches millennial-targeted property platform in Hong Kong

Once consent is secured, companies can build flexible, secure platforms to store and manage the data in a customer-driven way. Next, build digital rights management services that create a digital ‘vault’ for customers to store personal data and give the user an opportunity to monetise the same.

A tech company pays an average of US$208 per day per user for the data.

If the proposed approach is to be implemented a millennial can secure a minimum of US$75,000 per year per company. And the sky is the only limit to how many companies an individual can sign at US$75,000 p.a.

The questions, to trade or not trade?

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Malaysia-based co-working spaces operator WORQ has secured RM10 million (US$2.4 million) in fresh investment from seven follow-on investors, including its returning backer Phillip Capital.

In 2018, the firm had secured RM10 million in a crowdfunding round from Bangsawan Consulting and Phillip Capital.

WORQ, which has also secured loan offers from six banks including Affin, will use the fresh capital to grow its space under management 10-fold to one million square feet, it said in a press note.

The company was founded in March 2017 by Stephanie Ping and Andrew Yeow.

Also Read: Is this the end of the coworking culture?

Since its previous fundraise, the company claims to have grown its footprint 7x and revenue by 560 per cent and has been profitable.

With its sustainable model, WORQ is able to help turnaround loss-making spaces even in quiet locations. It has made an acquisition of another flexible space into its portfolio for this purpose.

It is also looking to inorganically expand its portfolio via acquisitions and partnerships with other co-working space operators and landlords.

The Kuala Lumpur-headquartered firm has expanded its services to include WORQ Enterprise, a space-on-demand division dedicated to consulting and customising workspaces for companies. These integrated solutions help companies save up to a staggering 30 per cent in costs every month.

“WORQ sells office usage to companies one desk at a time, eliminating the need to rent and fit out an office. WORQ’s space-on-demand solutions allow companies to implement a distributed work style. In this new environment, WORQ can sell one desk multiple times over and increase efficiency of space usage,” said Ping.

Also Read: T. Fuad leaves WeWork Southeast Asia & Korea, Samit Chopra takes over as MD

The company will soon be launching its proprietary community app SPARQ to create an online-offline experience for its users.”This spawns local communities everywhere, thereby canvassing the globe with productive hyper-localised communities all over the world. Ultimately, WORQ’s vision is to help people prosper by working together,” Ping added.

The company has earlier received funding from the likes of Cradle Fund, SMG (investment holding company co-founded by the founding partner of Jungle Ventures), and 500 Startups.

According to global real estate giant JLL, flexible office spaces only make up one per cent of Kuala Lumpur’s total office space. JLL estimates that flexible space demand will accelerate due to COVID-19, predicting that 30 per cent of all office space will be consumed flexibly by 2030. WORQ estimates that the flexible office market in Malaysia will grow to RM3 billion (US$722 million) by then.

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Image Credit: WORQ

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During the Future Economy Conference and Exhibition (FECE) of 2020 organised by the Singapore Business Federation, Singapore’s Trade and Industry Minister Chan Chun Sing stressed on the importance of digitalisation to push the economy forward.

“Singapore must act now to transform its economy, or risk losing its hub status and see its businesses and worker’s competitive edge erode,” he said.

He further added that companies must prioritise making use of digital methods to go beyond the boundaries put forth by geography.

“Now is the time to re-engineer processes, build a new economy, and transform to create the right opportunities for businesses and people,” he added.

“The faster we adapt, the faster we recover. There is no place for treading water and waiting for normalcy to return. Others will overtake us, and the opportunities will pass us by.”

The virtual conference, which saw a total of 1,000 business leaders attending, had 19 speakers from large companies, including United Overseas Bank, PayPal and PricewaterhouseCoopers, who shared their experiences going digital.

The main focus of the conference was how companies can rebuild their processes using digital tools. According to executive chairman Chris Wei of Aviva Asia “data was the number one key to the company’s digital strategy” in the new normal.

Also Read: Singapore’s central bank announces new hub for SMEs to access business services

Throughout his speech, he also spoke about challenges that he faced while making the transition and said that “culture clash” was one major hurdle.

“It does require leadership, it requires a lot of time, a lot of mediation, to make sure that priorities are aligned,” Wei, said.

In Singapore, throughout the outbreak of the pandemic, many companies have stepped up their efforts to offer help and support SME and MSMEs’.

Companies like Grab announced a pilot programme for hawkers, which delivers food from hawker stalls to customers while other companies like SGTech set up a fund to support Singapore’s small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

Other than that, the government is also reaching its hand out to support small businesses through schemes such as the SMEs Go Digital programme and financial incentives such as the Digital Resilience Bonus for firms that use digital solutions.

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BigBrainBank, a Malaysian startup that digitally assists investors in making trading decisions, said today it has raised a “7-figure USD” in seed funding from unnamed angel investors.

The platform, developed using a wide range of Big Data, Machine Learning, and AI technologies, collates years of market information and matches them with an optimised, deep-learning algorithm that generates smart trade suggestions for users.

The goal is to allow ordinary people to make investments with minimal technical or financial knowledge.

Also Read: Singapore’s Bambu secures US$10M to grow its SaaS-based robo-advisory solutions

BigBrainBank is a robo-advisor whose platform comes with a range of tools to make investing easier, ranging from risk level management, news filters, backtesting/market analysis, to social media sentiments.

Its boasts of a feature that notifies users on what to trade and when to trade based on historical data that it claims to have more than 65 per cent accuracy.

The platform also includes multi-channel analysis on commodities, indices, bonds and forex, with plans to integrate multi-broker accessibility in the longer term.

Since the launch in July 2020, BigBrainBank’s core product, The Brain – AI Trade Strategies app, has garnered over 60,000 trial users who registered over the app stores and website, the company said in a press note.

While the platform is designed on a freemium basis, the company charges an annual subscription of US$300 for more advanced features.

Moving forward, BigBrainBank expects to draw in 100,000 more subscribers by the year end.

Also Read: VinaCapital acquires operations of Singapore’s robo-advisor Smartly

As of today most of the current subscribers are from Malaysia, with 20 per cent coming from Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Taiwan, and Dubai.

In 2021, BigBrainBank intends to penetrate into new markets in the Philippines and Hong Kong, and thereafter to the rest of Asia.

“Our goal is to raise the standard of peoples living through financial tools and education. We believe BBB will not only allow people to make better investment decisions, it will also allow them to gain all the necessary support they need,” said Brendon Yong, Founder of BigBrainBank.

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Image Credit: BigBrainBank

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A group of tech and investment veterans, including Koh Boon Hwee, Tan Chow Boon and Seow Kiat Wang, have joined hands to launch Altara Ventures, an early-stage VC fund targeted at the Southeast Asian markets.

Other General Partners of the fund are Gavin Teo and Dave Ng.

“We are targeting a US$100M+ fund and are in the process of fundraising,” General Partner Ng told e27. “We look to invest US$3-5 million on an average in pre-Series A, Series A and selectively some Series B companies. We prefer to lead and are also open to collaborating with other funds as co-investors.”

Headquartered in Singapore, Altara aims to invest in the fintech, consumer, enterprise software, logistics, healthcare and edutech verticals.

Also Read: Koh Boon Hwee’s new US$100M VC fund Credence Partners to invest in Series A, B firms in Southeast Asia

The firm plans to support a total of 20-25 companies operating primarily in the Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand and Philippines markets.

It has already made three investments — Tonik Financial, a digital bank providing consumer banking services in the Philippines; Stashfin, a mobile-first digital fintech providing consumer credit in India; and Senseye, a deep-tech, AI and data science company that provides insights into user cognitive states.

“We want to back passionate founders and entrepreneurs who have strong product and platform innovation, applying technology to solve a large market problem. This is on top of our typical engagement and diligence process for investments selection,” Ng added.

Altara’s Limited Partners comprise a leading financial services institution, a publicly-listed technology corporation and a prominent family office.

The VC firm’s name derives from the English word Altitude and the Bahasa word Nusantara, which is the historical designation for maritime Southeast Asia.

Each of Altara’s five partners brings extensive experience founding, operating and investing in technology startups in Southeast Asia and globally.

Boon Hwee, Chow Boon and Wang are prominent business leaders and serial entrepreneurs in the Singapore ecosystem, with an angel track record of investing in over 100 companies such as Alteon Networks, FreeCharge, Razer, StashAway and many others.

They previously held the roles of senior executives at HP before founding a leading technology company, Omni Industries, which successfully launched an IPO and subsequently exited to Celestica for S$1.6 billion (US$1.2 billion).

The trio also have years of managing private equity investments as Credence Partners.

Teo and Ng are veteran VC investors bringing decades of experience managing venture funds and operating startups in the US and Southeast Asia. Previously, the duo led investments at B Capital Group, where Teo founded the San Francisco office and Ng was a founding director of the Singapore entity, helping to launch its Asian presence.

Also Read: Renowned Singapore businessman Koh Boon Hwee leads Series A in travel startup BeMyGuest

Together, the two invested in several growth-stage companies such as Atomwise, AImotive, Carro, Icertis, Ninja Van in Asia and the US.

Prior to B Capital, Teo invested with Comcast Ventures and managed product at Zynga through the company’s IPO on NASDAQ. Ng was most recently the Head of Southeast Asia for Eight Roads Ventures, a US$6 billion global VC fund backed by Fidelity.

Early this year, three of Altara’s General Partners — Hwee, Boon and Wang — had launched a US$100-million fund Credence Partners.

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Image Credit: Altara Ventures

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