e27 is thrilled to announce that we are working with IES-INCA to provide startups with access to e27 Pro.

IES-Incubator and Accelerator (IES-INCA) is a strategic initiative by The Institution of Engineers, Singapore (IES) to support engineers in technopreneurship and new technology business ventures.

IES-INCA is a platform “by engineers for engineers” that supports entrepreneurial engineers with deep tech innovations, enabling them to be successful in commercialising products and services through the scale-up incubation programme or via mentorship of first-time entrepreneurs through the Enterprise Singapore SgFounder programme.

From their board of directors to their operations team, IES-INCA speaks the same language and understands the needs of engineers and technopreneurs, with mentors advising on necessary technical, financial, and business development. Technopreneurs can tap on the rich experience of industry and finance experts to build a comprehensive and sustainable business with incubation or mentorship that emphasises quality engineering rather than just business aspects.

Also read: Facebook Community Accelerator Program introduces the 19 communities of the 2021 APAC cohort

In this new partnership, IES-INCA in its role as a community-builder will be working with e27 to grow and boost the connections between the technopreneurs, investors, mentors, and corporates in the deep tech space. With e27 in its role as the media partner, its extensive reach in the market and media, activities in the deep tech venture ecosystem will be able to receive greater market interest and awareness.

To launch this new partnership, IES-INCA will host a webinar together with e27, entitled In Conversation with a Deep Tech Investor. The webinar will talk about what founders need to know when engaging with a Deep Tech Hardware investor. Openspace Ventures has been invited to share its insights on key considerations for investing as well as its experiences working with founders.

For this webinar, we’re excited to have Mr Hian Goh of Openspace Ventures discuss key perspectives in how Openspace Ventures evaluates potential investments in companies.

Join this session happening on Wednesday, Oct 13, 4:30-5:45 PM SGT as we build a closer Deep Tech community engaging an investor and fellow Technopreneurs. You can register for free here.

Opportunities to build your investor network

Over the past couple of months, we have served over 3,000 connections between startups and investors through e27 Pro’s Connect feature.

In this new normal, there is a distinctive lack of ability for different parts of the Southeast Asia tech ecosystem to reach out to each other.

We used to have thousands of offline activities happening monthly, connecting various local and regional ecosystems, connecting startups, corporates, governments, and investors. Even our very own Echelon used to bring in more than 10,000 people over two days to achieve these meaningful, often serendipitous, connections.

This is a real pain, especially if you are new to the ecosystem and do not have existing networks that can introduce you to new ones. Online webinars and conferences seem to alleviate this issue temporarily, but we find that the startup ecosystem requires more.

Also read: Blue skies for Malaysia’s drone industry with Aerodyne

e27’s mission has always been to empower entrepreneurs with the tools to build and grow their companies. With e27 Pro, we’re going back to our roots and helping startups with their fundraising by providing a platform that allows not only discovery but a tool to begin conversations with investors and update them on their progress.

With over 300 verified active investors on the platform, e27 Pro members have in their reach the ability to find, connect, and engage with investors that are right for them. Not a Pro member yet? Start here.

Get the chance to connect with IES-INCA

IES-INCA is onboard e27 Pro, and members can reach out directly to them via e27 Pro’s Connect feature to be connected to the deep tech and engineering tech venture ecosystem or explore incubation with them.

Any e27 Pro member can simply visit IES INCA’s profile and click the Connect button to get the ball rolling.

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ESB, a fully integrated restaurant operating platform in Indonesia, has bagged US$7.6 million in extended Series A funding round, led by Alpha JWC Ventures.

Existing investors, including Beenext, Vulcan Capital, AC Ventures, and Skystar Capital, also co-invested.

With this funding, ESB plans to extend its footprint in the market. The fresh capital will also help the startup develop new Artificial Intelligence-based features, enhance its business intelligence (BI), delivery, payment, funding solutions, and HR information system.

ESB was established in 2014 by Gunawan Woen, Eka Prasetya, Setiadi Prawiryo Moeljadi, and Dwi Prawira. It is an all-in-one provider of culinary business operations software, connecting restaurants’ front-end, back-end, consumers, and supply chain partners. Its mission is to help F&B businesses increase their profits by incorporating technology to improve sales and operational efficiency.

Also Read: ESB, Indonesia’s answer to Toast, bags US$3M in Beenext-led Series A round

The firm’s initial offering was a customised enterprise resource planning (ERP) cloud solution to replace traditional hardware-based systems. It later expanded its objectives and started working on an all-in-one restaurant operating system covering a point-of-sale system and mobile ordering technology called ESB Order.

ESB aspires to follow the success of Toast in the US, which recently launched a successful IPO.

The Jakarta-headquartered firm has served more than 500 F&B brands, including MAP Boga Adiperkasa, Ismaya Group, Sour Sally Group, and Marugame Udon. It claims to be processing more than 40 million orders annually.

ESB managed to grow by 3x YoY during the pandemic mainly due to the demand for touchless ordering, which ESB caters to via its ESB orders. It now processes over US$500 million in gross transaction value and is expected to grow 10x in the next two years.

Before this round, ESB had received a total of US$3 million from Beenext, AC Ventures, Skystar Capital, and Selera Kapital earlier this year.

“Restaurant business is a combination of manufacturing, trading, and retail. We strive to alleviate the headache of dealing with separate platforms to meet the needs of these different aspects. At the same time, we help businesses generate better customer engagement, optimise their operations, and eventually increase their net profit,” said co-founder and CEO Woen.

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Ready to meet new startups to invest in? We have more than hundreds of startups ready to connect with potential investors on our platform. Create or claim your Investor profile today and turn on e27 Connect to receive requests and fundraising information from them.

Image Credit: ESB

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Draper Startup House Ventures (DSHV), a unit of the Draper Venture Network, has launched a new global micro-fund, targeting founders at the earliest stages of building tech startups.

It has also announced its maiden investment in Ferne Health, a startup addressing sexual health.

While DSHV is anchored in the US and its management is headquartered between San Mateo and Singapore, it aims to invest worldwide. The total amount of the fund will be announced at a later date.

The fund will have an APAC predominance due to Draper Startup House International having Singapore as its headquarters. Its reach potential includes 60 countries and 30 industries already represented on the company’s platform.

Its general partners are Giulianna Crivello and Vikram Bharati, founder of Draper Startup House International, who will co-manage the fund and long-time advisor Nick Martin.

The launch comes after the fund launched a software-based syndicate matching global investment platform in 2020.

Also Read: ‘We want to have a Draper Startup House in every major country by 2030’: Vikram Bharati

“Since inception in 2020, Draper Startup House Ventures has made 215 investor introductions to startups,” Bharati said. “With the launch of this fund, Draper Startup House itself expands beyond our 16 physical locations of entrepreneurial hospitality and tourism to better connect, inspire, and empower a global community through direct venture capital backing.”

“Thanks to the internet, and things like Bitcoin, entrepreneurs can build startups and create stored value from anywhere,” lead investor Tim Draper stated. “Whether they are in Myanmar, Estonia, or Indonesia, Draper Startup House Ventures brings them the opportunity to get funding without having to find their way to Silicon Valley.”

The fund provides access to its own venture capital fund, and the ability to submit pitch decks for circulation to the Draper Venture Network, which has 24 global funds.

Its lead investor Tim Draper is known for investing in Hotmail, Skype, and Baidu. Draper’s network companies manage over US$2 billion across 24 global funds.

In April, Draper Startup House acquired Hatch Ventures Vietnam (HATCH!), a Singapore-based startup ecosystem builder.

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Ready to meet new startups to invest in? We have more than hundreds of startups ready to connect with potential investors on our platform. Create or claim your Investor profile today and turn on e27 Connect to receive requests and fundraising information from them.

Image Credit: Draper Startup House Ventures

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Lead generation has been at the top of every e-commerce marketing leader’s agenda for many years. For marketing functions specifically, the focus has always been on driving consumers to your website, optimising their journey through the site, and presenting them with the information and offers that make them want to stay there.

Of course, all of this is futile if it doesn’t lead the window shopper to buy.

To achieve this sought-after result, the marketing manager underpins the customer journey with data such as heat maps of where consumers are clicking, their dwell time on critical web pages, and split testing to see what works best for getting a consumer’s attention.

For any marketing campaign, be it sales-focused or awareness-raising, getting a grip on this data is key to success.

However, whilst these metrics are critical, there is another key metric that has long been overlooked. To optimise it, marketers must look beyond the surface of glossy websites and marketing materials to truly optimise the customer experience.

That metric is authorisation rates or the percentage of transactions that successfully pass through the full authorisation process to complete payment.

Put, improving authorisation rates increases revenue, leads to better customer satisfaction, and ultimately improves customer retention and loyalty.

In fact, PayPal research shows that a two per cent increase in approvals could translate into more than a million dollars of previously unrealised revenue.

Also Read: How HackerNoon uses customer-centric approach to build meaningful new features on their platform

Steering clear of cart abandonment

Those in the e-commerce industry know all-too-well that cart abandonment is a huge issue, and it won’t go away or improve without action. Customers who have had a poor experience on your website may go online to share their reviews and to warn other potential customers about their negative experiences.

This can lead to long-term knock-on effects and severely impact the customer base that your team have worked so hard to build. However, all too often, the issue is not solved because its cause is not adequately addressed.

To truly optimise customer conversion rates, marketing managers need to understand the customer’s pain points when making a transaction on their website or app.

To aid this, there are experts and resources out there to help, including insight from PayPal’s specialists that shows why, when a customer journey isn’t smooth from start to finish, with a simple checkout process, consumers almost certainly abandon their cart, head to a competitor, and never come back. After all, today’s consumers are short on time, and their loyalty is hard to keep.

With the PayPal commerce platform, partners and customers can better understand and improve conversion rates on their websites by enabling merchants to optimise every critical stage of processing using PayPal’s unique mix of tools, technology and data to make informed data-driven decisions.

By having access to this actionable data, there is a much greater chance of approval of customer transactions. For many, the impact of poor authorisation rates might not have been a consideration in the past for improving marketing metrics.

However, in today’s competitive e-commerce environment, marketers who take the time to look beyond the surface-level metrics that are so commonplace and fully analyse why those with full carts didn’t complete their transactions can make huge gains and realise success.

Knowing where to look

When looking at the backend of a website and payment platforms and pathways, marketeers should ask some questions: what journey is a customer going on to find themselves at the checkout? Are there too many clicks? Is it too complex?

By working out the answers to these questions and determining what elements of the process need improving, optimised payment authorisation rates will positively ripple through the business, which could be the difference in millions of dollars of profit.

With this information at hand, marketers will no longer be so quick to ignore what has been written off as a seemingly insignificant back-end metric. There has never been a more crucial time to optimise conversion rates. It is no secret that many industries have been shaken up due to the pandemic, but few so much as the e-commerce industry.

Also Read: How Warung Pintar builds tech solutions to help warung owners embrace the future

The last 12-months has seen new demographics of consumers shopping online for the first time, and others convert to completing the majority of their shopping online as a more hygienic way to get the goods and services they need.

To gain their slice of this market, merchants need to be nimble and adapt to consumers wants and needs – those that don’t will get left behind.

The solution is simple, and payment platforms such as PayPal offer merchants all the tools they need to optimise conversion rates and capture and grow their slice of the e-commerce pie by ensuring valued customers don’t go to the competition.

This end-to-end payment know-how is all marketeers need to realise success when optimising authorisation rates at the checkout.

To future-proof their careers and strive toward truly optimised metrics, marketing departments must get behind the surface of the data they have at their disposal and start looking at the full customer journey.

There is no doubt that it might seem like a daunting task, but expert support is on hand.

PayPal can support marketing managers by helping them optimise authorisation rates to capture more revenue, increase customer volumes and avoid losing customers to their competition.

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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. Share your opinion by submitting an article, video, podcast, or infographic

Join our e27 Telegram group, FB community, or like the e27 Facebook page

Image credit: photonphoto

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The past two years has played host to a retail investing revolution across investment markets. Following the development of payment-for-order flow online brokerages and the release of government stimulus packages in the wake of the pandemic, we’ve seen a remarkable rise in the volume of retail investors trading their money on stocks and shares. But is this new wave of adoption as inclusive as it seems? 

The stats don’t lie. Retail investors are arriving on the market in record numbers, and the trend’s impact has been felt across Wall Street.

We’ve seen investors congregate on online forums like r/WallStreetBets to generate a short squeeze on GameStop and AMC stocks to send their shares rocketing into the stratosphere, and we’ve seen daily equity share volumes surpass their previous peak, set in the midst of the financial crisis of 2008. 

As the table above shows, the average daily volume of US equity options traded climbed to more than 40 million contracts in early 2021 – indicating an accelerating trend of growing trading activity from retail investors. 

One of the most significant developments that paved the way for this rise in retail adoption was the introduction of zero-commission operating models for online brokerages.

As the chart above shows, from their introduction in late 2019, we’ve seen daily average trades accelerate by as much as 200 per cent in the case of some brokerages, whilst Robinhood’s monthly active users climbed from less than 5 million to more than 20 million between Q4 of 2019 and Q1 of 2021. 

However, the introduction of zero-commission brokerages has been a controversial topic across the investing landscape, as well as the tactics used by platforms to keep their users engaged.

With this in mind, let’s take a deeper look at whether the recent surge in retail adoption really points to the democratization of retail investing: 

The implications of zero-commission

As with many things in life, it generally is if something sounds too good to be true. This is certainly the case to some degree with the zero-commission switch that brokerages made in late 2019.

Made popular by Robinhood in recent times, the platform relies on a payment-for-order flow (PFOF) model to make money rather than commissions. 

The approach relies on rebates paid by market makers to execute a buy or sell order on their terms. As brokerages opt to use a specific market maker over a more competitively priced alternative, the middlemen pay for the vast volumes of business it receives.

As Robinhood took off with its PFOF setup, other more traditional retail brokers like Schwab and TD Ameritrade adapted to stay competitive. 

Although companies that have adopted the PFOF model claim it provides better prices for retail investors, consumer advocates contest this assessment.

The argument against payment-for-order flow is that it presents a significant conflict of interest for brokers to find the best prices for their users. 

In fact, in February, a Congressional hearing in the wake of the GameStop short squeeze event aimed at PFOF, claiming that it was fundamentally to blame for some of the current problems across the investment landscape. 

In the wake of the mounting criticism, Robinhood rival, Public.com opted to drop its payment-for-order flow setup in favour of welcoming ‘tips’ from their users instead, as a means of making their trading environment fairer.

Retail brokerages have also been accused of profiting from the gamification of their investing platforms as a means of encouraging greater levels of order flow. 

In March 2021, Robinhood opted to remove a feature where confetti would rain down from the screen when investors made their first trade amid concerns that it offered instant gratification for buying stocks through the app. 

The path to true inclusivity

Retail brokerages may need to adapt their platforms if they’re committed to truly level the playing field between retail investors and their institutional counterparts. 

“Companies can provide protocols for determining which investments are appropriate for new account holders to avoid costly mistakes at the outset,” claims Maxim Manturov, head of investment research at Freedom Finance Europe.

“Firms should also consider additional staff training to educate clients about the risks of investing in high-volatility securities and adopting better methods of dealing with clients during market volatility.”

“Financial institutions could also consider offering information that might be useful during times of turbulence, such as warning labels on equities with high volatility so that customers are aware of the dangers.

“Also, it would be a good idea to add education to reduce the flow of disinformation faced by retail investors online and support investment education, including building VR virtual learning modules with built-in lessons in essential financial concepts,” Manturov adds. 

While we’re seeing vast new users arriving across the retail investing landscape, institutions still face many hurdles that institutions don’t have to worry about. The path to true inclusivity can be laid in the future. Still, it may require a new operating model for online brokerages and a greater level of support and education for new investors.

The democratisation of finance is already underway, and with a series of improvements, the future certainly looks bright for the retail investing ecosystem.

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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. Share your opinion by submitting an article, video, podcast, or infographic.

Join our e27 Telegram group, FB community, or like the e27 Facebook page

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