Think about this: You have spent innumerable hours setting up an Instagram-worthy online store with eye-catching photos, your logo is perfect, and the products are amazing. But it’s the moment of truth, and your customer has abandoned the checkout.

Did you make sure everything has been covered so that your customer doesn’t get frustrated? Often it’s the finer details that could dilute your brand experience. 

For any online business, driving conversions and building a loyal customer base are essential ingredients for long-term sustainable growth. A smooth checkout is an important part of this, but it has not typically been regarded as part of the brand identity.

That’s now changing, with payments no longer seen as the ‘last stage’ of the customer transaction but as the beginning of a post-purchase customer experience and the perfect opportunity to cultivate a stronger brand relationship.

Payments and brand trust go hand in hand

Increasingly, shoppers expect payments on their own terms. This was a key finding of our recent survey of 2,000 Singaporean shoppers and 300 e-commerce leaders to discover their key pain points – from both sides of the checkout.

The rapid growth of digital payment methods means today’s shopper is more discerning about how they pay. Shoppers are spoiled for choice and will move on if they cannot pick a convenient or trusted payment method at the checkout. 76 per cent of Singaporean shoppers reported that they would abandon their cart if their preferred payment method is not offered. 41 per cent will also walk away if the payment process is too complicated.

Also Read: How interoperability can spark a payments revolution in SEA

That payment experience isn’t only about reducing abandoned shopping carts. It can impact the future use of a brand or product. For example, more than half of survey respondents regarded payment security as a factor that would help them decide if they would like the visit an online store again. Payments have evolved from a last-mile transaction feature to an important element that can alter the consumer’s view of the brand.

Merchants are also becoming increasingly aware of the importance of the payment process, with 99 per cent of retailers surveyed reporting to have made some type of improvement within the past 12 months. Retailers who are taking action to improve their payment services are already beginning to see the benefit.

41 per cent of those who are bolstering their systems reveal that taking foreign payments has seen an increase in revenue, and more than a third, 37 per cent, are reporting higher sales levels through widening the choice of payment options. These improvements to the bottom line are significant.

But while expansion of payment methods is certainly a wise move within the fragmented ASEAN payments landscape, retailers must also address existing friction at the checkout – such as payment failures – to ensure they can convert leads into sales and build brand stickiness for the long term.       

Brand stickiness is becoming harder to obtain with more and more online shoppers made up of digital natives who are skilful at finding alternative places to shop.

The importance of a great online customer experience was reiterated in a recent report from McKinsey, which found that Gen-Zs, in particular, cannot be tied down to a brand and are always open to switching. Similarly, according to Edelman’s recent trust barometer, for this new generation, the purchase is often the starting point for the brand relationship and not the final step.

They’re driven first by the product, with 78 per cent of Gen Z’s reporting uncovering and discovering things about a brand after they make a product purchase. In this sense, these days, the customer journey is less of a funnel and more of a loop, with positive experiences during and post-purchase just as important as a satisfactory experience.

The customer journey extends beyond the checkout

When asked to list their top pain points in the online shopping experience, consumers were crystal clear on where retailers are ‘not delivering’, with five of the top seven complaints relating to delivery, fulfilment or returns. The high delivery cost was noted as the top pain point with 61 per cent of consumers, who also cited it as one of the top reasons they will abandon their cart right before making payment.

Also Read: Thrive amid business uncertainties with a reliable payment partner

In the same thread of pain points, delivery delays lost packages, and unfavourable returns policies are also followed up as consumer concerns. It’s clear that logistical issues are closely related to customer satisfaction and the overall perception of a brand. Similarly, the seamlessness of payments extends beyond the sale, as chargebacks, refund requests, rewards, and cashback are all part and parcel of the payment, delivery, and fulfilment experience.

To remove some of the friction felt by consumers, merchants should look at the consumer journey holistically – beyond the point of sale.

Besides engaging reliable logistics partners to ensure the fulfilment of parcels, high costs can be worked into payment plans through annual fees or subscription fees for shoppers to ease the pressure of one-off high costs and reduce the risk of cart abandonment.

Chargebacks and refunds due to failed deliveries create administrative work for businesses and stress for consumers. Thinking of checkouts not as the final stage of the transaction but rather as the start of the journey towards parcel fulfilment and long-term retention will help businesses prioritise these essential elements of a good customer experience.

Retailers are upping their game, with Shoppee recently promising returns to be processed within two and a half days from an expanded network of 112 drop-off points. Big players are setting the expectations, so it’s clear that improving service levels is going to be key going forward.

Overall, as the e-commerce market matures, these expectations will only continue to grow. Consumers have more choices when shopping online and hence are more empowered to step away when their needs are not met.

But a smooth end-to-end customer journey is not only within reach of the super apps with huge teams at their disposal. Retailers of any size should consider establishing strong partnerships with payment providers or platforms that can support them in establishing and automating a seamless end-to-end customer experience.

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In 2019, a multi-author report flagged over 34,000 poorly-coded smart contracts, which put over US$4 million at risk across protocols on Ethereum. Web3 stakeholders have thus put an almost obsessive focus on clean and bug-free code. They’ve invested massively in security audits, formal verifications, bug bounties, and other ‘hands-off’ methods. 

However, researchers and experts from the Forta Network community point out that robust code isn’t enough for optimal Web3 security. Most exploits have nothing to do with code. They’re market-driven and target components beyond the developer or project owner’s control: third-party oracles, APIs, frontends, private keys, etc. And a ‘hands off’ approach doesn’t work for this reason. 

There’s merit to this claim. It’s further evidenced by reports from firms like Immunefi and Blockchain Security Alliance which revealed that Web3 projects lost over US$3.5 billion to hacks, scams, and breaches in 2022 — a more than 50 per cent increase vis-à-vis 2021. And besides that, the Web3 ecosystem witnessed several high-profile crashes and insolvencies like Terra and FTX, jeopardising trust and confidence.

The Web3 community must thus rethink threat detection and prevention. It’s high time to build and adopt innovative, problem-specific solutions. Leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) is crucial. But it also requires understanding Web3’s unique security concerns and where it currently stands concerning cybersecurity.

Panic mode and pause the protocol

Most Web3 projects enter into panic mode whenever they see any imminent threat. Their knee-jerk response in such scenarios is to ‘pause the protocol.’ Researchers at the Imperial College of London found that over 50 per cent of the 180+ smart contracts breached between 2018 and 2022 had useless pause functionalities.  

It currently takes around 24 hours to invoke a pause. That’s too slow, significantly, as hackers constantly improve their methods and processes. 

Also Read: How layer-2 rollups boost Ethereum’s scalability for broader Web3 adoption

Protocols usually have to pause everything since they lack targeted mechanisms. It’s a user experience nightmare that affects even legitimate participants for no reason. And this doesn’t help Web3’s goal of bolstering security for long-term, mass adoption.

The one-size-fits-all approach to Web3 threat prevention needs to be revised because each layer of the tech stack has different security requirements. Likewise, each alternative solution has its pros and cons. 

Projects thus need to choose solutions that best suit their risk appetite while prioritising user expectations. And in doing so, transparency is crucial since it enables users to make informed decisions. 

Projects must consider various factors while determining their threat prevention and mitigation strategies. For example, the adopted method should be feasible to increase the cost and friction for users. It’s essential to preserve composability, decentralisation, and robustness without introducing too much complexity or the scope for censorship. And above all, the solution should utilise the latest technologies for maximum potential.

Web3’s unique security concerns

Blockchain ledgers are often public, so anyone can know what each account holds. Vulnerabilities like smart contract bugs or compromised external dependencies can collapse entire financial systems due to knock-on effects. This underlines the unique nature of cybersecurity concerns in Web3. 

Though Web3 eliminates several attack surfaces common in Web2—like corruptible intermediaries, for example—it’s not 100 per cent attack-proof because there are blockchains underneath. On the contrary, Web3 introduces a range of new attack types, such as 51 per cent Attack, rug pull, reentrancy attack, etc. And the incentives to attack Web3 protocols are also more significant than in Web2.

In Web2, attacks like phishing happen via text messages or emails that trap users into sharing personal and identifiable information. In Web3, however, entering malicious sites or approving random EOAs can cause immediate and irreversible financial loss since hackers get access to users’ assets. The stakes are thus high both for attackers and their victims.

Another key challenge for Web3 security is the speed at which hackers invent unforeseen ways to exploit blockchain-based systems. For instance, while Web3 projects increasingly explored cross-chain bridges as a means to better interoperability, hackers managed to breach them and steal over US$1.4 billion. Rapid response and constant vigilance are mission-critical for robust Web3 security.

Threat prevention with AI and ML

AI is more than a cheeky technology coming to take away jobs and spread misinformation or fake news in the media. It’s Web3’s security lifeline, enabling tools to protect millions and billions of dollars worth of user funds. 

Coupled with ML, AI is a critical component of the efficient monitoring systems that leading audit firms like OpenZeppelin, ChainSecurity, MixBytes, etc., highly recommend. 

As Dr. Neha Narula from the MIT Media Lab says, “Machine learning can be used to predict and prevent future exploits. By analysing patterns and trends in data, it can identify potential vulnerabilities before they are exploited. This allows developers to take proactive measures to mitigate these vulnerabilities, making Web3 projects more secure for users.”

Moreover, Web3 attacks aren’t usually atomic — they don’t happen in a single block. It’s thus essential to prioritise runtime monitoring, which can increase the chances of dodging attacks. This adds further weightage to the case for real-time security measures in Web3. 

Also Read: Creator economy: How Web3 is changing the game for content creators

Web3’s threat detection capability has improved significantly in recent years, thanks to various innovative projects like Forta, Halborn, and Cyware Labs. From advanced pen-testing and smart contract auditing to real-time ‘Attack Detector’ bots, these projects bolster security vigilance and due diligence in Web3.  However, stopping identified threats’s still a long way to go. 

Flashbots, Mem pools, and zKProofs

Frontrunning exploit transactions was a viable defence against Web3 attacks in the past. But the rise of private mem pools, Flashbots, high-rate L2s, and zkProofs has made this method increasingly challenging and effective. Coordinating block builders and relayers is another option, though temporary. 

That’s where AI-powered automated pausing mechanisms or ‘circuit breakers’ can come in handy, similar to legacy stock markets. They can trigger security responses based on data from monitoring systems, seamlessly connecting prevention and action. This was unthinkable in Web3 so far, but not anymore. 

Further, innovating ways to implement automated circuit breakers specifically, not globally, can finally resolve the utter helplessness with which Web3 projects face attackers today. 

It’s a long game. But with Web3 poised to become a US$6 trillion market by 2030, there’s a good reason to play it well. After all, securing the Internet’s next paradigm and global user community is a question. 

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Singapore-based AI marketer Needle has closed a US$1.2 million oversubscribed pre-seed round led by local accelerator Iterative.

Ethos Fund and Goldbell Financial Services, besides angels, including Rainforest Founder JJ Chai, also participated.

The startup will use the funds to expand its team, including data scientists, AI trainers, and engineers.

“It’s never been easier to start a business, and it’s also never been harder to grow one. New brands need to find customers on multiple channels and transact with them on multiple platforms. On average, they are using over ten tools which is also a lot of data to make sense of and a lot of decisions to make. At Needle, we want to help founders cut through the noise, make sense of their data, and point them where to focus,” said Kiyan Foroughi, CEO and Co-Founder of Needle.

Also Read: AI revolution in marketing: Transforming the way businesses connect with customers

Needle was founded by seasoned e-commerce entrepreneurs and operators, including Foroughi. A serial entrepreneur, Foroughi previously founded Electric8. He is also a seed investor at Ometria. He was earlier Managing Director at Shopee (Sea Group).

It is an end-to-end AI marketer for the founders of rising brands, which are often resource-constrained and spend up to US$3,000 monthly for generic marketing campaigns with little to no ROI.

The startup begins by helping founders generate ideas, determines business and marketing priorities, and then provides personalised recommendations for effective tactics. From creating emails to preparing and launching ad campaigns, Needle streamlines the process using generative AI.

E-commerce brands first connect data from platforms like Shopify, Google Analytics, and Facebook Ads to Needle, which then sets goals and personalised tactics. The tactics recommended are taken from a database of proven marketing strategies and campaigns used at the world’s largest brands.

Also Read: How Shopee uses AI, data to build a marketing strategy that suits changes in user behaviour

The platform then takes action quicker and uses generative AI to create marketing campaigns and assets.

According to the startup, early customers who have implemented at least three Needle tactics have grown their baseline revenue to 1.5x over five months.
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A few weeks back, the world’s largest advertising agency, WPP, announced an AI partnership with NVIDIA. The partnership outlines that NVIDIA will empower creative advertising production by using exclusive visual content from Adobe Firefly and Getty Images created by NVIDIA Picasso, a foundry for custom generative AI models for visual design, and will be provided exclusively on behalf of WPP’s advertising clients.

This recent news underlines how generative AI has emerged as a powerful tool that is revolutionising the field of ad creatives among the world’s largest agencies and enterprises. By leveraging advanced algorithms and machine learning, generative AI enables marketers to produce innovative and high-performing advertising content with unprecedented efficiency.

As the cost to produce content trends to zero and the organic discovery becomes ineffective, the ability to attract attention towards various forms of content will become harder and more crowded. This cost dynamic increases the necessity of paid advertising to find new customers and realise meaningful traction, which is why we need to uncover how generative AI impacts marketers so that every marketing team can include it as a part of their toolkit.

Also Read: Unleashing the power of specialised AI startups in the era of generative AI

Before diving into the impact of generative AI on ad creatives, what is the most important objective of an ad creative production and testing process? The purpose of an ad creative production and testing process is to ensure the availability of fresh and viable creatives before active creatives approach their performance inflection point. Put simply, marketers need to launch new ads before their previous ads degrade and reach creative fatigue.

As a result, generative AI is a real breakthrough for advertising, given its ability to preempt creative fatigue with minimal cost. Tools like Runway, StableDiffusion, and Midjourney enable marketers to experiment with various iterations that were once of high complexity and cost, like video, and once commanded by an army of designers but now can potentially be covered by a SWAT-like team of two or three persons.

Depending on your perspective on this new process, the definitive value of using such AI tools is that it eliminates the need to understand the why behind a successful outcome, as we can now use processes like image inversion to feed the AI with your competitor’s assets, for example, to help create remarkably similar results and quickly cycle through various iterations until you get the campaign results that you want.

That said, the most important point that I want to underline here is not that generative AI will lead to substantial cost savings but that it is likely to produce outperforming advertising results that defy conventional human intuition.

Also Read: How to unlock new horizons with generative AI

For example, the critical value of tools like MidJourney and Stable Diffusion is to decouple the ideation process from the arbitrary aspects of advertising creatives that teams often believe lead to the success of their ad campaigns. By pairing MidJourney and Stable Diffusion with vast datasets and sophisticated algorithms, generative AI algorithms will identify subtle patterns and correlations that humans may often overlook.

This inherent capacity to uncover hidden insights enables marketers to reach highly targeted segments and achieve optimal campaign performance. Consequently, the value of generative AI is in its ability to push beyond traditional boundaries and consistently deliver superior results with significantly less effort.

For smaller and less resourced teams, the future of advertising production might be human creators who are advanced in procedurally parsing existing creatives and really good at generating high-quality variants from those components. This future is exciting because it is more likely to level the playing field between bigger and smaller advertising teams.

Ultimately, I want to highlight that generative AI tools provide value to the creative production process not so much by replacing the human, mechanical efforts involved in asset creation but rather by mitigating the risks associated with human biases when determining which specific creative elements outperform others because these processes will be led by unemotional machines.

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eFishery secures US$200M

Indonesia’s aquaculture company eFishery has raised US$200 million in its Series D funding round led by Abu Dhabi-based global fund manager 42XFund.

Malaysian public sector pension fund, Kumpulan Wang Persaraan (KWAP), Switzerland-based asset manager responsAbility, 500 Global, Northstar, Temasek, and SoftBank also joined.

The funds will be used to expand the eFishery farming community, targeting to engage over 1 million aquaculture ponds in Indonesia by 2025 and increasing the transactions of fish feed and fresh fish on the platform. The goal is to export fully traceable, chemical-free and antibiotic-free shrimp to international markets.

NEU Battery Materials scores US$3.7M

NEU Battery Materials, a Singapore-based lithium-ion battery recycling startup, secured US$3.7 million in an oversubscribed seed funding round led by SGInnovate.

ComfortDelGro Ventures, Shift4Good, Paragon Ventures I, and other angel investors also joined.

These funds will accelerate the deployment of NEU Battery Materials’s automated recycling line, which will lower operational manpower requirements. It will also develop partnerships in key global markets to support their battery requirements and forge new direct partnerships with electric vehicle OEMs and battery manufacturers to further the adoption of its technology within the transport and mobility sector.

Antler names Agung Bezharie as Partner

Singapore-based early-stage venture capital firm Antler has appointed Agung Bezharie Hadinegoro as a Partner.

Hadinegoro will spearhead Antler’s investment strategy and operations in Indonesia. This aligns with Antler’s plans to invest in over 30 Indonesian companies in 2023.

Hadinegoro brings over a decade of entrepreneurial and venture capital experience. Before joining Antler, he co-founded and headed Warung Pintar, a digital platform that connects micro retailers with suppliers (manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers). Warung Pintar, backed by East Ventures, SMDV, Vertex Ventures, and OVO, was acquired by SIRCLO Group in 2022.

Before Warung Pintar, Bezharie contributed to organisations such as East Ventures and Global Entrepreneurship Program Indonesia, where he actively empowered aspiring entrepreneurs by providing them with the necessary resources, funding, access to mentorship, and networking opportunities to flourish in the competitive business landscape.

NodeFlair gets US$2M in Series A

NodeFlair, a Singapore-based career advancement platform for tech talents, received US$2 million Series A funding.

Iterative led the funding round with participation from 500 Global and PERSOL VENTURE PARTNERS, HR management group PERSOL’s corporate venture capital arm.

Prominent angel investors Quek Siu Rui (CEO & Co-founder of Carousell), JJ Chai (CEO & Co-founder of Rainforest), and Siew Kum Hong (Former COO of AirBnB China) also participated in the funding round.

The new funding will be used to accelerate product development, expand into new markets across Southeast Asia, and grow the team. NodeFlair aims to reach profitability by 2024.

Stag raises US$600K

Vietnam-based financial education startup Stag was selected to participate in the inaugural Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR) programme managed by Viet Capital Ventures (VCV), including an investment in the startup.

Alongside VCV, NH Securities Vietnam Co. Ltd. (NHSV) and Singapore-based Resolution Ventures also invest in a seed funding round for the company.

This year, with the funding, Stag plans to continue enhancing financial education features while also launching new value-added products for retail and corporate users. It also plans to enhance KYC and security features and complete technology integrations with key strategic partners.

Furthermore, Stag is actively seeking collaborations with universities and educational organisations to promote and raise awareness of financial literacy in Vietnam.

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