Inspired by the success of cash-back firms such as Rakuten in the West, ex-Zalora employees Joel Leong and Henry Chan decided to introduce a similar model and fill the market gap in Southeast Asia in 2014.

Their risk for the new model paid off. Today, ShopBack is a successful venture with a presence in countries, including Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Taiwan, and Australia.

In a nutshell, ShopBack helps consumers make smarter purchase decisions for items across categories, such as travel bookings, fashion, health and beauty, groceries, and food delivery.

ShopBack recently also entered South Korea by acquiring cash-back platform Ebates amid the COVID-19 turmoil.

With many startups struggling to find the right footing between survival and growth amid the spread of the COVID-19, e27 sat down with ShopBack’s Co-founder Joel Leong for tips on how small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and founders can cope better during the crisis.

Also Read: Afternoon News Roundup: ShopBack acquires Korean rebates platform Ebates

Below are his three golden rules for survival:

1. Be cash conservative

Leong believes that entrepreneurs must be prepared to fight out the uncertainty of the pandemic by being more cash conservative. With the crisis gaining more momentum, one thing is for sure: people are becoming more cash conscious.

As the situation continues to remain dynamic, all costs need to be continuously assessed. Most companies are beginning to see the inefficiencies that they did not notice before COVID-19.

It would be necessary for survival if founders can think about how they can optimise their costs well enough so that the return on investment (ROI) is improved.

“There’s no point on crying over spilt milk,” he said. “It is what it is, and we are unable to control it. However, cost is one-factor that can be controlled. Each company must think about how it can conserve its resources well enough to ride out this wave.”

Leong’s ideas shoot right out of a book on stoicism, which talks about how external influences are usually outside of one’s control but how one responds to it is very much within the control.

“Changes in the market are inevitable, but how we adapt to it can be changed,” he said with optimism.

Also Read: Afternoon News Roundup: Shopback raises US$75M led by Temasek to expand in Asia

2. Don’t give up on growth

One way ShopBack continues to save on costs while still managing to grow, is by listening more intently to customers and identifying key market trends. This helps them determine new revenue streams.

If the market is stagnating at one end, it is also gaining momentum on the other. If travel is stagnating, online shopping is booming.

To recognise where the shifts are happening and maintaining an eagle eye on customer habits is key to growth.

He throws in the example of the SARS pandemic (2002-2004), which compelled many companies to innovate and digitise, while even helping some of them to gain more customers.

“Travel is one sector that has been enormously affected by the lockdown and also one of our key revenue streams. The question we ask ourselves during this scenario is: if people are not spending on travel, what else are they spending on?”

“On the other hand, domestic travel within Taiwan is continuing. So, in that case, we can even look at doing more sales in the region.”

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

By asking these questions, the company can understand shopping habits better and target the right market.

One way in which the cash-back company walked the talk was by being able to pinpoint the need for companies to gain more visibility for products and realising the changing ways consumers were interacting with brands and content during the lockdown.

It concluded its first all-digital birthday campaign in celebration of ShopBack Australia’s 2nd birthday recently, which generated ten times more in orders for top-performing brands and managed to award users over AU$600,000 in cash-back.

The campaign featured several Australian influencers and included virtual activities such as Pictionary and an online scavenger hunt.

It added fun elements like clues hidden in YouTube videos, Instagram stories, Facebook groups and more with the attempt to grab the attention of its social media savvy customer base.

3. Increase your visibility… but do it right

As more people are bound to stay at home and maintain social distancing with others, a cascade of cancellations and postponements have impacted major gigs, business opportunities and events and wiped some of them off the calendar.

It is crucial to improve marketing at the same time so that products are more visible to consumers.

“A good question to ask would be, how can I become more visible to customers without compromising too much on costs? If you are paying for clicks, what usually happens is that you must pay for clicks even if the order doesn’t go through. You get nothing, yet you still pay for it,” he added.

It is vital to find the right marketing channels which are more performance-based rather than click-based.

ShopBack operates in a similar way where it aids other sellers using its pay-per-sale model. This is especially imperative during a time when brands are taking a closer look at their spending, and opting for channels that are relevant and necessary.

Also Read: Afternoon News Roundup: ShopBack acquires Korean rebates platform Ebates

Leong holds that it is important for founders to have as much control over marketing and up to them to explore various marketing channels that are performance-driven and figure out what works best.

Every dollar should be utilised in the right way, even if it is for marketing. More time must be invested to think about campaigns and to increase visibility without compromising on costs.

Conclusion

Most companies are striving to remain afloat while others are doing everything they can to keep their doors open post-pandemic. In times like this, it is essential to save money while continuing to innovate, depending on the stage of the company.

Be cautious, be innovative and be relevant, is the strategic founder’s new mantra.

“If you are alive, you can still live to fight another day,” said Leong, quoting Irish novelist Oliver Goldsmith.

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Image Credit: ShopBack

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Vietnam’s accounting automation startup Bizzi.vn raises seed funding led by 500 Startups

Vietnam-based accounting automation startup Bizzi.vn has raised an undisclosed amount of seed round funding, led by 500 Startups, with participation from unnamed angel investors.

The company is focused on helping accountants automate financial processes like pay bill, approvals, receipt scanning, compliance, and book-keeping using its RPA (robotic process automation) technology.

The startup claims that it can cut the cost and time that businesses spend on daily financial processes by 80 per cent.

Also Read: What can food-agritech startups and SMEs do for business continuity amidst the pandemic?

“This new funding will allow us to accelerate growth toward our vision that every accountant should spend their time advising and crunching the numbers instead of doing manual work,” said Nghia Vu, Co-founder of Bizzi.

Since its launch in Vietnam in late 2019, Bizzi has managed to attract clients from small businesses to large-scale enterprises in various sectors, some of which include DKSH, 3A Nutrition, GS25, among others.

Singapore’s agritech accelerator Grow launches Food Bowl programme

Grow, an agritech accelerator backed by Enterprise Singapore, AgFunder and Dole, has launched a new 12-week startup programme.

Called Singapore Food Bowl, the programme aims to build innovative solutions for challenges, such as yield predictions, food waste reduction and packaging alternatives, according to TechInAsia.

Interested startups may apply until June 7 this year.

Only applicants from the Asia Pacific with a minimum viable product can enter the programme.

Indian food delivery companies Zomato, Swiggy cut staff

Swiggy and Zomato, two of the leading food delivery companies in India, have laid off employees, according to LiveMint.

Swiggy’s Co-founder Sriharsha Majety said in a message to its employees on the company’s blog on Monday that the core food delivery business had been “severely impacted” by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Competitor Zomato is also going through layoffs and is cutting about 13 per cent of its workforce.

“Our business has been severely affected by the COVID lockdowns,” Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal said in a note to employees, as reported by The Economic Times.

“A large number of restaurants have already shut down permanently, and we know that this is just the tip of the iceberg. I expect the number of restaurants to shrink by 25-40 per cent over the next 6-12 months. What happens, for better or worse, is anybody’s guess,” Deepinder Goyal, CEO of Tomato.

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e27 Pro membership will further empower you with insights, tools, and opportunities that help you solve the problems that hold you back. Begin your company’s journey to success here.

Image Credit: Kelly Sikkema

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Non-performing loans (NPLs) is a persisting problem globally and is the natural consequence of a boom in consumer lending.

Traditionally, banks employed henchmen/used brute force to recover loans from retail consumers. This has oftentimes created friction between lenders and consumers.

Also Read: Going big? Then Go e27 Pro.

“In Poland, unsecured consumer lending exploded after the collapse of the communist regime in the last decade of the last century. The problem with rapidly growing unsecured NPLs in Ukraine appeared after the financial crisis in 2008,” Tomasz Borowski, a banker with considerable working experience in Europe, told e27.

“In both cases, the issues with growing NPLs triggered foundation for professional credit management services (CMS) companies, which were able to help lenders to improve the quality of their loan portfolios,” he added.

However, these firms couldn’t remove the inefficiency from loan recovery.

Borowski sensed an opportunity here. He decided to club his experience in the risk management and operations domain and new-age technology to develop a software solution to tackle the problem head-on.

“We looked closer in Southeast Asia, and made a couple of business trips and meetings with C-level managers from local and international banks in the region,” he said.

This led to the birth of AsiaCollect, which was recently rebranded as ‘Flow‘.

Started by Borowski and his former colleagues Greg Krasnov and Peter Barcak, SaaS startup Flow automates consumer debt collection for banks and financial services firms.

The Singapore-headquartered startup utilises Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to create debtor profiles to help banks and non-banking lenders recover their NPLs through mediums such as automatically-generated SMSes, interactive voice recordings, and predictive dialling systems.

The motivation

The idea of AsiaCollect occurred to Borowski in 2015 while working in Kyiv, the capital city of Ukraine where he moved from his home country Poland in 2006. There he saw a very brutal, inefficient and people-driven debt collection market.

The situation was also same in Asia. So he was determined to utilise his 12-plus years’ experience in risk management and operations and accelerate the transformation of the collection market in Southeast Asia.

In Asia, according to him, debt collection has a negative connotation. The brute-force format of debt purchasing is still in play in many parts of the region.

“At Flow, our focus on ethical treatment of borrowers, emphasis on data insights, AI-driven automation and champion challenger collection strategies gives us a distinct advantage and helps to mitigate many of the challenges facing the industry,” he explained.

“The foundation for our collections services and NPL portfolio purchasing business is our proprietary collections platform. It allows us to minimise human’s impact on collection process execution,” Borowski claims.

How it works

The startup’s collection strategies are based on incorporated rules (logical expressions) to re-distribute all cases in the portfolio among different collection actions.

The predictive autodialler and CRM system enable automatic calling along with complete information about the borrower, his/her debts and history of interactions, promises and payments on the operator’s interface to let him/her instantly be ready for the conversation.

“The dynamic call script makes suggestions for further questions and phrases to the borrower based on previous answers. The system also has dynamic voice-to-text conversion, automatic speech recognition covering 100 per cent of conversations,” he explained.

A US$100-billion market

Borowski expects US$100 billion-plus consumer NPLs to be generated in the next five years in Vietnam, Indonesia and India together. This presents a large untapped opportunity for the startup to be a sizeable player in the region in the medium term.

“In addition to our CMS outsourcing services, NPL purchasing is expected to be a high growth vertical for us. As our operations become more automated and AI-driven, there is an opportunity to package and sell the AI models that we plan to use in-house to increase efficiency and PTP ratios,” he noted.

Funding and expansion

At present, Flow has operations in three markets, namely Vietnam, Indonesia and India. It has partnerships with 40-50 banks, multi-finance companies and selected online lenders in these countries.

While the company’s focus continue to be these three markets, in the short-to-medium term, it will venture into other markets opportunistically.

“In the past, we have received reverse enquiries to set up operations in Thailand, the Philippines and Malaysia. Eventually, as the company grows, we intend to look at selected markets beyond Asia, and this has also been a part of the reason to transition from “AsiaCollect” to Flow,” he informed.

Also Read: KoinWorks raises US$10M from Lendable to help Indonesian SMEs raise funds online

Flow’s business model consists of 1) commission-based revenue from the services business which is a percentage of the amount recovered for the clients, 2) revenues based on the amount recovered from its purchased NPL portfolios, and 3) revenue from packaging and selling its in-house AI-models.

Last week, Flow raised US$6 million in Series A investment, led by DEG (a subsidiary of Germany’s KfW Group, and Dymon Asia Ventures, SIG Asia, and SCB10X (the VC arm of Thailand’s Siam Commercial Bank).

The fintech company is now back in the market to raise US$10 million in Series B round and has commenced initial talks with a few interested parties, said Borowski.

“Our existing investors have always been supportive of our expansion and growth plans and we are sure they shall support us in our Series B as required,” Borowski concluded.

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Image Credit: Flow

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Ant Financial Services, operator of Alipay, has announced a strategic partnership with Digital Money Myanmar, which owns and operates mobile financial services platform Wave Money.

As part of the deal, Ant Financial will invest US$73.5M in the firm, said a press release.

Ant Group’s stake in Wave Money will come by way of a new share issuance, which is subject to certain conditions, including regulatory approval.

Also Read: No more henchmen, banks can now use Flow’s AI tool for loan recovery

The strategic partnership is aimed at boosting Wave Money’s technological capabilities and utilise Ant Financial’s expertise in mobile payment and digital financial services to better address the needs of users in Myanmar.

“Myanmar is ready for mass adoption of digital payments with a connected population and high smartphone penetration. This partnership will be transformative for Wave Money and Myanmar,” said CEO Brad Jones.

Launched in October 2018, Wave Money is a joint venture between Telenor, Yoma Bank and Singapore Exchange-listed Yoma Strategic Holdings. The firm provides mobile financial services through a nationwide network of more than 57,000 agents or what it calls ‘Wave Shops’ in urban and rural areas, covering approximately 89 per cent of the region of Myanmar.

In 2019, Wave Money’s transfer volume claims to have more than tripled year-on-year reaching US$4.3 billion. More than 21 million people have used its platform for services such as remittances, utility payments, airtime top-ups and digital payments.

“Myanmar’s population is still massively underserved by formal banking institutions with only a quarter of people having a bank account. Ant Group brings a wealth of expertise in mobile payment and financial services. The COVID-19 situation is accelerating the trend towards a cashless society and drives the growth of ecommerce, and we expect this strategic partnership to massively boost Wave Money’s capabilities to support these trends,” said Melvyn Pun, CEO, Yoma Strategic.

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Image Credit: Ant Financial

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Holmusk, a data science and healthtech company headquartered in Singapore, announced today it has closed a US$21.5 million funding round, led by US-based Optum Ventures (OV) and Health Catalyst Capital (HCC).

Existing investor Singapore-based Heritas Capital and other unnamed individuals also joined the round.

The new funding round allows Holmusk to expand its US operations in New York City.

A part of the funds will be invested in its proprietary technology to harness and analyse real-world data to accelerate drug development and data-driven medicine.

Also Read: No more henchmen, banks can now use Flow’s AI tool for loan recovery

Founded in 2015, Holmusk aims to transform the lives of people with behavioural health and chronic diseases through evidence-driven medicine. It is building a real-world evidence platform for mental health and chronic diseases.

This is made possible by bringing together specialty behavioural health data and Holmusk’s novel analytics platform to deliver evidence-based insight that care providers, healthcare payers and patients can use to make fully informed care and treatment decisions, and better integrate care for people with both behavioral and chronic health needs.

These capabilities can also aid pharma companies with R&D and commercialisation of new drugs.

In 2016, Holmusk acquired MindLinc, an electronic health record (EHR) system focused on behavioural health, from Duke University School of Medicine. This enabled the company to leverage longitudinal data from many mental health institutions across US, stretching over 20 years.

Holmusk has offices in New York City, London and Shanghai.

“Our team is encouraged by Holmusk’s evidence-based approach to improving care for people suffering from behavioral health disorders, and we look forward to working closely with the Holmusk team to support the next phase of growth,” said Barathan.

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Image Credit: 123rf.com

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Jack Ma steps down from SoftBank board

Jack Ma will resign from SoftBank board after serving as Director for 13 years, according to KrAsia.

Softbank also named three new Directors amid calls from an activist investor to boost shareholder returns and strengthen corporate governance.

SoftBank founder and chairman Masayoshi Son’s bet on Ma’s startup Alibaba in 2000 became known as one of the most successful deals in history.

Alibaba went on to become one of the world’s largest companies, with a market capitalization of USD 546 billion. SoftBank still holds about 25 per cent of the company.

In September 2019, Ma had resigned from Alibaba Chairman’s position.

India’s Reliance Jio raises US$870M from General Atlantic

India’s telecom operator Reliance Jio has raised another US$850 million in exchange for a 1.34 per cent stake from private equity firm General Atlantic, bringing its total raised till date to about US$8.9 billion, according to Entrackr.

This marks Jio’s fourth investment, in a succession of funding which was started by social media major Facebook, followed by private equity funds Silver Lake and Vista Equity Partners.

Also Read: No more henchmen, banks can now use Flow’s AI tool for loan recovery

The telecom business under Reliance has other digital properties and investments such as Jio Cinema, Jio Saavn (music streaming platform) and Haaptik (conversational AI platform).

Singapore’s YouTrip launches initiative to offer support to the creative community

Singapore’s multi-currency mobile wallet YouTrip has launched an initiative called CraftWithLove, which is a platform where Singaporean’s can showcase their artistic creations.

This initiative aims to raise awareness and support for individual’s in the creative community who have lost their gigs and jobs opportunities due to COVID-19.

Also Read: Roundup: Singapore’s Responsible Cyber acquires digital identity wallet Secucial

“Many local creatives are our best advocates, showing ardent support of YouTrip through their content. Now more than ever, they
are at the top of our minds, and #CraftWithLove is our way of going the extra mile to support them during this crisis,” said Caecilia Chu, Co-founder of YouTrip.

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Image Credit: SoftBank