Ruangguru denies receiving US$256M from pre-employment card programme

Indonesian edutech startup Ruangguru has dismissed reports that it had received US$256 million from the government-run Pre-employment Card Programme.

“Ruangguru is in no way receiving US$256 million from the programme. The fund received by the digital partner depends solely on the choices of the participants that are free to choose any training class from eight official partners in the pre-employment card’s digital platform,” the company said in a statement.

“All participants of the programme hold full control in using the fund they receive to choose class or programme available provided by these official partners. There is no payment of any form related to Pre-employment card received by Ruangguru’s Skill Academy as of now,” read the statement.

Also Read: [Updated] Indonesian edutech startup Ruangguru confirms US$150M Series C funding round

It further added that as for the selection process of the service providers for the pre-employment card, Ruangguru has gone through a verification process according to Permenko law Number 3, 2020.

Furthermore, as revealed by Indonesia’s Minister of Finance Sri Mulyani on May 6, 2020, the government did not welcome any tender for the platform because there are no provided goods and services paid to digital companies who are partners, it said.

The purchase is done to content providers varied based on the pre-employment card’s participants’ choice. The tender was only taken place if there is only one partner selected, while pre-employment card programme is open for more than one partner, the statement said.

Ruangguru also noted that its CEO Belva Devara has no relation whatsoever in the selection process of Ruangguru’s Skill Academy as one of the providers for Pre-employment card training.

Fore Coffee denies shutdown rumours

Online coffee chain Fore Coffee has dismissed rumours that it is shutting down due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In an official statement, the company said it is still open for businesses and continue to provide services to its customers by offering a variety of new menus.

CEO Elisa Suteja said Fore Coffee has carried out several initiatives to adapt to the changing business situations in response to the pandemic, which include optimising offline store services.

Some steps that have been carried out and planned are the temporary closure of several stores during Ramadan, merging some store locations for efficiency, and upgrading internal systems to improve online sales services.

“We will continue to operate as usual. We closed several outlets and in the process of selling assets related to these locations. Information circulating that Fore Coffee closes permanently in all locations is incorrect,” Suteja insisted.

This week, Fore Coffee also launched the Barista Delivery service via its app. “For every delivery order less than 2 kilometers from the nearest Fore Coffee outlet, it will be delivered directly by Barista for added assurance of hygiene,” Suteja added.

Indonesia government to launch US$43B economic recovery stimulus

The Indonesian government is reportedly rolling out an IDR 641.17 trillion (or US$43 billion) economic recovery stimulus, which is bigger than previous allocations, in a bid to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs), as well as state-owned enterprises (SOEs), The Jakarta Post has reported.

The Finance Minister Mulyani Indrawati said the National Economic Recovery programme would include a strengthened social safety net, tax incentives, capital injections into SOEs, and interest rate subsidies for MSMEs, among other measures.

In doing so, the government is to re-revise the 2020 state budget to accommodate the stimulus as it expects the budget deficit to further increase to 6.27 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP).

In addition to that, the government is planning a US$10 million bailout for 12 SOEs including electricity firm PLN, oil company Pertamina, and flag carrier Garuda Indonesia, in a form of cash compensation and working capital investments, to reduce the impact of the virus crisis.

Cybersecurity needs improvement amid the e-commerce platforms breach, says Indonesia Minister

Indonesia’s Communication and Information Minister Johnny G. Plate has raised awareness for digital companies to improve their cybersecurity systems following a recent breach of users’ data on several of Indonesia’s largest e-commerce platforms, The Jakarta Post has reported.

On Friday, the minister revealed that Indonesia’s digital economy was ‘under attack’, in which an immediate action on cybersecurity measures improvement must take place. “I’m asking all companies to maintain their security systems to protect their applications and overall business,” he said.

Also Read: Afternoon News Roundup: Bukalapak denies reports of user data breach

The comments came after the reports of data breach of e-commerce unicorn Tokopedia back surfaced in March. As per reports, personal information of about 90 million users were compromised, and these details were put up for sale on the dark web for US$5,000 by a member of the data-exchange platform Raid Forums.

Plate added the ministry’s action would include expediting the digitisation of Indonesia’s 64 million micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) to tap into the pandemic’s online boom.

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Picture Credit: Fore Coffe

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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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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