The Financial Times recently bought a majority stake in The Next Web, tech media in Europe

In a report released by Techcrunch, Singapore-based tech media Deal Street Asia is said to be bought out by the Financial Times. The century-old newspaper has just recently closed a majority stake deal with The Next Web before moving on to this deal, expected to close in April.

The investors of the media include Singapore Press Holdings, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, the founder of Alibaba-backed Paytm, the Singapore Angel Network and Hindustan Times, the Indian media firm that operates Mint.

The investment is said to be led by the Financial Times’ Japan-based parent company Nikkei, who reportedly bought one-third of the company that could amount to 51 per cent, waiting to see which investors would sell. Another source in the knowledge of the matter said that the deal is worth at least US$5 million.

If the news is confirmed, the current investors of the media reportedly would get a four to five times positive returns from the early investments.

Deal Street Asia was founded in 2014 by Indian journalists Joji Thomas Philip and Sushobhan Mukherjee, providing daily news on Asia’s startups, financial markets, and business verticals with a subscription business option for its website. The media’s reporters are spread across Southeast Asia and India, licensed to use content from wires.

Also Read: BCA, Digitaraya launch coworking space, accelerator programme Synrgy

Deal Street Asia reportedly has sparked interests with its business events arm, one which Techcrunch highlighted as the possible reason of the acquisition as the Financial Times are trying to enter the Southeast Asian conference scene.

One of the events discussed was the Singapore’s summit back in September featuring senior executives from the likes of DBS, Grab, Sea, GGV, Allianz, and IFC.

So far, the Financial Times has acquired content startup AlphaGrid, intelligence service GIS Planning, and research firm Longitude in addition to The Next Web. In 2015, the media itself was bought by Nikkei from previous owner Pearson for US$1.3 billion.

At the time of the news published, Deal Street Asia hasn’t responded to our request for comment sent today.
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In addition to LINE, we also have updates from BigBasket, WeWork, and Lightspeed

LINE Founder Jungho Shin being appointed as Co-CEO – Press Release

LINE Corporation announced the appointment of its Founder and Chief WOW Officer (CWO) Jungho Shin as Co-CEO of the company, starting from April 1.

The company will have two representative directors: Takeshi Idezawa, the CEO and President, and Jungho Shin, the Co-CEO and Chief WOW Officer.

According to a press statement, as a representative director, Shin will “now focus on bolstering the competitiveness of LINE’s services and promoting innovation—assuming clear responsibility for creating groundbreaking services and the company’s operations.”

CEO and President Takeshi Idezawa will focus on management, revenue, organizational structure, human resources, and recruitment.

Shin’s appointment comes as the company moves towards its “second growth phase” this year, which is marked by the introduction of its new services in the fintech, AI, and blockchain sectors.

India’s BigBasket raises US$150M – Economic Times

Indian grocery e-tailer BigBasket has raised a US$150 million funding round led by South Korea’s Mirae Asset Global Investments, along with UK government-owned CDC Group and existing investor Alibaba, according to an Economic Times report.

Citing regulatory filings, the report said that the funding round has valued the company at “a little over” US$1.2 billion, helping it secure the unicorn status.

Alibaba is set to invest US$50 million while Mirae Asset will put in US$59.9 million, and CDC Group will invest US$40 million.

Also Read: Perx secures US$5M Series B funding from LINE Ventures

WeWork invests in coworking club Betaworks Studios – TechCrunch

Coworking space chain The We Company (WeWork) and JLL Spark Ventures have co-led a US$4.4 million investment in membership-based coworking club and builder community Betaworks Studios, TechCrunch reported.

Betaworks Ventures and existing investor BBG Ventures also participated in the funding round.

Betaworks Studios was launched in 2018. It offers entrepreneurs, artists, engineers and creatives a place to work on projects and accumulate a network.

Lightspeed ousts co-founder following college admission scandal – Bloomberg

Chris Schaepe, co-founder of Silicon Valley venture capital (VC) firm Lightspeed, has been ousted from his post after acknowledging that he had hired Rick Singer, the college admission coach that is currently involved in the college admission scandal, according to Bloomberg.

Schaepe was not named in the list of people directly involved in the college admission bribery scandal; he had also stated he had no idea that Singer was doing anything illegal.

Lightspeed said that it decided to part with its co-founder to minimise impact from personal matters unrelated to the firm.

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When in East Asia, do as the East Asians do

Technology has long broken the language barriers hindering the globalisation of businesses. And while this has already been a significant step forward, there is still the cultural barrier to contend with if any business is to succeed overseas.

We can’t deny the fact that underlying cultural rules define how businesses are run in different regions. Not being able to master those rules increases your chances of failure by tenfold.

Asia, particularly East Asia, is one of the regions that have the sharpest business culture contradictions with the west. That’s probably due to the religious, philosophical, and cultural differences between these two parts of the world.

Although these cultural differences aren’t as pronounced in the media, you must pay closer attention to it as after all, they will make all the difference when it comes to success and failure. In this post, we will look at seven must-know business culture clues that will give you a head start in East Asia.

Embrace humility at all times

If you are a fan of Asian movies, then you must be aware of the tremendous respect that Asians treat each other with. The Asian people respect authority and they always expect those with authority to exercise humility in equal measure.

Therefore, as a business owner, it is culturally appropriate to demand respect from your employees but you must be humble when doing it.

Pierre from New Horizons Global Partners, an Asian corporate service providers suggests we “demand accountability from your partners and suppliers, but be careful not to disrespect them otherwise that would hurt your business”

Give instructions with subtle inferences

Westerners like to shoot it straight. You can openly criticise staff members in the west, give them instructions with clarity and firmness, and be direct with them when laying out business strategies.

The Easterners are different. You will need to give instructions with subtle inferences, being careful not to sound rude or insensitive.

Professionalism is on another level here

Eastern Asians love doing business with professionals. Their professionalism bar, however, is too high that some Westerners find it impossible to cope.

Also Read: Thai online marketplace Tarad.com pivots to full-service e-commerce provider

For example, coming late for meetings is enough reason for Asians to deny your key business opportunities. Putting your arm around someone’s shoulder or any other unnecessary physical contacts can be interpreted to mean that you are professionally immoral.

Also, receiving gifts or business cards is a formal thing in Asia. You must receive them with both hands, literally. If you pocket a card without reading it, that is being rude and unfriendly.

All these are things that you must pay close attention to if want to make it big in East Asia.

Decision-making is highly centralised

Apart from the Japanese who make decisions like Westerners, other East Asian countries have highly centralised decision making. Don’t expect your employees to make decisions on their own, act on those decisions, and stand responsible for any and all their actions.

Here, you as the boss, are expected to act ‘hands-on’; making decisions for everyone from top to bottom and then holding the staff accountable for the decisions you make for him/her.

Agreement vs. acknowledgment

In the West, someone will only respond with a “YES” if he or she agrees with what you suggested. In the East, someone will say yes as a sign of acknowledgment for what you said, not necessarily in agreement.

Asians will say yes and then no in the same breath. Be careful, therefore, not to misinterpret a YES in East Asia.

Conservative dressing

Although the world is moving away from conservative dressing and adapting to the official casual form of dressing, East Asia is yet to make a full switch. You will still be expected to wear a dark suit, a white shirt, and a dull tie if you are a man while women will be expected to wear a feminine version of what men wear.

Also Read: The Financial Times reportedly acquires Singapore-based tech media Deal Street Asia

Don’t go to business meetings with a casual jacket or without a tie and expect to be taken seriously.

Privacy isn’t too much a thing in East Asia

While it is okay to keep secrets from your superiors and colleagues at work in the West, Eastern Asians hate that.

You will be expected to keep everything open and transparent if you are to gain their trust.

The bottom line?

If you are planning to start a business in Eastern Asia, these seven tips will help you to relate productively with the native clients and business associates. While at it, you can engage a professional employer organisation when recruiting employees as such organisations know exactly where and how to find the best talents.

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As Fintech startups gain prominence and are starting to make a bigger impact on consumers, financial institutions and economies grow more interconnected within this complex ecosystem.

The best practices and lessons learned from ecosystems around the world, particularly in emerging markets, can help stakeholders (fintech companies, consumers, financial institutions, investors, regulators, and educational institutions) work together to deliver financial services at lower costs, higher speed, and better qualities.

Ecosystems or hubs have shown particular value in emerging markets. In the 26 hubs and emerging markets across eight geographic clusters, we see different drivers, notable players, and opportunities for growth but also common themes and best practices for success.

ASEAN: fast growing economies with large populations make a unique playground.

Connecting China and India, ASEAN brings together large local and global players with innovative but still cautious regulators. With large population bases in some of the world’s fastest-growing and most dynamic economies, innovation in ASEAN is key to meeting the increasing demand for better quality services.

Also Read: Today’s top tech news, March 29: LINE names Founder Jungho Shin as Co-CEO

Latin America: opportunities in an underserved market.

With governments considering financial inclusion to drive sustainable economic development, Latin America is ripe for collaboration among companies, investors, and governments.

Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe and Central Asia (CESA): leveraging a strong talent base.

CESA’s strategic location, strong infrastructure, sizeable talent base, and access to a large unified market make the region an attractive location from which homegrown companies and incoming investors can service the EU market.

Middle East: government support and capital are driving FinTech growth.

Sovereign and private investors are making major capital commitments in the Middle East as the region focuses on diversifying economies and servicing Islamic banking needs.

Africa: leapfrog innovations.

Service providers have huge opportunities to leapfrog generations of technology development to deliver cutting edge solutions to Africa’s unbanked and underbanked populations, in particular via the region’s deep mobile penetration and service delivery innovations.

Asia: the rise of independent finlife ecosystem platforms in Greater China, and India brings out the best from East and West.

Fintech is the “way of life” in China, where supportive regulation and a confluence of market factors have taken e-commerce and chat platforms into full-scale financial service providers with room for further expansion and growth in global markets.

In India, the unique government-led digital infrastructure, along with rapid urbanisation and mobile penetration, are driving developments, particularly in payments.

In each cluster, common pillars unite successful fintech ecosystems. To create a strong, scalable, sustainable enabling environment, clusters must facilitate collaboration, allow easy access to local and international markets, and feature government and industry support.

The ecosystem must be able to access, train, and retain the highest quality talent. Consumers, corporations, and financial institutions must form the backbone of sustained demand. Companies must be able to access risk, growth, and strategic capital.

Also Read: Smart retail startup Blue Mobile raises Series C funding from Ant Financial

Finally, fintech laws must allow an overall regulatory environment that eases operations (including credit availability, taxation policies, visa policies, and regulatory sandboxes) and encourages competition.

Singapore is a particularly successful story, and its continued success as a fintech hub goes hand in hand with the overall strength of the industry. Singapore’s central bank established the Financial Technology and Innovation Group in 2015 with the vision of establishing Singapore as a smart financial centre.

The country also committed SGD$225 million (US$166 million) for Fintech projects from 2015-2020, established a regulatory sandbox, introduced blockchain to interbank payments, issued guidance on ICOs, and plans to issue guidance for use of artificial intelligence in the industry.

The annual Singapore fintech Festival brings together close to 45,000 participants from 130 countries and 5,000 companies. Matchmaking at the festival in 2018 resulted in a groundbreaking investment of USD$6.2 billion pledged to Fintech startups which will be realized in 2019, and an additional USD$6 billion earmarked for the next two years.

As fintech evolves, it is clear that it needs to have strong ecosystems. Startups and scale-ups, regulators, governments, traditional institutions, investors, and talent institutions are all key players in the constantly evolving ecosystems that will drive competition and innovation while maintaining the safety of the financial system for today and tomorrow.

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The national scale competition is supported by five government ministries and agencies

Grab announced that it has partnered with five government ministries and agencies in launching Thinkubator, a startup conference and competition that the company said seeking innovation and tech talent development in Indonesia.

Coordinating Maritime Affairs Ministry, the Office of Presidential Staff [KSP], Ministry of Communication and Information Technology, the Indonesian Investment Coordinating Board [BKPM] & Agency for Creative Economy [Bekraf]) are five ministries involved in succeeding the competition.

Officiated by the Coordinating Minister of Maritime Affairs, Luhut B Pandjaitan, Thinkubator would be a public-private collaboration between Grab and Indonesian government in search of the next decacorn startup for Indonesia, said the company’s official statement.

Later on, Grab said it plans to bring this program to other Southeast Asia countries, to help grow the overall tech ecosystem in the region.

“There is so much innovation here, driven by a real passion to make a difference. With Thinkubator, we want to create an open and inclusive platform that will find and nurture the best ideas from Indonesia. A large part of Grab’s success is thanks to the many giants that support us. We have the opportunity to pay it forward and are excited to join hands with the Indonesian government on this search for Southeast Asia’s next big success story,” said Hooi Ling Tan, Co-founder of Grab.

Also Read: Facebook Indonesia confirms the resignation of Country Director Sri Widowati

Thinkubator was first conceived from a conversation with the country’s Coordinating Minister of Maritime Affairs, and has become a nation-wide competition in search of the best ideas across key categories including Logistics/Transportation, Agriculture/Environment, Education, Health and others, all focussing on diversity and inclusion.

In total, Grab said it has welcomed 1,165 startups applications for the program, with 150 shortlisted candidates to join the conference today that includes workshops and networking opportunities.

From the shortlist, six top finalists will be selected from to pitch their ideas in front of a professional panel of top business leaders that includes William Tanuwijaya, Co-Founder of Tokopedia; Friderica Widyasari Dewi, Executive Director at KSEI; and Chairul Tanjung, Chairman of CT Corp.

The finalists of Thinkubator will have a chance to receive funding from a total pool valued at Rp 3 billion, including access to Microsoft Azure to grow their business. Exposures on a national television will also be an advantage of the finalists as the final will be broadcasted live on Trans TV, tomorrow, March 29, 2019 at 8 PM.

Also Read: Insurtech Waterdrop Company closes nearing US$74M Series B funding

Grab also has Grab Ventures Velocity (GVV), Grab’s flagship scale-up program for post-seed startups that would be a follow-up to Thinkubator. It will start accepting applicants for their second batch in Indonesia, offering a platform to test and commercialise their solutions with the Grab customer base.

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Other major story of the day is Paytm’s ongoing talks to raise US$1.5-2B from existing investors SoftBank Vision Fund and Ant Financial

Digital tech, food security among key areas to get more R&D funding [ChannelNewsAsia]

Following a mid-term review of its five-year science and technology plan, Singapore will pump in more money to boost research and development (R&D) efforts in three key areas, namely digital technologies, cell therapy manufacturing and food security.

“Our investment in R&D is a long-term endeavor. It is not just for the short run and we must continue our investments in basic sciences,” said Finance Minister Heng Swee Keat on Wednesday.

Heng, who is also the chairman of the National Research Foundation (NRF), was speaking alongside Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, Trade and Industry Minister Chan Chun Sing and National Development Minister Lawrence Wong at a press conference held at the end of the 11th Research, Innovation and Enterprise Council (RIEC) meeting.

Paytm raising up to US$2B; Valuation may touch US$18B [The Economic Times]

Online payments services company Paytm is in the midst of raising US$1.5-2 billion from existing investors SoftBank Vision Fund and Alibaba’s financial affiliate Ant Financial, said people with knowledge of the development.

The latest financing round at One97 Communications, the parent of Paytm, is likely to peg the company’s valuation at US$16-18 billion, these people said, adding that new investors may join the current round.

Grab Malaysia drivers defend new cancellation fee policy [The Star]

Grab drivers are defending Grab Malaysia’s move to charge users a fee for cancelling.

Arif Asyraf, the president of the 300-strong Grab Drivers Malaysia Association, said the new policy was something that has been requested by drivers for a long time.

“We feel good about the cancellation fee. It’s something that drivers have been asking for Grab Malaysia to implement,” he said when contacted.

According to Arif, 36, the cancellation fee is meant to discipline some riders who take advantage of the services that Grab drivers provide. He said riders only get charged a fee of RM3 to RM5 if they cancel five minutes after a booking has been made.

PH payments app Mynt mimics model of its 45% stake owner Ant Financial [DealStreetAsia]

Mynt, the Philippine payments app backed by billionaire Jack Ma’s Ant Financial, plans to roll out insurance products en route to becoming a sprawling financial services platform in its Chinese ally’s image.

The operator of GCash is now trying to become a conduit for insurance policies with the help of strategic partners that can help it expand a slate of products from banking and credit-scoring to financing and money market funds, Chief Executive Officer Anthony Thomas said in an interview.

E-sports startup GamingMonk attracts strategic investment from Japanese company GameWith [press release]

Gaming and esports platform GamingMonk has raised US$100,000 as strategic investment from Japanese gaming media GameWith.

The funding is being used for product development, team building and brand marketing. GamingMonk has grown its user base by 500% in the last six months.

The startup raised a seed round last year from Incubate Fund, Rajan Anandan, Stellaris Ventures, Smile Group, AdvantEdge Founders and Samir Khurana.

GamingMonk is a community whose mission is to build an ecosystem for gamers through prize tournaments, gaming content and many other engagement programs.

The company was founded in 2014 by Abhay Sharma and Ashwin Haryani.

Takuya Imaizumi, CEO of GameWith, said: “The gaming industry in India has strong growth potential and GamingMonk, led by a strong management team, is well-positioned to further benefit from industry trends. We are excited about the company’s growth prospects and proud to have this opportunity to support the journey.”

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The digital gifting and loyalty platform receives an undisclosed amount of funding from VIISA and VinaCapital Ventures

Digital gifting platform based in Vietnam UrBox announced today that it has closed a seed round of funding for an undisclosed amount from VIISA and VinaCapital Ventures, two Vietnamese VCs.

In an official statement, UrBox shares that the funding it received will be used to strengthen their merchant, create synergies across companies, provide UrBox with access to top talents, as well as expand connection with global tech companies to have a presence in other countries in Southeast Asia.

“The experience in the transition of customer service from offline to online for SMEs has been painfully labored, especially with larger enterprises. We believe that UrBox’s persistence in crafting a better solution for every new business, such as Urbox’s API services, can resolve this problem for B2B clients. Through the Accelerator Program and follow-on investment, we support Urbox in their growth and working with their strategic investor, VinaCapital Ventures, who also believes in Urbox’s mission and team quality,” shared Hieu Vo, CFO at VIISA.

Furthermore, as B2B is their key focus, UrBox will leverage on VinaCapital Ventures and Dragon Capital (VIISA’s founders)’s network to reach more potential and scalable partnerships opportunities and will do so by hiring talents in technology, marketing, partnerships, and business development.

UrBox was first launched in late 2017 as a platform that helps businesses integrate their reward or loyalty program with an ever-growing network of national and international gift suppliers or merchants. UrBox also connects brands with customers through multiple digital channels.

Also Read: Smart retail startup Blue Mobile raises Series C funding from Ant Financial

Using UrBox, customers can receive the gift voucher and store it on their app/phone to redeem at both offline and online store.

Determined to change manual processes in the reward system, UrBox founders initially started out as a consulting agency to build loyalty programs by connecting merchants to big corporates in Vietnam. With its business model, businesses don’t need to deal with each gift supplier or merchant, print out the cash vouchers, pack, and send gifts to customers as it’s all done by UrBox.

To date, UrBox said that it has expanded their gifting acceptance with merchant network of hundreds of lifestyles brands and nearly 3,000 outlets across Vietnam, ranging from Dining & Drinking, Shopping, to Online.

UrBox claimed to be serving more than 30 top corporates in different sectors from banking, telco, insurance to tech companies.

e27 previously reported that VinaCapital Ventures made an investment in Wee Digital and UrBox just a week prior to this news.
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Image Credit: UrBox

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The Tokopedia-UI AI Center of Excellence will focus on AI implementation in the various aspects of society and industry

Indonesian e-commerce giant Tokopedia and Universitas Indonesia (UI) today announced the launch of Tokopedia-UI AI Center of Excellence, an artificial intelligence (AI) development centre at the university’s campus in Depok, West Java.

In a press statement, the institutions explained that the initiative taken to encourage academics and researchers to use technology, especially AI, in presenting real-life solutions to problems that occur in society as well as industries.

Through the collaboration, researchers from UI will develop AI-based solutions to address problems that occur in society and industry, including the e-commerce industry, such as logistics, risk management, cybersecurity, and payment.

The centre will also use super computer technology as provided as NVIDIA.

Also Read: Blockchain-based e-KYC platform claims the throne at Binar Academy and Tokopedia’s Hack of Thrones

“This facility is also expected to be able to support Faculty of Computer Science (Fasilkom UI) in producing human resources that are ready to contribute and compete globally, especially in the field of AI,” said Fasilkom UI Dean Mirna Adriani, Ph.D.

Tokopedia CEO William Tanuwijaya stated that the implementation of AI technology in the various aspects of e-commerce business, from warehousing to logistics, helps the company in its mission to democratise commerce through technology.

“At Tokopedia, we believe that technology should be an enabler that empowers the people, rather than a disruptor,” he said.

Previously, fellow Indonesian unicorn and Tokopedia competitor Bukalapak has also launched its R&D centres in Bandung and Surabaya.

Traveltech unicorn Traveloka has also opened its R&D centre in Bangalore, India.

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Image Credit: Tokopedia

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Southeast Asia-based Blue Mobile is a vending machine platform

Along with Beijing-based Joy Capital as co-investor, Hangzhou-based Ant Financial invests in Blue Mobile, a vending machine platform based in Southeast Asia. The amount of the Series C funding round is undisclosed, as reported by KrAsia.

The company said it will use the funding to explore collaboration with Truemoney, Dana, Lazada, and Tokopedia for mobile payments usage possibilities.

Back in 2014, Blue Mobile was founded in Shenzhen and now has subsidiary companies in Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

It has a flagship product called BluePay Wallet, which is a mobile payment platform that allows payment, transfer, with no transaction fee, said to be handling more than 300,000 transactions on a daily basis.

Also Read: Insurtech Waterdrop Company closes nearing US$74M Series B funding

The company claims that it now runs more than 6,000 smart vending machines across Indonesia and Thailand. It plans to add 30,000 units in the coming year and partner with major e-money platforms
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Photo by Laura Thonne on Unsplash

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Afterall, nobody wants a lousy one-star app rating right?

Between April to May 2017, our team launched the first version of Funding Societies | Modalku investors’ app on both Android and iOS. From a modest group of two developers and one freelance designer, we have expanded to a fun team of seven engineers and two designers, managing seven different applications altogether.

In this article, we wish to unveil our biggest upgrade to date — along with the challenges we encountered, our approach to solving them, and the kind of impact we strive to deliver as app developers.

We hope this will be helpful to anyone contemplating a significant refactoring phase or a major design overhaul!

_{Left: previous version vs right: investor app V2.}

Challenge #1: tech debt

As we expanded, our investor base and their expectations and needs grew proportionally. What started as a lean mobile app soon evolved into a complex product which required quicker iterations and stronger feature updates.

However, our project architecture wasn’t ready to scale this just yet. To provide a little more candid context, our early application releases fulfilled just three conditions for production to take place:

• The release wouldn’t spike our crash rates to more than or equal to 0.05 per cent.
• Users would be able to invest (core functionality).
• Financial data presented on the app was accurate.

While this approach was straightforward, it brought forth a greater inclination for several workarounds to be hidden under the rug, making it increasingly difficult to build new and supplementary features.

While the project had accumulated tech debt in several measures, the ones that stood out the most emerged when we were working on massive storyboards (iOS), and huge Activities and ViewControllers.

The pain-points we faced could be summarised into five points:

• Difficulty in implementing unit tests.
• Painfully slow load times of Interface Builders.
• Conflicting constraints.
• Lack of reusability leading to code redundancy and inconsistencies.
• Impossible for developers to collaborate on UI development.

Our solution
Since our investor app caters to regional users, this would mean that there are vastly distinct user journeys that we have to keep in mind — the biggest consideration point being accommodating the differences in legal regulations, currencies, and languages across the three countries.

As such, we knew that moving towards custom labels, custom text-fields and table-views, and a specific number for matters was the way forward in fostering reusability.

With that, the next step for us was to review our project architecture and reconsider Model View Controller (MVC). We decided to go ahead with Model-View-View-Model (MVVM) for V2 – paving the path for lean activities/view-controllers and cleaner distinguishing of business logic based on a UI standpoint.

Below is an overview of our final architecture:

Broadly speaking, our architecture consists of four important layers:

1. Managers – This layer is responsible to connect with several individual components. Each component, for example, Retrofit in Android and Alamofire in Swift, is only accessible via their respective manager (which in this case will be NetworkManager).
2. Repositories – This is a very critical layer as it’s responsible for decoupling the business logic from the UI. Classes in this layer expose only relevant methods via interfaces in order to protect the business logic being modified by the UI layer.
3. View Models – Standard view models in the MVVM architecture. View Models contain all attributes that are to be displayed by the respective UI.
4. Views – All the XML, Storyboards, XIBs, and associated view classes to make the experience pretty belong here!

As you can probably infer from above, our revised architecture is not an overly-complicated one. We focused on keeping it simple so as to keep the development process efficient and easy to understand.

This architecture eventually alleviated all our pain points, empowered us to scale efficiently, and allow us to build more supplementary features.

Challenge #2: dated UI and UX

We believe it is imperative to keep up with the evolving needs of our users. A casual browse across different user interfaces of popular products will make it pretty apparent that the adoption of dark themes is on the rise.

Earlier this year, Mojave introduced the popular theme to MacOS. It was also the top requests voted by YouTube users. Moreover, Windows 10 and Android’s support for the dark theme is fast approaching as well.

The mobile and design teams identified the trend towards dark-themed applications and hugely appreciated its usability. As such, we were inspired to incorporate it into our app to enhance the experience and hopefully delight our users.

Besides ramping up on the physical appeal of our user interface, we have also introduced major changes and improvements to everything related to UI and UX.

Our solution
We can summarise two modules that went through a major overhaul below (user onboarding & portfolio management):

a. User onboarding

User onboarding on regulated finance apps can be tedious, especially when it comes with the various KYC (Know Your Customer) and AML (Anti-Money Laundering) checks, and other regulatory requirements. With such information to be accounted for, the process of even beginning to utilise the app can certainly seem daunting.

This is where we believe coming up with a considerate and well-thought user journey, and offering helpful UX-related messages, can mitigate the problem. As such, we introduced two key changes into our user onboarding process. They are namely:

1. USPs (Unique Selling Points)

Before kick-starting the onboarding journey, we present users with four key USPs of Funding Societies; in short — a ‘why choose us?’ For a relatively new financial services company like us, we believe it’s important for us to take time in establishing trust in our new investors.

2. Integrating-arrows button

With so many fields to fill in, we wanted to offer users an easier way to navigate between fields, along with a button that’s always accessible for continuing to the next step. With a traditional approach, users would be required to constantly scroll and tap.

We tried to make it more straightforward with guiding arrow buttons; all while making sure the app remains elegant.

b. Better portfolio management

1. Improving dashboards

We believe a good dashboard doesn’t only show information that users care about, but also helps them to intuitively find the data they truly need and help make these data easier to comprehend for them. While designing the dashboard, we researched in-depth to ensure that we show the right information hierarchy. We also grouped data in a more logical way.

For example, instead of showing all financial data and returns in one page, we grouped them in 2 tabs: Performance and Account. This makes our dashboard more user-friendly and helps app-users access the right information they need more effortlessly.

2. Portfolio filters

Finding specific data in a long list can be a pain in the neck. Good, functioning filter options then become the ideal solution to this problem. We designed the new portfolio filters based on our users’ job stories, and it goes something like this:

“As an investor, when it’s the [end of the month], I wish to check [all my due repayments this month] to [summarise the monthly performance]”.

By making an effort to empathize with our users and making decisions based on their point-of-view, the new filters we introduce will become more meaningful and beneficial.

In retrospect — how did it all go?

Looking back, we’re extremely grateful for having gone through this enormous refactoring phase. Having a clean code-base has significantly boosted our engineers’ excitement level in pushing forward more effective updates, improved internal NPS scores, and also increased the average number of story-points completed each sprint.

There was a direct impact on business too; our improved onboarding journey is directly attributable to a significant increase in user sign-ups and retention. If you’re considering an enormous refactoring effort while keeping the current boat afloat, we’d recommend three key principles to stick by:

1. Simplicity is underrated, less is really more.
2. Taking a step back is more often than not taking a step forward.
3. Always empathize with your users.

We hope that this article has brought you plenty of useful insights, and for the budding app developers and engineers alike, we wish you the very best in building something that is ever trailblazing and game-changing!

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Image Credits: deagreez

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