The Semakau Island Landfill, located about 8km south of Singapore’s main island, takes in about 200,000 tonnes of solid waste a year, earning it the unceremonious title of “the rubbish dump of Singapore”. But the island is much more than a resting place for refuse. Today, it is also home to fish hatcheries and nurseries. It is known for its rich marine biodiversity and picturesque views. In addition, it may hold the key to energy security for remote villages and tiny islands.

On a recent Monday afternoon, Hans Bjorn Puttgen leads a group of reporters to a near-empty plot of land on the island. The 64,000 sq m space, roughly the size of eight soccer fields, currently boasts just a row of photovoltaic panels. But it will soon be the site of four hybrid microgrids that will tap solar, tidal, diesel and power-to-gas technologies, Puttgen says. The first phase of the project has been completed, with more than 3,000 sq m of photovoltaic panels installed on the rooftop of the transfer building, where barges berth.

Puttgen is a professor at the Nanyang Technological University and senior director of its Energy Research Institute. He heads a team of NTU scientists who are working to put together a largescale integrated offshore renewable energy system on Semakau. Dubbed the Renewable Energy Integration Demonstrator- Singapore (REIDS) initiative, it will be the first such project in Southeast Asia.

Other members of the REIDS consortium include ENGIE Lab Singapore, a unit of French energy utility ENGIE; energy management and automation solutions provider Schneider Electric; energy solutions provider General Electric Grid Solutions, a unit of GE; and utility operator Sembcorp Industries.

When completed in the third quarter of next year, the four microgrids will be capable of managing multiple renewable energy sources. They can be operated independently or collectively. Once fully operational, the microgrids are expected to power fish hatcheries and nurseries at Semakau Landfill. In the medium term, the goal is to produce enough stable and consistent energy to power 250 four-room high-rise apartments for a year.

The project will serve as a test-bed to demonstrate how renewable energy- powered microgrids can operate reliably and inexpensively in a fully isolated environment. The island was chosen because it is isolated from an energy point of view, thus simulating the kind of environment typically found in remote villages and islands, says Puttgen.

Etienne Drouet, director of ENGIE Lab Singapore, says the ultimate goal is to commercialise the integrated product in Asia-Pacific, particularly in the Philippines and Indonesia. These are markets in which ENGIE is already supplying off-grid solutions. “But, in two years, we want to supply the next generation of energy management systems to them,” he says.

Off-grid requirements
Globally, as many as 1.2 billion people do not have access to electricity. More than 95% of this underserved population live in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia. Typically, they live in remote areas that are not connected to national power grids. Remote communities lucky enough to have access to electricity rely on diesel generators, which are expensive and harmful to the environment.

For companies in the energy business, this off-grid market represents tremendous opportunity. In Asia-Pacific alone, it is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 31.3% from 2013 to 2023. By then, it will be valued at $5.6 billion.

The solution, it would seem, is renewable energy, but off-grid renewable energy systems pose several challenges. One is stability. Winds and waves do not generate the same amount of power at all times, and even the sun is sometimes clouded over. Grid technologies today work best on stable and continuous power generation, which renewable energy systems throw off. Adding variable load factors further complicates matters. If demand surges just as energy production plunges, stored power can be depleted quickly, leading to a power outage.

At Semakau, ENGIE and Schneider have co-developed a common energy management solution to integrate the various renewable energy sources with a portfolio of storage systems. They will also use hydrogen as an energy source, to smooth out lumpy output or fulfil any temporary increase in the load profile. The hydrogen chain will include a low-temperature hydrogen generator, storage for the hydrogen generated and a fuel cell for converting the stored hydrogen into electrical energy. A hydrogen refuelling station will be constructed and interfaced with the hydrogen cycle to fuel electric vehicles such as forklifts, light vans or scooters.

The project relies on predictive algorithm to forecast load demands and the available supply of renewable energy sources. It uses data from weather forecasts as well as consumption and production profiles to ensure a more accurate forecast. The system will monitor real-time fluctuations in output and demand, so that timely adjustments can be made.

Another useful addition is a Demand Response feature, which controls when energy is dispatched for a specific use. Drouet cites the example of an ice factory that typically has to run eight hours a day. With the Demand Response feature, those eight hours of power can be dispatched at a point that works best for the microgrid. In other words, the microgrid will be able to determine where the needs for power are the highest and channel electricity there. Conversely, should the microgrid determine that a specific load is not of a high priority, it can delay dispatching electricity till the overall load demand on the grid is lower.

Of course, that means not every customer will have power when he needs it. “There will be occasions when optimisation of an individual sub-system must be sacrificed to optimise the whole system,” says Drouet.

Commercial deployment
Drouet acknowledges that, even if the REIDS initiative proves successful, deploying it in other markets will be difficult. The solution requires not only acceptance by the local community, but also what he calls “a first level of independence” by the local community. This involves equipping them with the relevant skills and knowledge to operate the system.

Inevitably, there will be questions about reliability too. He cites a recent sociological study done in the Philippines. “The first question the locals asked us was whether our system was typhoon-proof. Given that the Philippines is prone to typhoons and has suffered severe damage in recent years, it is important that we build a system that the local communities have confidence in,” says Drouet.

Nevertheless, the project has had a promising start. And the Semakau Island Landfill, previously little more than a wasteland and a nature reserve, has Photovoltaic panels installed at Semakau Island Landfill an interesting future.

This article appeared in the Enterprise of Issue 757 (Dec 5) of The Edge Singapore.

One-year-old fitness start-up KFit Group is pivoting. The company, which sells subscriptions to multiple fitness clubs, has just acquired Groupon Malaysia for an undisclosed price. It previously bought Groupon Indonesia and launched a mobile marketplace called Fave, which offers food, spa and fitness deals. Founder Joel Neoh clearly thinks Southeast Asia has room for yet another online marketplace. He may have the right idea.

While China and India are larger markets, Southeast Asia is a more attractive market for start-ups and the early-stage venture capitalists looking to fund them. “Competition is very high in China and India. You can find better opportunities in Southeast Asia because we don’t have the same intensity as they do. We are eight years behind China and four years behind India,” says Alice Besomi, investment analyst at early-stage venture company Jungle Ventures. In many sectors, the region has no market leader, she says, which makes it easier for VCs to back companies early on and at a fairer valuation.

Her colleague Yash Sankrityayan adds that Southeast Asian consumers also have higher incomes. “In India and China, most start-up activities take place in the big cities. There are nine to 10 big cities in Southeast Asia with about 75 million people that have more spending power than India and [that are] comparable to China,” says Sankrityayan. The spending power in the top Southeast Asian cities, he says, is more than twice that of India.

In the 12 months ended June, startups in Southeast Asia raised US$1.6 billion ($2.3 billion). That was less than a quarter of what was raised in India or China, according to Jungle Ventures. Industry players with backers from China say valuations in the region are five to 10 times cheaper than they are in China.

Khailee Ng, managing partner of VC seed fund and start-up accelerator 500 Startups, says the region has the potential to create “big internet companies”, but the VC scene has not quite caught up. “This means there’s an undersupply of investment capital, making it very affordable to invest in Southeast Asia,” he says. “With a young population — more than 70% are under the age of 35 — and consistent and strong GDP growth, this creates a strong case for investors.”

The case for Southeast Asia
According to Jungle Ventures, Southeast Asia largely has better infrastructure and internet penetration than India. Leading the charge is Indonesia. According to GSMA Intelligence, a provider of mobile operator data, the country has 320 million mobile connections in a population of 250 million. Most Southeast Asian countries rank better than China when it comes to ease of doing business.

More importantly, it is easier and cheaper to acquire customers because the market is less saturated. “Capital is readily available in India, which leads many start-ups to [go all out] on marketing, and end up giving too much discounts,” says Sankrityayan. “Here, you have less capital to offer discounts blindly, and people are more discerning with what they buy. So, if you can build a good brand, you have a chance of pricing your goods better than in India.”

He points to a Jungle Ventures-backed company called Pomelo, which sells clothing online. Transactions on Bangkok- based Pomelo’s site average US$50, versus US$20 to US$25 for the average fashion e-commerce retailer in India.

One difficulty that start-ups sometimes encounter is dealing with different languages, currencies, infrastructure and regulations. But Ng of 500 Startups says the companies in its Southeast Asian portfolio, called 500 Durians, have generally found a way to scale across multiple countries. The failure rate for 500 Startups’ Southeast Asian companies is just 3%. He says, “The cities of Southeast Asia have plenty of similarities, making it easier to expand across cities. Some bright opportunities include local product brand leaders that leverage the internet to get customers and sell to them.”

While many start-ups are copying successful models from the US and the UK, Ng says more local innovations are springing up. For instance, iGrow connects farmers who have idle land with investors who fund the production of organic food. The start-up also deploys a cloud-based agricultural management software to help farmers make sustainable incomes.

Immature ecosystem
Of course, many start-ups continue to fail. And still more are forced to change their business models. When Malaysia- based concierge start-up Belazee was launched, it scored coverage with Bloomberg TV and a US$500,000 investment round with Cradle Fund. Last year, its Malaysia and Singapore operations undertook 6,000 orders a month and grew at a rate of 150% each month. But offering a concierge service must not have made financial sense. Belazee is now a B2B chatbot for financial institutions in Indonesia.

“In general, the start-up market here is still very young and immature compared with other regions, and that is why it’s mainly attractive for early-stage VCs, and not for big late-stage investors,” says Igor Pesin, investment director of fintech venture firm Life.SREDA. The veteran investor says Southeast Asian start-ups are facing a hard time scaling across the region because of the lack of basic technological infrastructure. At the same time, these start-ups are “not very open” to M&A opportunities and prefer to “grow organically”, which makes them unattractive to investors.

While Singapore is seen as a startup hub in the region, Pesin says, the country is also conventionally known as a starting point or “soft landing” for start-ups in this region. This may have shielded them from the real challenges they may face when they reach out to other countries in the region.

At the same time, James Tan of Quest Ventures warns that a recent shift in focus to deep tech start-ups may hinder the growth in ICT sectors. “[This would create] an opening for our regional neighbours to grow their ICT sectors with indigenous companies.” This year, the government has announced more funding to power deep tech start-ups.

To make Southeast Asian start-ups more attractive to investors, Pesin says start-ups should set up core teams in all their target markets to reduce costs and help form local partnerships. “Startups in Singapore are more ‘relaxed’ compared with regional peers [owing partly to the better funding support in Singapore than in the region]. Startups should always be hungry and never feel relaxed and saved, even though they are being incubated in Singapore.”

Today, one of the biggest hurdles in Southeast Asia’s start-up scene is the lack of later-stage funding. Most funds operating in Southeast Asia are dealing in seed and Series A investments.

But as global funds such as Sequoia Capital and SoftBank Capital become more active in the region, Jungle Ventures hopes Southeast Asia will become an even more important destination for investments. “In the next three years, once they start seeing more Series As and Bs happening, I think investors will take this market more seriously,” says Sankrityayan.

Jungle Ventures is among those trying for bigger rounds. It is investing some US$100 million in 15 start-ups and setting aside extra funds to back its portfolio companies in later rounds. In doing so, it aims to burnish Southeast Asia’s reputation.

This article appeared in the Enterprise of Issue 757 (Dec 5) of The Edge Singapore.

From practising kung fu to saving orangutans and driving innovation at DBS Bank, Neal Cross is charting an unconventional path as chief innovation officer.

Leaning back in his chair, Neal Cross waxes lyrical about Asian martial arts and their nuances. “I used to do wing chun, same as Bruce Lee, which is a hard art — [it] uses muscle and physicality to be effective. Tai chi uses energy, qi, and that’s a soft art. It’s all about flowing and submissiveness; you use [your adversary’s] own energy against them, but it’s very slow,” he muses. “Xing yi— very, very hard energy, you hit them like a spear. You can virtually leap halfway across the office with one stride,” he adds, gesturing at the distance. “It’s quite interesting to watch.”

Unshaven and clad in loose, rumpled khakis, Cross, who still practises tai chi, is quite the opposite of what one imagines a bank employee, or a martial arts expert, would look like. The brown cotton jacket he has on during his interview with Enterprise is well-worn. Cross recalls he was attired similarly at the G20 Summit in China earlier this year, seated between the German finance minister and the governor of the Bank of England. “I was the first ever [speaker] not to wear a shirt and tie.” In August, he was pictured wearing the same jacket with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, after being recognised as the world’s most disruptive chief innovation officer.

Indeed, Cross’ laidback air belies the impact he has had and the significant task he has at hand — transforming one of Southeast Asia’s largest banks from within. Cross has been chief innovation officer at DBS Group Holdings since 2014 as the bank pursues what it calls a “digital agenda”. His job is to gradually turn the bank into a giant innovation group that embraces an entrepreneurial, experimental culture, one employee at a time.

“I feel that most innovation groups have got it completely wrong. They tend to be focused on inventing things. In my group, no one is allowed to invent anything,” Cross says of the innovation team he leads. “I could sit here all day with my team and come up with amazing solutions for the future of financial services, but would that have changed the bank? No. There would still be the same old people in the bank operating the same old way. We’re in the middle of quite serious disruption in our industry. It’s the ones who are most adaptable that will survive.”

In his view, banks should already be inventing products, developing technology and carrying out largescale projects. “[The job of the innovation team] is to bring a different side to that, to help them be more creative, more ambitious, experimental and partnership- led. Essentially, take what they’re doing today and make it better,” he explains.

Driven by ambition
Over the past few years, DBS has launched a series of events and products that include “talking” ATMs for the visually impaired and an agreement with peer-topeer (P2P) lending platform MoolahSense to expand funding sources for small businesses.

In April last year, the bank decided to build hackathons into its talent development programme, with bank employees working alongside start-ups to create new products. Some employees are given time off from their job to work on their innovation, which could eventually be adopted by the bank in some way. Other initiatives aimed at embracing digitisation and technology include pre-accelerator programmes to cultivate fintech start-ups. Most recently, on Nov 14, during the first Singapore FinTech Festival, the bank opened a new facility at Fusionopolis, designed for co-working spaces. It will house accelerator programmes and workshops for staff and start-ups.

Cross believes, however, that while fintech startups and the like are giving the institutions a run for their money, the way the financial industry is evolving is far more complex. “There are five types of fintech,” he explains. The banks themselves are the biggest and most successful, followed by the banks’ typical suppliers such as those that develop mobile banking platforms or banking terminals. Then there are fintech start-ups that are either partnering the banks, such as MoolahSense, or are pitting themselves against the traditional financial institutions, such as London-based P2P money transfer service TransferWise.

But it is the likes of Google, Amazon.com, Alibaba Group Holding, Facebook and Apple that are really going to change the industry, Cross says. “They’re the real ones you have to watch. They have a billion customers, the brightest minds on the planet, billions of dollars and the best brands in the world.”

In his view, search engines in particular command significant leverage. “They own the internet.” For example, if the search engine decides to make a deal with one bank and send all searches for mortgages to the bank’s website in exchange for a commission, “they’re in banking, technically”, he muses. “Every time somebody does mobile banking, they’re either looking at a Google or an Apple logo.”

In China, third-party payment platform Alipay, a unit of Chinese online marketplace Alibaba, has overtaken PayPal in terms of volume to become the largest mobile payment service, with some 175 million transactions a day. Also in China, WeChat, a free messaging platform developed by Tencent Holdings, has morphed into a do-everything app that allows users to transfer money and buy plane tickets.

Cross believes the success of the Chinese platforms is not simply a result of the sheer size of the market. “It’s the ambition level as well. There’s no reason that PayPal couldn’t do what AliPay did,” he says. Indeed, Cross disagrees with people who complain that they have found it difficult to succeed because they have been held back by regulation. “I think they’re hamstrung by their own ambition level.”

As such, his task at DBS delves deep into what those ambitions might be. What he does is to “raise ambition and bring a scientific process to accelerate innovation”, as he puts it. “I want this to be the world’s most innovative bank.”

Changing culture
Cross’ plan is to turn a typical banking culture on its head, starting with helping each employee become an entrepreneur, in a way. “Banks, historically, are quite slow and cumbersome in their operations, quite expensive and quite linear,” he says. “If you can learn, you can partner quickly; you empower your staff to make decisions. You experiment and occasionally fail in small safe ways; you’re going to have a lot more chances of survival.”

Intriguingly, it was Cross’ recent experience in the Indonesian jungle that has been helping him shape his processes at the bank. Over the past three years, he has been spending his weekends and half his salary on two social enterprises in Indonesia.

The first, Hotel Orangutan, in Bukit Lawang, Sumatra, is an eco-hotel built into a cliff at the edge of a lush rainforest. Cross bought the land three years ago, and a year later the hotel opened for business. It has since garnered nearly 90 reviews from guests, mainly Europeans keen on jungle-trekking and the up-closeand- personal experience with Sumatran orangutans. Profits from Hotel Orangutan’s operations are shared with the villagers and spent on the next enterprise — a dive resort in Aceh that is scheduled to welcome its first guests next April. Cross says he nearly had to sell his car, an Aston Martin Vantage, to finance the venture.

The two projects are revolutionising the villages’ economies — bringing tourist dollars and jobs — and have had a positive impact on the local ecology. Employees at DBS are also reaping the rewards of Cross’ involvement. “You learn about how to work with non-optimal resources,” he says. In many ways, there are similarities between teaching villagers the details of hotel management and “teaching bankers to innovate”, he adds. “You’re trying to teach someone a unique skill and very different from what they’ve done before.”

A key lesson that Cross says has become “really evident in the jungle” is the need to change the culture of your partners, “even if to a small degree”, while learning from theirs, to work together better. “People don’t talk about this. They assume that when you have a partnership, you go straight at it. But, actually, you have to spend a bit of time and learn from their culture as well.”

A recent example is DBS’s partnership with insurer Manulife Financial Asia. “That’s one of the first things we had to do to make our relationship more successful.” The two sides have embarked on a 15- year distribution agreement covering Singapore, Indonesia, Hong Kong and China. At the same time, they have agreed to co-invest up to $100 million over the next 15 years in digital technology and innovation enhancements. On the part of DBS, there were efforts to help Manulife understand what innovation meant to the bank and what processes were used, for instance.

Cross believes his time- and energy-consuming activities outside of his day job add to, rather than subtract from, his duties at DBS. “When an innovation leader has run his own start-ups, does his own social enterprise, invests his personal money into start-ups, do you want to work with this person or do you want to work with [another bank employee]?”

Unconventional path
The social enterprises also help Cross “give back a little”, he says, and he has certainly come a long way from being the nerdy kid from council housing in the seaside town of Weston-super-Mare in Somerset, England. “I grew up in a very rough town, where you had to look after yourself,” he says, explaining his later obsession with martial arts.

At 11, he was writing 8-bit computer games, having taught himself how to from books and through trial and error. He left school at 16, after selling some of his games, and elected to travel around the world, programming and practising martial arts. Eventually, he landed a job at a consultancy in London. He later moved to Microsoft, where he started out selling software; in 2011, he was appointed financial services industry director for Asia. In 2012, he moved to MasterCard Labs, where he was responsible for establishing innovation processes. In 2014, he joined DBS on the recommendation of his predecessor, Steve Monaghan.

Looking back on his journey so far, Cross believes it is the simplest things that work best. “Innovation doesn’t have to be something big, and certainly nothing to do with technology or apps. People get this confused. It’s really about just doing something as simple as just making small changes,” he says. “So, at DBS, we’ve kind of commoditised innovation, enabled everyone to do innovation.”

What’s coming up for Cross? At this interview with Enterprise earlier this year, he reckoned it was about two years more before DBS hit its ideal of being the world’s most innovative bank. In July, the institution had already been named the world’s best digital bank by Euromoney, a banking industry magazine based in London.

Meanwhile, it is no secret that he has embarked on his next social enterprise. Dubbed Leaf and Reef, it is set to be a fund aimed at conserving land and sea animals in Asia. The project is just beginning, but Cross says it is already being backed by a host of likeminded eco-conscious individuals, including Hollywood producers and a relative of the Queen of England.

“Now, I’m an innovation leader. I’ve done sales, product, game development, been a CEO, built a hotel. I tend to do just one thing, never the same thing [twice].”

 This article appeared in the Enterprise of Issue 757 (Dec 5) of The Edge Singapore.

Singapore seems an odd place for a start-up that wants to help pig farmers. The country began phasing out pig farming in 1984 and closed the last farms in 1989. But that has not stopped Howard Tang, CEO and co-founder of Smart Animal Husbandry Care (SmartAHC), from building his company here. “It sounds ridiculous that there is not a single live pig in Singapore,” says Tang. “But what we want to do here is to become the e-enabler for smart farming rather than do the farming itself in Singapore.”

SmartAHC has developed a wireless sensor that monitors a sow’s temperature and activity. The sensor feeds the data into software that uses unsupervised machine learning to determine a sow’s estrous status — whether it is in heat. Today, this process of determining if a sow is in heat is tricky and has varying success rates across farms. Farmhands use tests such as a back press test, in which the sow arches its back when weight is applied at its loin. The more experienced the farmhand, the more accurate the result of the test.

“The outcome is very subjective, depending on the experience of the farmers,” says Tang. “What we normally see is a 75% success rate in sows sent for artificial insemination. And the number fluctuates in big farms, as farms in many cities are managed by workers with different [levels of] experience.”

The temperature of a sow will increase by 0.5˚C when in heat. But temperature increases can also indicate that a sow is sick. Temperatures also fluctuate based on activity levels. SmartAHC therefore uses artificial intelligence to look for patterns and make accurate predictions. “Previously we made use of artificial neural networks, a subset of artificial intelligence. But recently, we have moved on to unsupervised machine learning, which is more sophisticated and provides higher accuracy,” says Tang. “Machine learning is good at pattern recognition.”

The software is also able to produce a dynamic model and make allowances for biological differences between pigs, Tang explains. The software will keep learning through pattern recognition, picking up indicators during the estrous cycle. Currently, the software has been tested with up to 60 sows at once. The aim is to be able to track 1,000 pigs before a commercial launch.

“The good thing is that most of the pigs in China are Yorkshire pigs, so a model built for that breed can be used for most of the farms,” says Tang. “Pigs still react differently in the same environment and if they are of the same breed. Machine learning is able to, through indicators, make decisions based on experience.”

SmartAHC is also developing a product that will help medium- to SmartAHC uses wireless sensors to help farmers monitor pigs for better breeding large-scale farm owners to remotely manage their workers. The product will track the health of workers. “We realise that there is a shortage of farmers worldwide and we want to incorporate the experience of a farmer into a computer system to improve the quality and productivity of workers,” says Tang.

Testing challenges
The stories Tang tells of SmartAHC’s early days would be familiar to any entrepreneur. The earliest designs of the wireless sensors were inserted into the heads of dead pigs. The team would then shake the heads as hard as possible to see if the sensors dropped out. “But when we sent it over to China [to test on a live pig], the sensor dropped out after two seconds,” says Tang.

SmartAHC had teamed up with Sichuan Agricultural University in China and asked students for help to test out its designs. But the students had trouble communicating to the designer in Singapore as to why the sensor dropped off, Tang says. The company produced up to three iterations with no improvement.

“That’s when we decided to set up a small office in Shanghai, China, and keep four pigs in a small farm about 20 minutes’ drive from our office,” says Tang. A mechanical engineer was also recruited in China to eyeball design issues firsthand and rectify them. This resulted in design times improving tremendously. The time it took to make significant improvements went down from one year to as little as two to three months. With the new office, prototypes could be made in China and tested directly on live pigs. “Now, when our design is done in China, we can get the prototypes within three days and test it on live pigs, bringing testing time down to five days,” says Tang.

SmartAHC has now progressed to commercial trials with a farm in China, having achieved 95% accuracy in a controlled test environment. Tang admits that the first phase of commercial tests on electronic and mechanical stability failed due to issues such as waterproofing and the wire being torn off by the pigs. “But through this, we knew which area to strengthen,” he says.

The second version of the improved design for the sensor has seen better results, continuing to collect data after two weeks. The next phase of tests will be on the algorithm to determine the estrous status of a sow.

“Starting early December, we will test on breeding sows ready for mating. We will test our algorithm to see if we can achieve the same accuracy (95%) achieved in a test facility in Sichuan Agricultural University,” he says. “The objective for the commercial test is to hit 80% to 85% accuracy.”

Targeting mega-farms
An alumnus of the Nanyang Technological University, Tang got the idea for a pig sensor when working on his PhD in electrical and electronic engineering. Tang and SmartAHC co-founder Lan Song, a fellow PhD candidate hailing from China, joined NTUitive, NTU’s start-up accelerator programme. Their idea received undisclosed seed funding from the Small World Group in 2015, and another $1 million from GreenMeadows Accelerator and the Spring Singapore SEEDS programme. SmartAHC is currently closing another funding round in China for RMB8.2 million ($1.7 million).

Four years on, SmartAHC has signed letters of intent with five farms in China and worked with three of them for commercial tests. The target is to launch its wireless sensor and software product by April next year, according to Tang, with plans to convert the five farms into paying customers. These five farms are mid-range farms with 10,000 pigs. Tang has ambitions to target mega-farms with 100,000 breeding sows by 2018.

Another product in the works will help authorities track whether pigs in farms have been tagged. Pigs slated for consumption have to be tagged by law. This is to prevent farms from dumping dead pigs into the river or selling them at a wet market. But many farmers only tag their pigs days before they enter the slaughterhouse, where visual inspections are done. “We call it Smart Ear Tag. It is able to detect whether a tag is attached to the pig or not, helping the government better enforce the law on tagging the pig,” says Tang.

There are also plans to go into new products such as weight management for pigs. And SmartAHC is talking to farms in Indonesia and Vietnam to bring the product to Southeast Asia and even the US after a successful launch in China.

“Longer term, [our goal] is to cross into other livestock,” says Tang. “We do receive a lot of requests from chicken farms, so we may build a system for chicken farms as well.”

This article appeared in the Enterprise of Issue 758 (Dec 12) of The Edge Singapore.

Are you worried a robot might soon replace you at work? Do you dream of building an on-demand services start-up, or fancy a career switch into coding and app development? If so, ALPHA Camp’s programmes might be an option for you.

ALPHA Camp is a tech and start-up school with campuses in Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan. It aims to equip people with the skill sets to pursue a career in tech, or to launch their own tech start-up. It offers a full-time programme, or boot camp, that lasts for 12 weeks. Students pick one of four courses: full-stack web development, iOS app development, digital marketing, or product user interface and user experience design. On top of these specialisations, there are core classes that all students are required to attend. At the end of the boot camp, students have to complete and present their final project. Certificates given by ALPHA Camp are endorsed by the Committee for Private Education.

“What we hope [to do] with the programme is to take people from various backgrounds and help them launch a new career in tech, such as in software development or digital marketing,” Bernard Chan, ALPHA Camp founder, tells Enterprise in an interview. The school also works with the Info-communications Media Development Authority of Singapore to do job placements for students.

Given the intensity of the boot camp, ALPHA Camp has stringent conditions on student admission. Interested applicants have to complete a questionnaire that covers topics such as learning goals, work experience and personality. They also have to take a test and undergo an interview. Chan explains that the school only wants to enrol people who are passionate and serious about technology. It also seeks people who are independent and collaborative. “I don’t want you to quit your job and then show up here realising that this is not what you had envisioned. That is bad,” he says.

For those who are not prepared for such an intensive course, ALPHA Camp also offers one-off workshops and seminars. These aim to educate participants on the latest developments in technology.

Simulated start-up environment
As with any other school, ALPHA Camp involves tutorials and homework. It emphasises on learning by doing. During the first week at boot camp, each student is required to pitch an idea for the final project. Ideas must use technology to solve a problem or improve on an existing solution. Students pick the best ideas and form teams to complete the projects. Ideally, each team should have at least one student from each of the four courses. “So if your idea gets picked, you are like a start-up founder. Then you go find your co-founders,” says Chan. Through the process, students learn skills such as how to recruit the best talents, build a team and resolve team conflicts. “We try to create a place that is as real as possible,” Chan adds.

Occasionally, students have the opportunity to work with established start-ups. ALPHA Camp engages these start-ups to commission real-world ideas for students to use in their final project. Start-ups that have participated include on-demand grocery delivery service honestbee and online luxury retailer Reebonz.

Usually, a senior employee of the startup will lead the final project. When honestbee participated in the programme, Chan says, co-founder Isaac Tay himself took time out to work with ALPHA Camp students. A good working collaboration between students and the startups can sometimes lead to offers for freelance work or even a full-time job offer, Chan adds.

However, he says the school is careful to structure its collaboration with the start-ups. “We don’t want them to see us as some kind of outsourcing thing. I also don’t want our students to touch the core business of the start-up,” says Chan.

Value add
Can a 12-week boot camp replace a fouryear bachelor’s degree in computer science? Critics would argue that the latter covers more ground and provides a much more solid foundation. Chan does not deny this, but says that not everyone has time to study for four years.

He adds that not every job requires a lengthy formal education. In fact, many great software developers today never had one. Chan says a chief technology officer he once worked with was a Chinese literature major at a university. The CTO had learnt coding on his own.

What ALPHA Camp offers to prospective students is time efficiency and industry integration, especially in the start-up scene. The school employs instructors who themselves are business owners or have day jobs. This makes them industry practitioners who are sensitive to real-world practicalities.

“That’s why we don’t have full-time instructors. The most successful and qualified [of them] don’t teach full-time. They run their own business. Teaching for them is a personal fulfilment,” says Chan. ALPHA Camp also engages industry practitioners to become mentors to students. They provide advice beyond the curriculum such as career progression and business-related issues.

Despite the proliferation of free learning material on the internet, Chan believes learning is more than just reading or watching content online. At ALPHA Camp, learning on campus allows students to form networks. This is important for building a start-up or career progression in the future, he says. Moreover, the integration of students from different courses allows peer-to-peer learning across multiple disciplines.

Chan founded ALPHA Camp because he saw a gap in the market. Over the last 16 years, he has worn many hats. One of the business ideas he pursued was setting up his own fashion blog. The process made him realise that he lacked the necessary knowledge to build a tech company. Later on, when he was in an advisory role for a venture capital firm, he saw the same gaps in tech start-ups.

These observations led him to enrol himself at a three-month coding boot camp in the US called The Starter League. That inspired him to start ALPHA Camp here. His vision for tomorrow is still the same: to empower people to pursue their dreams in technology. “In the next two to three years, I hope I can build a network of schools that connects talents, opportunities and know-how in the region.”

This article appeared in the Enterprise of Issue 758 (Dec 12) of The Edge Singapore.

Everyone wants a peek under the hood. Do our genes contribute to weight gain or affect what we eat? What impact do they have on our skin or our sporting ability? Imagene Labs is hoping to answer some of those questions. The local start-up is among a handful of companies offering tests for genetic markers associated with weight gain, metabolism, dry skin and other wellness-related traits.

“The area of gene testing has advanced in the last couple of years [such] that there are studies now to show that nutritional and fitness genomics are becoming more recognised in the mainstream health field. If we can customise your food and exercise based on your DNA, you will be much healthier,” says Dr Wong Mun Yew, founder of Imagene and a physician by training.

Genetic testing has been used in other areas, including assessing a person’s risk for diseases such as breast cancer and diabetes. It is also used to personalise medications. But new studies are drawing links between genes and wellness. Mutations in our genes might determine how fast we can heal from a muscle injury or how we respond to different exercises, some experts say. Variants in our genes also indicate how well we metabolise nutrients. For instance, some people absorb less iron; so, a change in diet is likely to benefit them.

Imagene tests up to 40 traits with its three tests, broadly categorised under fitness, nutrition and skincare. Users order a test online and Imagene sends them a saliva sample kit. Within two weeks of sending back the sample, a report card will arrive by email. But Imagene’s services do not stop there. “With many of the [gene] tests offered today, many do not tell you what to do after except to eat well and sleep well. We want to change that,” Wong says. “In Asia, we see a rising demand for personalised care as the middle class becomes more affluent.”

The test itself costs US$169 ($240). For about US$80 more, the firm offers customised skin serums or vitamins. Imagene plans to add a line of workout beverages in the future, entirely customisable based on your gene profile. Within its first month, it has scored more than a hundred customers in Southeast Asia. A couple of gyms have partnered Imagene to offer personalised training to their clients. It also gained some prominent backers, including the former chairman of DBS Group Holdings, Koh Boon Hwee.

Multi-billion-dollar business
While genetic wellness programmes are still new in Southeast Asia, they are part of a fast-growing multi- billion-dollar industry. The cost of genome sequencing has fallen from US$3 billion to just US$1,000 in about a decade. The genomics market is now growing 10.3% each year and is expected to hit US$22.1 billion in 2020, according to Harvard University.

About three years ago, Wong — who is the former vice-president of Parkway Group Healthcare — cottoned on to the trend and founded Asia Genomics. The company offers genetic tests for cancer, reproductive and cardiovascular health patients through partner labs overseas. Tests can only be ordered by medical professionals today. A year ago, Asia Genomics formed Imagene to enter the wellness market.

Genetic-based wellness may be the more lucrative market. It meets little to no resistance from most government regulatory boards, including Singapore. According to at least two molecular diagnostic firms, gene testing and interpretation require regulatory approval. This could take years and is expensive. In 2013, USbased genetic testing company 23andMe was made to stop selling its Personal Genome Service kit after the Food and Drug Administration said it did not have the proper approval to give people life-altering health information based on a spit sample. It received FDA approval to provide some types of genetic information to customers last year.

In Asia, regulations are not as onerous, and approval processes are cheaper and quicker. As a result, there is a growing number of start-ups offering gene testing here. Some, like Dr Gene Hong Kong, offer a combination of medical and wellness testing. Others, such as Korea’s Genoplan, are focused on the wellness market.

Controversial field
Genetic testing for dietary, fitness or wellness factors remains a contested field among the medical community. Studies published in Nature — a prominent medical journal — show that mutations thought to be harmful can be benign, suggesting that our understanding of genes and its association with diseases and wellness may not be as thorough as we like. In 2014, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics in the US said it was too early to use genomics to provide dietary advice. Another study funded by the European Union concluded that personalised nutritional advice improved eating habits. But it also suggested that it did not matter what the personalised diet was based on, be it biomarkers or genetic variants.

“This is one of those half-truth things, like the vitamin C and shrimp story or alkaline water and cancer — a mixture of some facts and rubbish,” says associate professor Tan Nguan Soon from Nanyang Technological University’s school of biological sciences. Some websites, circulated emails and text messages claim that eating shrimp after taking vitamin C will lead to a chemical reaction producing deathly amounts of arsenic, and that alkaline water can treat cancer by creating a pH environment that is hostile for cancer cells. Neither claim is true, although the scientific principles behind the claim have some validity.

“These companies play on [a situation in which they cannot lose],” says Tan, who specialises in genomics. “If one followed their recommended diet and did not develop osteoporosis, the companies say their genetic sequencing has prevented that. If this person develops osteoporosis, the company can say the genetic sequencing predicted it correctly.”

Wong, however, points out that there are also studies that show certain genes do affect health. “We are using the genetic perspective for customisation, which is more accurate than the questionnaires [traditionally employed within the wellness field],” he says. Also, studies done on cancer patients show that personalised nutritional supplements improve recovery rates. But he concedes that the field is still young. “It would be another five years before we see [studies done on how] predisposition translates into real effect.”

Meanwhile, Wong is creating digital tools to help his customers measure the impact of Imagene’s products and services. Among them is a photo-based mobile application to check for wrinkles and a blood test to measure biological age. “We think if our vitamins that are based on your genetic profile are working, your biological age should improve or stay the same,” he says. These tools are expected to be ready in the first quarter of 2017. Imagene will also launch other genetic-based wellness tests next year.

Raising funds
Imagene is currently raising US$20 million to expand its services to the region. Wong wants to reach 100,000 consumers by 2018, and a big part of his expansion plan lies in China — a country where obesity and dietary issues are escalating to become a national health crisis. “The goal is to be a pan-Asian molecular testing company,” he says.

Already, Wong has some venture firms and investors backing him. Formation 8 Partners, Raffles Venture Partners and Spring Seed Capital are among his early backers. “People all over the world are more educated and more aware of their health and well-being. Imagene Labs, the lifestyle arm of Asia Genomics, will make truly personalised wellness solutions accessible to a broad consumer market,” says backer Koh. “The fitness, nutrition and skincare industries that Imagene will focus on are multi-billion-dollar businesses.”

This article appeared in the Enterprise of Issue 758 (Dec 12) of The Edge Singapore.

The Catcha Group is riding its second tech sector boom. CEO Patrick Grove sees multiple opportunities for his fast-growing empire.

Patrick Grove is not one to stare at spreadsheets and balance the books. He says after spending 2½ years at the now-defunct Big Five accounting firm Arthur Andersen, he discovered he “hated” accounting. “All I [ever] wanted to do was to build and grow [companies], whereas all an accountant does is to count,” he tells Enterprise in an interview. “It just wasn’t for me”. In 1999, as the dotcom bubble was rapidly expanding, Grove left Arthur Andersen to found an online search engine and portal in Malaysia called Catcha.com. He was just 24.

Despite his youth and lack of experience, Grove and his company survived the dotcom crash. Today, at 41, Grove is group CEO and co-founder of Catcha Group, a global investment company focusing on building internet businesses in emerging markets. The group has over 60 investments, held both directly and indirectly, and as either sole, majority or minority shareholder. Several of these investments are public-listed companies. Altogether, Grove says, Catcha Group has total assets of about US$1.5 billion ($2.1 billion). The company hires 3,000 staff and has operations that span Asean, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.

“What we are today is an investment group that specialises in two things: digital companies and emerging markets,” Grove says. “So, we don’t do first-world markets. We would be very unlikely to do anything, for example, in Singapore. And we are not going to do factory business and manufacturing. We are very focused on technology.”

Distinguishing Catcha Group from a venture capital (VC) firm, Grove says the company does a lot more than provide funding to start-ups and small businesses. The group, he says, is fundamentally about creating new companies.

“We launch our own businesses. We have the balance sheet to fund [them]. Usually, our aim is to launch one company a year. It is not a must, but historically, we have done that on average,” he says. Catcha Group has been compared to German internet company Rocket Internet, which builds online start-ups and owns shareholdings in them. Among the companies that Rocket Internet has spawned are e-commerce businesses Lazada and Zalora.

Tapping emerging markets with the internet
Grove was born in Singapore to an Australian father and a Malaysian mother. He holds an Australian passport but is also a permanent resident of Malaysia and spends much of his time in Kuala Lumpur, where most of Catcha Group’s companies are headquartered.

He believes that emerging markets — as they transit from third-world to first-world status — present one of the greatest opportunities for investors. Every year, more and more people are entering the middle class, especially in Asean, as the economy grows, he says. “So whatever business you have, even if you do nothing, your business would grow because the addressable target market is growing. We think that is a great thing to be part of.”

The internet industry, meanwhile, allows businesses to reach those customers in ways they never could before. The internet has the power to enable companies to move “rapidly and disruptively”, Grove says, pointing out that an app can be built on Monday, made available on the app store on Tuesday and have a million downloads by Wednesday. By Friday, the app could hit 100 million downloads.

“It is probably the greatest scale platform known to man,” says Grove. “What we love is that the power to scale and build great companies fast can only be found on the internet. No other industry [can do the same], whether it is hospitality or a newspaper company.”

Furthermore, the internet breaks down boundaries, enabling businesses to tap other markets. This is demonstrated by iflix, an internet TV service provider owned by Catcha Group. Grove says the app, which provides video content streaming, was developed in Malaysia, but downloaded in 10 other countries. “I haven’t been to some of these countries and yet we have customers [there]. It’s such a great thing.”

Hands-on approach
While some of Catcha Group’s businesses have been built organically, the company also has a very active mergers and acquisitions (M&A) record. In the past, Grove explains, the group had adopted a strategy of buying minority stakes in early-stage internet start-ups. But that has changed as it realised this did not gel with its vision of a global business. “If someone offers us Uber shares, we would say no because what’s the point of owning [a minority stake]? That’s not our style of investing. We are not a VC. We like to be active and hands on,” he says. “What we realised is that we are better off being creators of companies as opposed to investors.”

The company now passes any minority stake investment opportunities it is offered to 500 Startups, a global VC seed fund and start-up accelerator. Early-stage start-ups are 500 Startups’ speciality, Grove says. Catcha Group can still participate in any upside potential as it is an investor in one of the funds under 500 Startups.

Today, Catcha Group’s M&A strategy is focused on acquiring later-stage start-ups and becoming the sole shareholder. It looks for businesses that are ancillary and complementary to its existing portfolio of companies. These businesses can then be merged with the companies started by Catcha Group.

“If the business is not really related and there is no link, then we wouldn’t [acquire] it. But if there is a way to put [these businesses] together — perhaps the technology, platform or distribution is better — then we are always very willing to acquire [these] companies,” he says. Grove reckons this allows the company to build better and bigger businesses, and build them more quickly.

How does Catcha Group fund its acquisitions? “Beg, steal and borrow,” Grove says in jest, before adding that the group often co-invests with big corporations. In fact, its larger business units have successfully scored investments. UK broadcaster Sky invested £31.6 million ($55.9 million) in iflix while US movie production house Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios put in an undisclosed sum.

“We obviously have our own balance sheet,” Grove says, referring to funds that Catcha Group has to bankroll its companies. “But we want to work with partners who can bring in a lot of value to the table.”

Going public
Catcha Group has also been able to successfully recycle its capital via the listing of its portfolio companies. Quite a number are listed on the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX): iCar Asia, an Asean-based network of automotive portals; Frontier Digital Ventures, which operates online classifieds businesses in frontier markets across the globe; and e-commerce company Ensogo.

Another company, iProperty, was previously listed on the ASX but has since been acquired. Based in Malaysia, iProperty owns and operates a network of property websites in several Asean countries. The acquirer was REA Group, an Australian online real estate advertising company that is part of media tycoon Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. The acquisition valued iProperty at A$751 million ($801.04 million). Catcha Group remains a shareholder of iProperty and retains seats on the board of directors.

Unlike VCs, which see IPOs as exit strategies, Grove sees an IPO as a growth strategy. He explains that it is easier to initiate an M&A when the business is a public company. Publicly traded shares make good negotiating chips, he says. “If you are a private company, it is very bad to merge with [another company] and then give them your shares, which they cannot sell.”

Catcha Group chose to list its portfolio companies on ASX as this provides better visibility for technology companies, Grove says. The only company in its portfolio that is not listed in Australia is RevAsia, a digital media firm that Catcha Group chose to list on Bursa Malaysia. Grove says markets like the US and Australia provide a more conducive environment for tech companies.

“You have a lot of fund managers, retail investors, high net worth individuals, brokers and analysts who will give you support and coverage,” he says. “Historically, in Singapore and Malaysia, there hasn’t been an understanding of internet companies. But I think the Singapore Exchange is working to change that, so that it will be more supportive of internet listings going forward.”

Building great internet companies
Grove believes that having a “big vision” is necessary to build great internet companies. Many internet businesses in Asean, he observes, tend to be focused only in this region. These include Lazada, ride-hailing app Grab and online job portal Jobstreet. But by not thinking big, these companies miss the opportunity to serve more customers and gain scale.

His vision for iflix, for instance, is to revolutionise internet TV in emerging markets globally. As he tells it, there are some three billion people in these markets who own a smartphone and want access to internet entertainment. Even if iflix manages to capture only one-third of them, it will still have a sizeable customer base of one billion people. iflix is currently available in seven markets: Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Brunei and the Maldives. It intends to roll out its sevice to “key additional emerging markets in the coming months”.

In building a service that covers multiple emerging markets, Grove also hopes to prove to the world that an Asean company can produce a great global internet business. “We can be smart enough and have good courage to build a global business. And that is what we really want to do with iflix,” he says.

He also has three “P”s for building great internet businesses: problem, people and perserverance. A business must start out by identifying the problem that it is trying to solve. Then, it must recruit the best team of people to solve that problem. Finally, success requires perseverance as entrepreneurship is about never giving up despite the difficulties.

Grove says he is grateful for the team of capable and “amazing” CEOs who oversee the portfolio companies under Catcha Group. They never give up, work smart and are willing to take risks as they are not afraid to make mistakes, he says. The way he sees it, making mistakes provides an opportunity for everyone to learn together because they will know what does not work.

Having a team of excellent managers also allows Grove to concentrate on the strategic aspects of Catcha Group. “I think if people are such an amazing talent, it makes my job much easier. I can focus on the things that I’m good at, which is looking for the next opportunity,” he says. “I’m not good at managing a thousand people. But some of our CEOs are world class [at doing that].”

Billion-dollar opportunities
Grove reckons that mobile online videos will be the next big thing in the technology industry. Smartphone penetration is increasing and more people are watching videos on them today. “Three years ago, no one would have thought that there would be Facebook video or Instagram video,” he says. “Now there are videos everywhere.”

In fact, Grove thinks that anything related to smartphones could become a billion-dollar opportunity. “If you think about Grab and Uber, you can’t even use their apps on your laptop. It only works on a smartphone. So we are seeing more and more of these great ideas that are just very smartphone-centric,” he says.

As technology continues to improve and innovations are rapidly adopted, the cost of building an internet business has fallen dramatically compared with 15 years ago. Already, websites can be built for free, Grove points out. Moreover, the skills and expertise to build an app have been democratised as there is, today, software built for people without any coding knowledge.

Catcha Group intends to continue to ride the digital wave. Says Grove: “We want to build big, game-changing internet companies that are Asean-based but global in footprint. We really want to build a global business from Asean.”

Patrick Grove, 41, group CEO and co-founder of Catcha Group

1)What helps you think?
Reading about what other people are doing gives me a lot of ideas. And travelling too.

2)What is the best advice you have received so far?
Like the Nike slogan, just do it. Stop thinking; stop procrastinating; stop debating. Just do it.

3)How many hours do you work in a week?
About 100 hours. I love what I do. Even during the weekends, when I’m reading a book, it’s related to work.

This article appeared in the Enterprise of Issue 758 (Dec 12) of The Edge Singapore.

SINGAPORE (Dec 28): Which will be the next businesses to be challenged by further digitisation and automation?

Looking ahead five to 10 years, The Financial Times set out to identify those industry sectors and companies set to shrink or disappear completely as tech disruption marches on.

Here are five sectors FT says that could come under the threat of extinction:

High-street travel agents
Traditional bricks-and-mortar agencies have been in decline for years as travellers become more comfortable booking trips through online outlets such as Expedia. Although travel agencies will not wither away completely, they will need to change. The ones who survive will have to find a niche. Think honeymoon, special family getaways or planning a safari.

Small component makers
The explosion of 3D printers is expected to shake up entire supply chains, enabling companies to print much of what they need rather than order it, often from overseas. Israeli startup Nano has already created a working desktop 3D printer called Dragonfly that can create multi-layer printed circuit boards. This could help electronics companies bring new products to market faster.

Motor insurers
Motor insurance generates about US$260 billion ($377 billion) in annual premiums for major global insurers and US$17 billion in profits, according to Morgan Stanley and Boston Consulting Group. But if driverless cars and fewer cars are the future, then fewer accidents will mean less demand for insurance. And as carmakers get better at collecting driving data, they could end up in a stronger position to sell insurance.

Financial advisers
New UK rules introduced in 2013 banned fund houses from paying advisers commission. The ban, which removed advisers’ main source of income, forced those remaining in the business to either raise fees charged to retail investors or increase the minimum investment sum they would offer advice on. Unable to afford their adviser, investors began to turn to “robo-advisers” which emerged in 2012.

Car workshops
Electric cars contain virtually no moving parts other than the wheels so there is almost nothing to go wrong under the bonnet. This spells trouble for the thousands of garages that make a living servicing and fixing petrol or diesel cars. While an internal combustion engine in a car sold today have several thousands of moving parts, an electric Tesla contains just 18 moving pieces.

Financial services providers around the world are looking to start-ups to solve problems and grow their businesses. Jewel Paymentech thinks it has a service they will want. The start-up aims to help commercial banks automate the risk management and due diligence work that goes into getting new merchants on board and ensuring that nothing illegal is going on.

“We saw a huge gap in traditional banks that do the traditional merchant acquisition business,” Sean Lam, co-founder and CEO of Jewel Paymentech, tells Enterprise. “They’re struggling with on- boarding merchants from e-commerce or a face-to-face retail environment, and it all revolves around old processes in risk management with these merchants.”

As banks struggle to work with and manage new merchants, Lam says, more of them have been outsourcing this part of the job to other companies. “Banks are slowly losing that touch [in the payments space]; they are outsourcing to gateways such as CyberSource. [But] the banks are supposed to be the payments players.” CyberSource is an e-commerce credit card payment system management company.

Meanwhile, the banks are also losing some payment processing and e-commerce merchant banking business altogether. “What’s really happening is that they are being displaced by the likes of Stripe, PayPal and newer types of merchant aggregators,” Lam notes. Both Stripe and PayPal are online payment companies. “Ultimately, banks need to realise that these are their customers and they need to bring it in-house. They need a partner like us to help them get their act together.”

JewelPaymentech offers an end-to-end solution to help banks manage the merchants they support. Its solution will monitor the business activities of each merchant; control transaction exposure at individual merchant level; and even manage risks such as fraud, credit, chargeback and data security. In doing so, the start-up aims to help the 1,200 banks in the region recapture their relationships with merchants so that they can go on to sell other financial services to the merchants too.

Defending the banks
Lam and co-founder Lee Wooi Siang, Jewel Paymentech president and chief operating officer, used to work in the risk management department at Visa. There, they saw the challenges banks face on-boarding and managing merchants. They eventually teamed up with Sandra Cheim to form Jewel Paymentech in 2014. Chief financial officer Cheim previously worked in ABN AMRO’s corporate finance team.

Cheim says Jewel Paymentech aims to apply artificial intelligence to the process of merchant acquisition. “We want to look for intelligence in every transaction. The purpose is to transform the merchant acquisition business and the basics of payment that are often neglected or left behind,” she says.

Although the payment industry has evolved substantially, with digital payments becoming commonplace and sophisticated, risk-management procedures have remained largely similar. Banks do due diligence on merchants through the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority and credit bureaus. But limiting themselves to these checks also limits the types of merchants that banks agree to take on, Lee says.

“We’re doing much more than that. We’re looking at what’s available in the public and social media space, and evolving the whole model. [We are] allowing banks to take on an additional set of customers they normally wouldn’t take on, or [which they would have] pushed out by asking for collateral,” he adds.

Another differentiating factor in Jewel Paymentech’s system is that it can conduct checks on merchants continuously. Most banks would typically do that only upon acquiring a merchant. Jewel Paymentech can flag suspicious behaviour when it occurs. Suspicious behaviour among merchants can lead to regulatory action — such as fines — taken against the banks or even reputational damage, Lee says. If banks are processing payments for the sale of illegal items or abetting in money laundering, the fines can be levied by financial regulators, other government authorities and even payment networks.

He cites the example of controlled pharmaceutical medications, which merchants need special licences to sell. If a bank is found to be providing commercial services, such as the processing of payments, to unlicensed online sellers of pharmaceuticals, it can face a fine or punitive action by payment networks such as Mastercard and Visa, or regulatory bodies such as the Health Sciences Authority. “Depending on the severity [of the offence], you might also have a civil case,” says Lee.

Besides processing payments for illegal or contraband items online, another danger banks face when they acquire new merchants is money laundering. There have been cases of dubious websites funnelling their transactions through a trusted website.

“For example, in a classic use case, [the money launderer] comes in and applies as an e-commerce merchant — who looks legit after all the due diligence checks. But there are activities behind it,” says Lee. “Money is laundered through the bank because as soon as the money enters an account, it is remitted out, either on the same day or the next day. The volume [involved can be] large. Money laundering is fast and it’s growing, not just here but throughout the world.”

Jewel Paymentech chief technology officer Azim Yazdani says banks tend to be on the back foot when it comes to preventing money laundering by e-commerce merchants because their traditional tools are unable to detect these transactions. “I wouldn’t be surprised if, in many cases, this is a recurring issue [the banks] are not aware of until they get into trouble with the regulators,” Azim says.

The outsourcing of payment gateway services further exacerbates the problem, Lam adds. These service providers earn commissions on each transaction and have little incentive to weed out fraudulent merchants. “Even if [the banks] cannot bring everything in-house, they will need a provider like us to provide that additional level of checks,” he says. “There are two sides to the coin. If they see us as a traditional risk tool, they might see us as stopping business. But what has really helped in convincing the banks is that with proper tools, you can go out and acquire more merchants than you would have without our tools. Ultimately, what you want to do is expand your reach.”

Going regional
Jewel Paymentech has secured US$1.5 million ($2.1 million) in Series A funding from US bank Wells Fargo and several other investors. It also participated in Wells Fargo’s accelerator programme. Despite its ties with a major US bank, Lam says the company intends to be Asia-centric in 2017.

“There’s so much opportunity in Asia. It’s in our backyard and it’s enough to keep us really busy,” Chiem says. Lam adds, “Ultimately, it’s about the bottom line. We’re running it like an actual business”.

Lam says Jewel Paymentech has plans for many new products next year. It will introduce modules and upgrades that will change the way banks handle merchant acquisitions, including enabling the former to offer the latter payment card readers. “For them to say, ‘I can offer you a payment product,’ be it a mobile point-of-sale or [other point-of-sale] in 24 hours, is a game changer for banks,” he says. “We want our solutions to be flexible for all new forms of payments.”

Beyond banks, Jewel Paymentech is looking at marketplaces and even tier-one merchants as potential customers. “We have gone beyond our primary market into marketplaces, because what we’ve built is applicable for them as well,” says Lee. “We’re also targeting tier-one merchants who face the same problems as banks.” These merchants deal with many suppliers worldwide.

While the hype for fintech start-ups remains around the consumer space, Jewel Paymentech proves that opportunities in the back-end segment are still untapped and ripe for a change.

This article appeared in the Enterprise of Issue 759 (Dec 19) of The Edge Singapore.

All students who enroll at Byte Academy receive a yellow rubber ducky. The coding school, which was established in New York in 2014 and opened its Singapore campus this year, teaches students to use the Python coding language to build fintech and data science applications. The first local cohort will start school next year. Programmes are for full-time students and last 12 weeks.

What does learning to code have to do with a floating squeeze toy? “It forces you to clarify your thoughts,” Byte Academy instructor Cody Hess tells Enterprise in an interview. Students are expected to name their duck and bring it to class, where it becomes a sort of partner. When they face problems in their course work, they can turn to the toy to bounce off thoughts before seeking help from instructors. Hess has his own duck, which he calls Kevin.

While talking to a toy may sound silly, Hess says it trains students to better clarify their thought process. In doing so, many times students find they actually have the answers to their questions. If they do not, the process helps them communicate their problems coherently to their instructors.

Students do, however, have face time with real-life class partners. Byte Academy also practises paired programming: Students work in pairs to complete a coding exercise. In the same way a navigator provides directions to a pilot, one student will dictate the code to be written while the other will write it. They then switch roles and repeat the process. Paired programming helps students understand what they have learnt about coding and trains them to convey it to others, Hess says. “It forces you to be able to explain yourself.”

Byte Academy is open to anyone interested in joining the programme, irrespective of career, experience or education. The school promises that students will be able to secure a job upon graduating, provided that they do their part and perform.

“The explicit goal is that you leave having learnt enough to get a job with a company and contribute at the junior web developer level or build a minimum viable product that you might approach an angel investor [with],” says Hess. “But yes, you [will] know enough to build an entire working piece of software.”

Admission to Byte Academy is stringent. There is a coding exercise to complete as part of the application process. This is to gauge the aptitude and attitude of prospective students. The school only enrols those who are determined and passionate to make a career out of coding.

Those who succeed could well be on the path to a dream tech job. And, of course, they get to keep the yellow rubber ducky.

This article appeared in the Enterprise of Issue 759 (Dec 19) of The Edge Singapore.

In an age of digitisation, there is increasing demand for programmers and developers. But the world is not churning out enough of these skilled individuals. UK-based Mercato Solutions hopes to fill this gap with a no-code platform called KnowledgeKube, which lets individuals create enterprise-grade applications without writing a single line of code.

To be clear, KnowledgeKube is not a drag-anddrop platform that you can learn to use in an hour or two. Singapore-based Total Integrated Resources has partnered with Mercato Solutions to offer training for individuals who want to learn to use it. TIR has rolled out an eight-day introductory programme through its education arm, TIR Academy.

The programme will equip participants with basic skills in data analysis, system design and project documentation. This will help them build applications to automate and integrate business processes. As students progress, they will be able to manipulate data, configure a database and develop automated responses or reports through email. In just eight days, they will be up-skilled to confidently build and publish a basic, fully functioning application that is customised to their organisation’s needs, TIR Academy says.

KnowledgeKube was designed in response to what Peter Robbins, Mercato Solutions’ managing director, describes as a resource problem. He recalls attending a conference in London in 2009 where major IT players such as Google and Microsoft were talking about data being the new oil. “And the thing they were focused on most was the lack of resources within the industry,” says Robbins. “It absolutely resonated with us.” Robbins knew the resource problem could not be resolved in the conventional way. “It’s not as easy as going to the universities and trying to attract youngsters and women into coding. It’s a real problem, especially in Europe,” he points out.

Outsourcing such projects would not work either. “From my personal experiences and from speaking with others, the person whom you outsource to will never perfectly understand what you need. So, there will always be delays to and from the customer and the outsourcing company,” says Arun Murthy, CEO of TIR. “And these companies have a high turnover [rate] as well. So, when someone leaves, another person takes over your project and the cycle gets disrupted.”

Murthy says KnowledgeKube has already been used successfully by local companies. Oneberry Technologies, a home-grown IT solutions company that serves the security and construction sectors, teamed up with TIR to develop its own integrated logistics and inventory management app using KnowledgeKube.

“It took the employee just four days to learn the platform and slightly under two months to come up with the initial prototype,” says Murthy. “The same app would [typically] have taken more than [one person] to build, and a minimum of eight months.” And it is cheaper as well, he adds.

Murthy is optimistic that KnowledgeKube will take off in Singapore. He points out that there is a big market here, given the thriving start-up scene. “KnowledgeKube gets you to the market much quicker and [at a lower cost]. When you [want] to build an app and you start outsourcing, the first thing they do is charge you $25,000 to start work without even clearly understanding what you require,” says Murthy. “With KnowledgeKube, you avoid all that.”

This article appeared in the Enterprise of Issue 759 (Dec 19) of The Edge Singapore.

Behind every great leader is a great team. That is essentially what Achal Agarwal and Maximilian Bittner told Enterprise after they took the top prizes at the CNBC Asia Business Leaders Awards (ABLA) 2016. Agarwal, who is Asia-Pacific president of paper products maker Kimberly-Clark, was named CNBC Asia Business Leader of the Year. Bittner, CEO of Lazada Group, clinched the Asia Disruptor of the Year Award. The winners were feted in Jakarta last month at an event attended by over 200 business leaders and guests.

“The first thing I think about a leader is: What does he do or think when building a team?” says Agarwal. “A leader is only as good as his team. When you have a good team, you have a good business.” This means selecting the right people, and empowering and engaging them. Winning the award, he adds, “was a pleasant surprise because I feel this is actually an award for my team, for what they have done. I’m proud of them. My team deserves to be recognised”.

Agarwal leads employees in Kimberly-Clark’s operations in 12 countries across Asia-Pacific. The company manufactures personal care products such as Huggies baby diapers, Kotex sanitary pads and Kleenex tissues.

Beyond building a good team, Agarwal says it is important for a business leader to lead with clarity. He should be aware of the relevant issues at hand when confronted with a situation, before getting the team to focus on a few key strategies or initiatives. This comes from discussing the situation with the team rather than just giving instructions.

“If a leader wants 20 things done, he is not prioritising but confusing the team. It needs to be crystallised down to a few critical things,” he adds. “Of course, there will be [many sub-tasks] that need to be done. But the leader needs to be clear in enunciating the important things.”

To illustrate, Agarwal says the Huggies brand has always emphasised the welfare of a mother and her baby. They are the brand’s most important stakeholders. If the diaper fits well and has good absorbency, both mother and baby will be happy. “It’s our responsibility [to ensure] the diapers don’t leak. We are not going to compromise on product quality for cost reasons. Our team needs to share and own that commitment.”

Counting on others
Bittner, meanwhile, sees his team as crucial to helping Lazada disrupt the e-commerce industry. The company is Southeast Asia’s largest online market place, with operations in Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam. As it does battle with bricks-and-mortar retailers, online giants such as Amazon.com and local players such as Tokopedia, Lazada needs to keep on its toes. To do so, Bittner says, a great team is necessary.

“I don’t see myself as a disruptor, but I see that in my team. I don’t think one person can be disruptive because there are too many moving pieces, complexities and intricacies to be taken into consideration,” he tells Enterprise in a separate interview. The way Bittner sees it, a team can cover more ground.

He adds that working as a team gives everyone the opportunity to listen to as well as offer differing views and perspectives, which in turn leads to healthy discussions and debate. It promotes an “honest culture”, he says. “I need to be challenged too.”

A former McKinsey executive who joined German start-up engine Rocket Internet in 2012, Bittner volunteered to move to Southeast Asia when the latter launched Lazada in the region that year. He has since been responsible for driving the company’s growth as well as helping to seal a deal with Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba. In April, Alibaba bought a controlling stake in Lazada for US$1 billion ($1.43 billion). Half of the money went to newly issued shares in Lazada while the other half was used to buy shares from existing shareholders.

Following the acquisition, Lazada will consider using Alipay, Alibaba’s online payments system, in the future, Bittner says. But for the most part, “life” at Lazada is pretty much the same. The look and feel of its e- commerce site remains largely unchanged although there have been improvements, he adds.

Bittner sees Alibaba as an “older brother” to Lazada — one that can help spur the company forward. Older siblings are typically trailblazers who have experien ced the good and bad things before the younger ones. He thinks Lazada can learn much from Alibaba. “I think the opportunity to be part of a company like Alibaba — the ability to share learnings, avoid some of [its] trials and errors and check a few things — is huge,” he says. Lazada has sent over a hundred people to Ali baba’s headquarters in Hangzhou, China to exchange ideas and share best practices.

On the commercial side of things, Bittner reckons Alibaba can introduce merchants and brands to Lazada. The latter can leverage Alibaba’s reputation as an established and dominant player to pursue cross- border collaborations between China and Southeast Asia.

In terms of logistics, Lazada has started to leverage Alibaba’s network, relying on its logistics arm Cainiao to perform first-mile pickups from merchants in China. In return, Lazada performs last-mile deliveries in Southeast Asia on behalf of Taobao, Alibaba’s e-commerce platform.

While Bittner is appreciative of the award, he is not basking in his success. “If you spend too much time thinking about how great winning that award was, in that time, you would be disrupted already,” he says.

Recognising Asia’s finest
The CNBC ABLA is in its 15th year. This year, it recognised top business leaders for their vision, competence and achievements in six categories. Other winners are Rohana Rozhan of Astro Malaysia Holdings, who won the Asia Talent Management Award, and Somchai Lertsutiwong of Advanced Info Service in Thailand, who won the Corporate Social Responsibility Award.

A Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to Liu Chuanzhi of Legend Holdings, which owns Lenovo Group. Two people were recognised as joint winners of the Indonesia Business Leader of the Year Award — Muhammad Arif Wibowo of Garuda Indonesia and Taswin Zakaria of Bank Maybank Indonesia.

ABLA nominees go through three selection phases. The first includes a quantitative data analysis of company performance. This is followed by face-to-face interviews to assess their leadership capabilities. In the final round, the overall winners are selected by an expert panel of judges.

This article appeared in the Enterprise of Issue 759 (Dec 19) of The Edge Singapore.

Singapore’s small and medium-sized enterprises need to focus on long-term goals to future-proof their business against global economic uncertainties, says Koh Tat Liang, assistant executive director of the SME Committee & Capacity Building Division at the Singapore Business Federation. “Some SMEs in Singapore are too comfortable, and they are likely to face challenges to stay afloat if they do not change in the next five years,” he tells Enterprise.

Singapore’s economy is expected to grow at a subdued pace in 2017, according to a quarterly review of Asean economies conducted by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW). A slowdown in the manufacturing sector is one of the factors likely to dampen growth in the coming years, says the report.

“It is important for companies to future- proof their business, through technology adoption and going beyond their domestic market,” says Koh. “When they grow abroad, they need to think about their competitive edge, such as localising their content to fit regional markets.”

Koh also points to a survey conducted by American Express Singapore, in which nine out of 10 SMEs in Singapore say their day-today priorities are more important than long term strategies. In addition, three out of five chief financial officers (CFOs) do not have a long-term game plan to stay relevant amid the current economic volatility.

In the survey, SMEs say short-term challenges such as the tightening of cash flows, the rising cost of doing business and local economic conditions took up the bulk of their time and budget. American Express received responses from 253 CFOs from companies with turnovers of between $2 million and $200 million, across a variety of industries, including retail, manufacturing and financial services.

Despite the pessimistic findings, Nigel Fox, American Express’ president and general manager of global corporate payments, says SMEs spend an average of 8% of their annual revenue to future-proof their companies. Smaller SMEs spend more than bigger ones. One possible reason, he explains, is that smaller SMEs are more confident they can adapt quickly to a changing environment.

SBF’s Koh suggests that SMEs should invest in technology such as data analytics. Food court operator Koufu uses data analytics to track consumers’ average spend, table and seat turn rates, as well as the bestselling products in its outlets.

“When we help stalls improve sales through data analytics, it also benefits us in terms of rental income,” says Koufu CFO Chua Sher Lin. Koufu’s food sales per stall have gone up 3% a year since the company adopted the new technology in 2012. Chua says sales were largely flat y-o-y before that. Productivity has also increased 6% each year since then.

Another SME that has benefited from the use of data analytics is Reebonz. The pre-loved luxury goods retailer has used technology to create the Asia Luxury Index. The platform tracks the value of luxury goods in different markets, giving consumers a better idea of the value of pre-loved products.

“The biggest challenge for SMEs to adopt new technology is cost and finding the right tools,” says Reebonz CFO David Cheah. Some software can cost up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. He says Reebonz partly relies on government grants from SPRING and IE Singapore to allay technology expenditure.

Like Koh, Cheah says SMEs need to find their competitive edge when they expand overseas. “The first step is to build brand awareness,” he notes. When Reebonz made its maiden foray into China, it partnered with local platforms to grow a local consumer base.

Koufu’s Chua adds that SMEs should invest at least 5% of their annual revenue when they enter a new market.

This article appeared in the Enterprise of Issue 759 (Dec 19) of The Edge Singapore.

Hari Sivan is a former banker who founded a cash withdrawal company. He thinks we are not going cashless anytime soon.

It was 2008 and Hari Sivan felt like he was back on the cricket pitch at university. As a rookie in a bank, he had just scored the project of a lifetime: to build a spanking-new mobile banking product at a time when consumer banking ran on computers. The catch was that he had just three months to do it. “Everyone thought [I was] crazy,” he says. Everyone except his boss, who spoke to him with the same demeanour of his cricket team coach: “Focus, Hari, ignore the noise.”

The product he designed turned out to be a success. Now, Hari is turning his laser-like focus to building a start-up called soCash. His company wants to make it easier for consumers to obtain cash, moving against a cashless trend. soCash’s mobile application helps users who need cash to locate other users or merchants who exchange physical cash for a digital deposit.

Hari, who left DBS Group Holdings in April this year to found his company, says the cashless narrative is flawed, over-hyped and unsupported by statistics. “If you look at the actual numbers from central banks, the amount of cash in circulation has grown. Last year, the amount of cash rose nearly 7% in most developed markets, which shows that cash is still an efficient mechanism for value exchange.” In Singapore, cash circulation grew 9% in 2015. Cash withdrawals from ATMs increased from $65.2 million in 2014 to $65.8 million in 2015, according to statistics from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). Credit card transactions in 2015 totalled $48 million and debit card transactions came to $32.3 million.

The push for society to go cashless is driven by the high cost to move cash around, Hari says. Banks in Singapore spend around $100 million on average a year to process cash. “We are only moving away from cash because the cost to circulate cash is growing every year, but if we can bring the cost down [with a service like what soCash is offering], businesses and consumers will benefit from it,” he points out.

soCash’s mobile application is set to be launched in 1Q2017 in partnership with two major banks in Singapore. By June, it will also go live in Indonesia. soCash is the first fintech start-up backed by MAS under its Financial Sector Technology & Innovation Scheme. According to Hari, the start-up received about $200,000 in grant money. The grant will be used to fund soCash’s trial on how well consumers respond to a new method of withdrawing cash. MAS could not be reached for comment.

A spin on an old service
Cash withdrawal services are not new. In the early 1960s, consumers cashed their cheques at convenience stores. Today, stores such as 7-Eleven allow customers with DBS, OCBC and UOB debit or credit cards to withdraw between $10 and $100 as long as they buy something.

But soCash hopes to make the process easier and faster than most of its predecessors using a mobile app that mimics the car-hailing industry. In Singapore, its services will be available within its partnered banks’ mobile apps.

A user states the amount of cash he wants on the app, which starts scanning for available merchants in the vicinity. Once a merchant accepts the request, a map pops up on the app to guide him to the merchant. The user and the merchant have to use their phones to carry out an authentication test before the money can change hands. Once the user receives the cash, the bank will transfer the money from the user’s account to the merchant’s. “We partner with [the banks] so that we can do the transfer instantly,” Hari says.

soCash has a rating system much like Uber’s. Users who cancel their requests often and merchants who give crumpled, torn notes could see their ratings suffer. soCash has struck deals with 627 stores, mostly convenience stores, scattered across Singapore to provide cash to consumers. Most of the outlets are concentrated in the CBD and the housing estates in the east, but there are quite a few in secluded areas such as Tuas, Kranji and Lim Chu Kang. “We could do that so quickly [over four months] because we went to the chains and businesses that already have a network of established merchants,” says soCash account manager Adrian Ng, a former Standard Chartered banker-turned-merchant acquirer. soCash aims to have 5,000 cash points by 2018.

Many of the merchants have joined soCash to drive traffic to their stores. One of them is U Stars Supermarket, which has six stores and is a relatively new player in the market. It records an average of just 3,000 transactions a day at each store. “When people come to the stores to draw cash, they might also purchase groceries or drinks that they would not usually purchase,” says Cliff Heng, U Stars’ head of corporate services. In the long term, he hopes that partnering with soCash will also help the supermarket cut down on the cost associated with depositing cash in banks.

In May, soCash conducted a pilot trial with the residents of a private condominium. Over two days, it recorded 200 transactions. “We are targeting condos with small shops in their vicinity. Often, the ATMs in these estates are not conveniently located,” says Hari.

The firm does not charge merchants or users for its services, but banks pay a fixed fee for each transaction. Hari guarantees that the fee will be cheaper than whatever it takes to maintain their ATMs. And a significant portion of the fees that soCash generates will go to the merchants, he says. “[When you are starting out,] you need to incentivise people to give out cash.”

Can soCash turn a profit on this business model? Hari says there are 20 million ATM transactions in Singapore a month. “If we can capture 20% of the volume, the profit would be very significant,” he says.

While soCash offers its service only between merchants and users in Singapore, the service has a bit more flexibility in Indonesia. Users will be able to exchange cash with other users as well.

Weighing the pros and cons
Sweden is among the countries widely acknowledged to be well on its way to going cashless. Cash transactions in the Scandinavian country today make up barely 2% of all payments, according to its central bank. Cash accounts for only 20% of all shop transactions in Sweden compared with the global average of 75%.

The country’s move into digital payments has had some advantages. Sole traders and salespeople in Sweden have reported a 30% increase in sales. Banks have been able to glean a massive amount of data on their consumers by parsing their digital transactions. It is also a lot faster to tap a card than to count bills for consumers.

But many like Hari argue that the move to go cashless has a price. First, in a cashless society, each transaction has to go through a financial institution. But not all organisations and businesses qualify for a merchant account at a bank. Transaction costs for digital payments can also be a drag on small businesses. In Singapore, merchants have to pay fees of 1% to 2% on credit card transactions. Many small owners cannot afford the fee, and the process to set up the infrastructure required for cashless payments can be lengthy and daunting, says Tan Jun Yuan, founder of F&B mobile app 11th Hour, which helps small business owners optimise their inventories.

“From an economic perspective, the transaction fee will become significant to inflation. Merchants will increase their prices to manage the higher cost,” says Hari. He adds that emerging Asia’s population is relatively young compared with the developed world. “Almost a billion people will be getting into the consumption market for the first time, rising out of poverty. Their first port of call is not going to be a credit card, but cash.” In emerging markets in Southeast Asia, mobile penetration has grown rapidly, but digital payments have not. Cash on delivery still accounts for more than 80% of all e-commerce transactions in Southeast Asia, according to Hari. He believes cash and cashless payment options are therefore likely to stay for the next 30 to 50 years.

Banks appear to be fairly supportive of third-party cash withdrawal services. DBS already has a service called POSB Cash-Point, which allows customers to withdraw money at 7-Eleven, Guardian and Sheng Siong outlets. Transactions per month on Cash-Point have doubled every year, says the bank’s head of deposits and secured lending P’ing Lim.

Janet Young, head of channels and digitalisation at UOB, says: “The service provided by soCash could help extend the reach of a bank’s cash withdrawal network without the need to set up and run additional ATMs. This could help reduce hardware and maintenance cost for the institution.” However, the bank warns that soCash’s services might be limited by merchants’ operating hours. And there are concerns about the possible circulation of counterfeit notes in retailers’ networks. UOB, however, notes that soCash has plans to purchase insurance to reduce the risk.

Reaching the unbanked
Hari grew up in Kerala, India. His was a happy childhood with most days spent on the cricket pitch. Yet, he knew he did not have what it takes to play professionally. In the early 2000s, he got his hands on his first computer. That was when he felt he had found his calling. Building a career in financial technology, he went from HSBC to Citibank to DBS, mostly working on digital products. His team clinched the Asian Banker’s best remittance product award in 2014.

But Hari says he always wanted more. “In an organisation, you have to ask what your priorities are. A bank would not do [something like soCash] because banks would not work together.”

soCash received an angel round of $400,000 earlier this year, led by a US-based military software entrepreneur. The company is currently raising a series A funding round of between $1 million and $2 million to expand in the region. Hari’s immediate targets are likely to be in Southeast Asia.

Lim Kuo-Yi, managing partner of Monk’s Hill Ventures, which invests in early- to mid-stage start-ups in Southeast Asia, says soCash will have to compete with other e-wallets that have the ability to allow withdrawals through third-party agents. Its success beyond Singapore will depend on its ability to expand its networks, as well as on the variety of services available beyond cash withdrawals. soCash will also have to deal with regulatory bodies that “favour established players such as banks, which have the infrastructure, brand trust and regulatory compliance”, says Finian Tan, chairman of Vickers Venture Partners.

Hari is already thinking of those challenges. “In some markets, we are partnering with e-wallets to reach the unbanked,” he says. The firm is in talks with a biometric ID company to look at potential collaborations. The cricket pitch has been replaced with a cutthroat fintech environment, but Hari is still just as focused on making the runs.

This article appeared in the Enterprise of Issue 759 (Dec 19) of The Edge Singapore.

SINGAPORE (Jan 4): Credit Suisse AG has appointed Benjamin Cavalli as the Singapore Chief Executive Officer with effect from January 1.

Cavalli takes over from Lito Camacho who continues as the vice chairman of Asia Pacific.

At the same time, Cavalli will continue in his existing roles as the head of Southeast Asia and the head of Singapore Location for private banking, and will report to Francesco de Ferrari, the head of Private Banking Asia Pacific and the CEO of Southeast Asia.

Cavalli joined Credit Suisse in 2009 and has two decades of experience in wealth management and investment banking in Asia and Switzerland.

At the same time, Tan Kuan Ern (top photo), the head of Singapore Coverage, Investment Banking and Capital Markets has been appointed to an additional role as Deputy Singapore CEO.

Tan joined Credit Suisse in 2010 and had over 16 years of investment banking experience. He replaces Edwin Low who continues to be the group’s co-head of IBCM, Asia Pacific.

Jacky Ang (bottom photo), the current Chief Operating Officer of Singapore, was also appointed additional roles as branch manager for Credit Suisse AG Singapore Branch and senior corporate officer for Credit Suisse Singapore.

Ang replaced Chien Chien Wong in these two roles after Chien was appointed Chief Operating Officer, Asia Pacific. Ang has been with Credit Suisse for 19 years and has been COO Singapore since 2015.

Desmond Kuek, president and CEO of transport operator SMRT Corp, spent over three decades in the military and public sector before joining the private sector in 2012. His past four years at SMRT have been tumultuous as he battled negative public sentiment and weak employee morale.

At the recent Orchestrating Winning Performance programme organised by the Swiss-based IMD Business School, Kuek shared some insights gleaned from crisis management. These are his five tenets of leadership:

Put staff first and central to your mission
In the face of competing interests, companies often face difficulty deciding which stakeholder group to prioritise. But Kuek has no qualms about where his priorities lie. “Of course all [stakeholders] are important, but if I had to start with one, it would be our [employees] — all 10,000 of them that I have to straighten out, and get right and motivated and inspired to do better,” Kuek says. “Before that can happen, there can be no satisfying of the customers and shareholders.”

Be sensitive to cultural nuances
In 2012, a group of bus drivers from the People’s Republic of China staged Singapore’s first industrial strike in 26 years. Kuek says their discontent stemmed from a human resources directive on year-end bonuses. In it, the HR department had written “excludes PRC [service leaders]” to indicate that short-term contract workers would not be entitled to a salary increase or incentive. “But to the PRC drivers, it was culturally insensitive and reminded them of the days of persecution by the Japanese in the 1930s and ’40s.” Kuek eventually defused the situation by addressing the workers in Mandarin during a special town hall meeting. He also paid a visit to their dormitories, a symbolic gesture that demonstrated the readiness of the CEO to go down to their level and engage with them.

Use culture as a weapon for change
When Kuek took over the reins at SMRT, a series of breakdowns had drawn into question the reliability of its trains. And the seeming ease with which vandals were able to gain access to train depots had led to issues of public confidence. One of his immediate priorities was to instil a culture of service excellence. To do so, he engaged Disney, an entertainment company synonymous with service excellence. Like SMRT, the theme park operator deals with a mass exodus of visitors at the end of the nightly fireworks display. Kuek says lasting change cannot take place if leaders do not first address workplace culture. “The idea is that building trust and bringing on smiles is a higher order of lifting that service excellence.”

Communicate more, not less, in a crisis
Companies should always be open and transparent with the findings of an inquiry, Kuek says. As information surfaces, leaders need to figure out what to convey proactively to fill the void of information and satisfy the natural curiosity of the public. “The cynicism that people have of big organisations is that we are always trying to hide something from the customer. A proactive effort to show openness and transparency goes a long way in building confidence with the affected stakeholder group,” says Kuek. It is also important for a leader to show empathy with those affected, be it the grieving family of a deceased employee or commuters who have been affected by a service disruption.

Stay connected to the community you serve
“Everybody likes to know that you’re a company that has the larger society or the community which you are a part of at heart,” says Kuek. For SMRT, this has included accessibility for the mobility-challenged throughout the public transport network. Championing social causes also creates a positive impression in the mind of the public. “They are more willing to forgive, perhaps, if they recognise that you are playing a part in the community and fulfilling your social responsibilities.”

This article appeared in the Enterprise of Issue 760 (Dec 26) of The Edge Singapore.

Three years ago, Tan Jun Yuan tried to build an empire of bak kut teh stalls. His business succumbed to manpower and sustainability issues in six months. Now, he thinks he understands the notoriously difficult industry and has a pitch for F&B business owners.

The business school graduate has founded 11th Hour, a start-up that helps F&B companies craft last-minute deals to lure consumers during lull periods.“When I was selling bak kut teh and it rained, I could lose half of my business for the day,” he tells Enterprise. “That’s why we came up with a platform that allows merchants to customise deals and post them whenever they want.”

Since its official launch in October, the number of merchants on 11th Hour has doubled to more than 200. The number of users has increased 60% to more than 8,000 people. Merchants using it include independent cafés, chains such as Swensen’s, and even high-end diners such as The Salon at Fort Canning and Wharf Oyster Bar & Seafood.

Scores of new deals are posted on 11th Hour’s platform each day. Merchants offer discounts of at least 30%. Some do one-for-one promotions during the lunch or dinner period. “Merchants do not want to have regular promos because people will start anticipating the deals and it would be hard for them to sell at regular prices,” Tan explains.

Many of 11th Hour’s customers are small business owners who want to drive up sales and prevent wastage. Tan charges them a monthly subscription fee with yearly renewals. “The price varies based on the outlet size,” he says.

His journey from graduate hawker to tech entrepreneur has not been easy. Tan spent the last two years building and tweaking 11th Hour. But unlike how it was for his first business, Tan believes the platform is worth fighting for. “Sometimes, you can see where things are headed very clearly. I could see where the bak kut teh business was going and I did not want to take the risk. But every merchant I speak to [about 11th Hour] gives me confidence that the platform would work,” he says.

Poster boy for hawkers
Tan was ushered into the limelight in 2013, when he chose to become a hawker despite graduating from a prestigious business programme conferred by the University of Manchester. He and his mother rented half of a stall at a coffee shop in Toa Payoh. “Pontian Wanton Noodles has many stalls across the island. We wanted to replicate their model with bak kut teh,” he says. The experiment cost him $14,000 in upfront capital.

Dressed in a black shirt and a white apron, Tan could be seen nearly every day at his stall. Soon, he was raking in $7,000 a month in revenue. But he was also burning out from the long work hours and being unable to find kitchen helpers. At the half-year mark, he called it quits and got a job as a business consultant.

At the back of his mind, however, a new idea was taking shape. One of his biggest bugbears as a hawker was the amount of leftovers. “I figured other F&B business owners would not be facing too different a problem from us and I wanted to do something that could help that.”

In July 2014, Tan gathered three of his friends and started 11th Hour as a weekend gig. “Because we all had jobs and our tech developers were busy with their own commitments, things did not go anywhere after nine months,” he says. The group parted company amicably.

Then, a company approached him and volunteered to build his app in exchange for a 33% stake. But the end product was so poor that Tan backed out in haste. At the same time, one co-founder decided to pull back for personal reasons.

“I told myself I would give it one final push,” Tan says. He put in $45,000 of his savings and hired professionals to build the foundation of the app. He took up online coding courses and within eight months had enough knowledge to finish up his mobile platform.

“I built a dating app and game app for practice,” he says. The mobile game, called Crazy, features spaceships and tacky music. He recently took the app down from Apple’s App Store.

The 11th Hour app was finally ready earlier this year. Tan brought on board his childhood friend Lim Ting Hong to court merchants. Tan describes Lim as someone who made so much money as a salesman that he decided to skip college. “We started with independent cafés because it is easier to reach the owners compared [with those of] a chain,” Tan says.

Food-related start-ups growing
Food-related services have been growing in Singapore. Deliveroo, UberEATS and Foodpanda dominate the meal delivery space. Kitchen Trainer and Grain boast healthier meals delivered to your doorstep. Chope is a bookings management website and app that also offers its own deals.

Investors in this space say F&B businesses are seeing F&B-linked platforms as a new way to acquire customers. “The key is scale. Diners go to the platform with the most options. Restaurants don’t just use Chope as a table management system, but also a marketing tool,” says angel investor John Tan, who is a backer of Chope. “I have friends who pay for Entertainer’s annual membership because of the deals on the platform.” Entertainer is a subscription-based deals service.

Piyush Chaplot, a partner at venture firm Innosight Ventures, says many of these platforms are the best marketing alternative. “For a small business, traditional media such as billboards and television is not an option,” he says. “[Through these platforms], small businesses can advertise in the mainstream for the first time.”

But the food services space looks set to become more competitive in the coming years. “It boils down to whether these start-ups can be profitable and retain customers when they stop subsidising,” John says.

Market consolidation is a possibility in the next two years, adds Chaplot. “Leading players in Singapore such as Chope, Quandoo, UberEATS and Deliveroo are well funded for now. So it will take time for the game to play out.”

Tan does not see delivery start-ups as competitors. Restaurants and cafés will always have physical space that needs to be filled to justify rentals, he says. His app aims to do just that. “Over time, we want to integrate our platform with delivery services,” he adds.

Asked whether 11th Hour is bracing itself for more competition, Tan says: “Platforms like ours involve an ecosystem. Every user that comes in makes the service more valuable to users. And if we get enough scale, it will be harder for new players to come in.” He plans to acquire up to 4,000 merchants in the next two years.

Don’t burn out
Having learnt a lesson from his days as a hawker, Tan says his main focus is sustainability. “Our [cash] burn rate is very tightly managed,” he says. His sales team of four people is paid commissions only. He plans to base his tech team in Vietnam to manage costs.

“Even if we have no investor for the next 10 months, we will be alive,” he says. But users can expect more features from its platform. There may be a separate app for hawker stalls or redemption services to help merchants to track sales.

11th Hour is going live overseas next March, most likely in Vietnam. The start-up is now raising a seed round for its expansion plans. “In the long run, we want to deal with all types of perishables,” Tan says, hinting that he may move beyond food. “We may not get it right the first time, but we know if we don’t overstretch our wallet, we don’t burn out and we’ll get it right eventually.

This article appeared in the Enterprise of Issue 760 (Dec 26) of The Edge Singapore.

Blockchain engineer Chua U-Zyn took a break from his tech consulting business early this year to go into the civil service. The founder of Zynesis says he was attracted by the thought of being able to contribute to the public good. “My interest has always been in blockchain. I thought it would be interesting for the government to explore a few areas on how [this technology] can help the Smart Nation Initiative,” he says.

Chua is one of several top data scientists and technologists who are collaborating with the government on public projects thanks to a new Smart Nation Fellowship. The temporary work attachment programme seeks to recruit those who have experience in leading or working on data or technology projects. Fellows are required to have expertise in computer and social sciences, data science, software development, user experience/interface design, or technology.

So far, Chua has conducted research on how blockchain can be applied to the Internet of Things and data. Working alongside the emerging technology team at the Government Technology Agency of Singapore (GovTech), he toyed with various ideas, came up with a white paper and worked on several prototypes. He has since chosen to extend his participation in the programme for five months on a part-time basis. Chua felt he could contribute more to Singapore’s Smart Nation initiative if he stayed on as a fellow.

“Right now, in my extension, I’m working more on applications of blockchain so that people can relate more to it in everyday tasks,” he tells Enterprise in an interview. “I extended [my stint] because I wanted to create something more tangible.”

Proof of concept
The Smart Nation Fellowship is part of Singapore’s vision to harness technology and data to its fullest to improve the lives of citizens. It is an initiative implemented by GovTech, an agency responsible for spearheading the government’s digital and data strategy.

Blockchain is a common and decentralised digital ledger that allows for subsequent blocks of information to be added to the previous, forming a chain. It keeps records of each transaction made across a fully distributed network. The concept, coupled with cryptography, prevents information from being tampered with without being detected.

Chua is now looking at how blockchain can be used to enhance the smart home or office. His team recently built a smart inventory system for coffee drinkers. It is designed to alert users when stocks of espresso capsules are low.

Typically, to make an order online, one has to set up an individual account with the online shop and provide payment details such as a credit card number. With blockchain, these are done away with as cryptocurrency is used instead.

“You can use the [shared] wallet with all its services available without having to register an account. When you make the order, you will send the payment along with it,” says Chua. “That is the power of blockchain.” Blockchain also makes transactions transparent, which should deter cheaters. “If you place an order with a company and it isn’t honoured, everything is recorded on the blockchain,” he says.

Creating an ecosystem
So how might blockchain technologies enhance the lives of citizens? Chua admits he is not sure yet. “Blockchain currently is like a solution looking for a problem. People are trying various ways to fit blockchain into their daily lives,” he says. However, he has some ideas about its potential. One of his goals is to start an open ecosystem powered by blockchain. Chua wants to help businesses and consumers gain acceptance of blockchain and, by extension, cryptocurrencies.

GovTech has already partnered online concierge company honestbee to test a blockchain-powered system. honestbee, which does grocery shopping for its users, would allow users to purchase items through blockchain using cryptocurrency without the need for pre-registration. Following the test, honestbee may consider using it permanently in its operations.

Ultimately, the aim is to open source the underlying coding behind the blockchain system developed by Chua. This eliminates the need to reinvent the wheel, allowing applications to be built on top of the existing code base. Businesses and organisations can get on board the blockchain bandwagon more quickly.

Meanwhile, the Monetary Authority of Singapore is also experimenting with blockchain. Last month, the central bank announced a partnership with blockchain company R3 and a consortium of financial institutions on a proof-of-concept project to conduct inter- bank payments using this technology. The project could potentially avail a payment system for participants to transact in different global markets around the clock that are today limited by time zone differences and office hours.

Making impact
At Zynesis, Chua says he was doing pretty much the same things he is doing now: working on proof-ofconcept projects and doing research on the feasibility of blockchain; the only difference is that his work at Zynesis was for the private sector.

Chua says he sometimes felt that back then, whatever he had worked on would lack the scale required to make an impact. That was why he decided to take up the Smart Nation Fellowship. “Being part of this gives a lot of meaning to what I do,” he says. “I know that what I do may make a difference or at least spark something [big].”

The fellowship is open to all nationalities. It is a full-time stint that can last from three to six months. Interested applicants are required to submit a two-page written application. In it, they have to state their vision of a smart nation and their motivations for wanting to be a fellow. They also have to indicate the types of projects they are passionate about and would like to undertake as part of the fellowship.

Fellows who have successfully completed their stints are welcome to collaborate on further projects, subject to approval. As for Chua, he will return to managing Zynesis full-time once his extended stint ends. Blockchain is his passion, after all.

Chua U-Zyn,
33 years old,
Smart Nation fellow and blockchain engineer

What helps you think?
Pushing my boundaries.

What is the best advice you have received so far?
Always be humble and learn more.

What helps you relax and destress?
Listening to music.

This article appeared in the Enterprise of Issue 760 (Dec 26) of The Edge Singapore.

The death knell for cash was sounded as far back as the middle of the 20th century, as credit cards gained in popularity. But, to paraphrase Mark Twain, those reports were greatly exaggerated. Today, even as payment systems are going digital, cash is as popular as ever.

Visa’s “2016 Digital Payments Study” reveals how consumer adoption of digital payments has shifted dramatically over the last 12 months. According to the study, the number of consumers who make payments using mobile devices has tripled in the past year.

Visa found that 54% of respondents regularly use a mobile device to pay for their daily purchases. That number was just 18% when the same study was conducted a year ago. Thirty-eight percent of those surveyed last year indicated they had never used a mobile device for payment purposes and had no plans to do so. This year, only 12% gave this response.

In the Asia-Pacific region, a study by market research firm Kantar TNS reveals that 53% of connected consumers — defined as those with access to smartphones — have used their mobile devices for payment purposes. China, Hong Kong and South Korea are the top three mobile payment markets. Singapore comes up fourth in the rankings.

Growing applications
With mobile penetration clearly on the rise, it is no surprise that digital payments have taken off in a big way. The number of smartphone users across Asia- Pacific has now exceeded over a billion and is set to rise as the region becomes more affluent.

It helps that there are now more ways to pay. Tech giants Apple and Samsung have unveiled proprietary mobile payment platforms in partnership with major credit card companies such as American Express, Mastercard and Visa.

There are also new market-specific solutions. In recent years, popular chat apps such as Tencent Holdings’ WeChat and Naver Corp’s LINE have introduced built-in mobile payment platforms such as WeChat Pay and Line Pay respectively. Merchants are seizing the opportunity to expand their reach. Earlier this month, Starbucks announced a partnership with Tencent to co-create a new social gifting feature on its WeChat app platform. WeChat users in China will be able to gift Starbucks products to family and friends. Customers at the approximately 2,500 Starbucks outlets across China can also now make mobile payments using WeChat Pay by scanning a QR code at the point of sale.

Closer to home, Singapore Telecommunications relaunched its mobile payment app Dash earlier this year. The app lets users make cashless payments at more than 20,000 participating retail outlets. Dash payments are accepted by ComfortDelGro and Prime taxis.

Challenges to mass adoption
Despite this wealth of options, cash remains king. Ken Moore, executive vice-president and head of Mastercard Labs, says concerns over security and personal data privacy continue to pop up. Moore says Mastercard is looking to the use of biometrics to alleviate users’ worries.

“While there is no silver bullet to fighting fraud, we are constantly looking at innovative biometric authentication solutions such as Mastercard Identity Check to ensure security of the accounts, cardholders and transactions,” he says. The digital check identifies users using unique personal characteristics such as fingerprints or facial features. During checkout in a web store, the consumer receives a pop-up on his or her mobile phone. The consumer can then authorise the payment via finger scan or selfie recognition. “In the future, we will see the widespread use of innovative authentication capabilities such as a blink of an eye or unique heartbeat signature tracked by wearable technology,” Moore says.

At the same time, the adoption of biometrics brings its own problems. There are privacy concerns regarding the storage of digital records. Speaking at a panel session at the inaugural Singapore Fintech Festival, Laurent le Moal, CEO of online payment service provider PayU, questions the extent to which consumers are willing to sacrifice their privacy in exchange for convenience.

Le Moal points to the example of Estonia, one of the most advanced e-governments in the world. There, the issue of privacy has long exited the public sphere of discussion. But getting there has taken years of trust and confidence building.

Siim Sikkut, digital adviser in the Prime Minister’s Office of Estonia, alluded to this in a May interview with GovInsider. “The privacy conversation [in Estonia] has already happened and is behind us. There is a good level of trust in the government,” Sikkut says.

Cost is also an issue in the implementation of biometrics. Matt Dill, senior vice-president and head of innovation and strategic partnerships at Visa, suggests that governments should create a digital records database. “That would free all of us [payment services providers] to innovate and provide services.”

Security and privacy concerns aside, Mastercard’s Moore says it continues to be “a challenge to change the habits, behaviours and attitudes of consumers and businesses who may be entrenched in the thinking that cash is king”. This may be particularly true for purchases that are relatively small in value. A study done by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco notes that cash remains the dominant instrument for low-value payments.

Certain segments of the retail economy have a well-known preference for cash. “Some cab drivers will say their terminals are down or that they prefer cash,” says Janet Chua, a finance executive who takes a taxi to work three times a week. “Some drivers who have non-cash payment facilities have also refused to pick me up unless I commit to paying in cash.”

Mr Lim, who has been driving taxis for a living for the past 15 years, explains that he needs the cash to pay for petrol and daily expenses. “It’s better because we can take it and use it immediately. Some drivers depend on their daily earnings to feed themselves,” he says.

Promoting collaboration
Moore believes that for cashless payment systems to hit the mainstream, the various players need to work together. “There are many existing players in the payments ecosystem, and there is a need for cross-industry collaboration between the government, regulators, payment network providers, financial institutions and merchants to enable secure and cashless payment as well as enhance the commerce experience,” he says.

To facilitate change and speed up the move towards demonetisation, governments have a major role to play, Moore adds. “The government and regulators play an instrumental role in facilitating change among citizens,” he says. “A strong regulatory framework to create a safe, sound and secure payments landscape will encourage the creation of innovative solutions, infrastructure development and the adoption of digital payments.”

Visa’s Dill adds that the question of whether society can become truly cashless may not be the most important one. Digital payment systems ultimately need to give people in developing countries access to the same kind of transactional efficiency that people in developed countries have. Dill says: “A better question would be: In my life, can I operate on a day-today basis without cash if I want to?”

This article appeared in the Enterprise of Issue 760 (Dec 26) of The Edge Singapore.

(Jan 12): British peer-to-peer lenders were bracing for disaster when the UK voted to quit the European Union on June 23. Maybe they needn’t have worried.

Funding Circle, the biggest online lender for small businesses in the UK, has raised US$100 million ($143 million) in equity funding, it said in a statement Thursday. Accel Partners, the Palo Alto, California-based venture capital firm, led the round, which included Index Ventures, Union Square Ventures, and Temasek Holdings, Singapore’s state-owned investment company.

Retail investors and borrowers have flocked to their platforms since the Brexit vote. The industry’s cumulative loan volume has surged by 28%, to 8.7 billion pounds ($15.1 billion), according to AltFi Data, a London-based research firm. Funding Circle’s lending has jumped by a third since the June 23 referendum.

Some analysts say the Bank of England’s decision to lower interest rates to 0.25% from 0.5% in August prompted retail investors to seek profits in peer-to-peer loans that were, on average, returning about 5%. Others say investors paused in the months leading up to the vote and now are piling back into the space because the British economy has avoided a recession many economists predicted.

"It’s probably a combination of things," said Cormac Leech, a London-based principal at Victory Park Capital Advisors, a private-equity firm in Chicago that invests in peer-to-peer loans. "Growth has been stronger than expected, investors are hunting for yield, and there’s a bounce-back from earlier in the year."

In November, Funding Circle became the first online lender to arrange more than 100 million pounds in loans in a single month. The startup, which also operates platforms in the U.S., Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain, said today that its UK operations had positive earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization in the fourth quarter. Zopa Ltd., the largest online lender to consumers in the UK, also broke into the black on that basis late last year.

Funding Circle’s round is the biggest in the UK since 2015. It bucks a drop in fintech investing in Europe and North America as startups morph into more mature businesses.
In the third quarter, venture investing in British fintech firms skidded 42% from the year-earlier period to 64 million pounds, according to CB Insights, a New York-based research firm.

The deal comes as Funding Circle and its ilk face a crackdown by the Financial Conduct Authority. In December, the British regulator issued a report finding that the industry fell short of providing fair and transparent offerings to investors. FCA Chief Executive Officer Andrew Bailey said the industry is growing so rapidly that platforms may be too complicated for retail investors to understand. This year, it may work with Parliament to implement new industry rules.

Crave Scale
Even so, Harry Nelis, a partner at Accel who led the funding round, said Funding Circle is in a position to deliver what venture capitalists crave -- the ability to grow significantly. The firm dominates online lending for small companies in the UK, a market that topped 5.6 billion pounds in the third quarter. And CEO Samir Desai is making a push in the US market, which topped US$417 billion in October 2016.

"What we’re looking for is the possibility of something big, and in the UK alone you could build a business with a market capitalization worth several billion," Nelis said.

Funding Circle declined to disclose its valuation. The company, which has arranged more than 2.5 billion pounds in loans since its founding in 2010, was valued at more than US$1 billion when it raised US$150 million in April 2015.

Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond said Thursday Funding Circle’s deal was a "vote of confidence" in a firm that’s "helping business to grow and create jobs."

Last week, the British Business Bank, a government-owned development bank, made 40 million pounds available on Funding Circle’s platform for loans to small businesses.