The Manchester-based FinTech startup Hello Soda has just announced the launch of ‘Hello Soda Asia’, its new Southeast Asian venture.
The new FinTech venture will operate out of Bangkok (Thailand) and Singapore, and will specifically target key ASEAN economies, including Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Singapore. In each of these markets, Hello Soda’s technology will provide its insights into customer behaviours, preferences, risks and aspirations, and will enable its clients to deliver a better customer experience.
Hello Soda was founded in 2013 and builds products that make data driven decisions accessible across the enterprise. Their current focus is on credit markets, gaming, recruitment and insurance.
The accelerated adoption of mobile technology is changing consumer behaviour, including purchasing patterns, now significantly influenced by social networking, online research, and peer reviews of products. Digital payments are becoming significant in Asia, and the impact of digital disruption is mounting across industries. In this rapidly changing market context, Hello Soda’s proprietary technology ‘PROFILE’ offers unique data analytics capabilities, with the speed and scale to unlock the value embedded in the vast expanse of social media, user and machine-generated unstructured data. Hello Soda has the ability to understand and predict user behaviour, preferences, fraud and credit risks.
The Hello Soda Asia joint venture is a strategic alliance between Hello Soda UK and the Asia-based team of analytics services director Marcello Fontana and distribution and implementation director Gary Pound. Hello Soda Asia will focus primarily on financial services (including banking, insurance, consumer and SME finance), telco, retail, gaming and tenant vetting, and is projected to generate a substantial fraction of Hello Soda’s global revenues. The new venture follows the recent opening of a Hello Soda office in New York to support its accelerating growth in the US market.
Commenting on the strategic alliance, CEO and Founder of the Hello Soda group, James Blake said: “There are big opportunities in Asia for us as a company. For example, in Indonesia, there are 60million people who don’t have a credit footprint. Lenders and financial intermediaries, such as brokers, insurers and asset managers, need ways to carry out ID verification and assess customer risk; this is where Hello Soda steps in. We are helping to pioneer a revolution using big data analytics which will help our Southeast Asian businesses innovate and take major steps forward within their sectors.”
If you want to learn more about Hello Soda, check out the awesome pitch Ben Allott (Co-founder of Hello Soda) did at the Northern Stars pitch competition by the end of 2015. Here it is:
