How Kelvin Teo Built Southeast Asia’s Largest SME FinTech Empire - E678
"Org structure is the last thing you should be integrating during an acquisition. Where you should be integrating is mindset, thinking, culture, and values—all the things that are below the surface. Before building trust and aligning values, recklessly integrating the org structure is a recipe for losing good people and drawing charts based on arbitrary ideas that don't fit Southeast Asia." - Kelvin Teo, Co-founder and CEO of Funding Societies | Modalku
"When it comes to customer acquisition, for every 10 customers that I meet and give me a document, I approve two—meaning I waste eight of them. What if I can actually keep them for longer? This is why we entered payments. It allows us to add multiple product lines so we have something for the customer and don't have to reacquire them, while using that payment data to complement our underwriting." - Kelvin Teo, Co-founder and CEO of Funding Societies | Modalku
"SME finance in Southeast Asia is a high-volume, low-margin business. If you aren't covering enough scale across the region, it’s hard to be successful. We realized that while bankers are often siloed in one country, a regional footprint in Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam allows for diversification. When one market faces a macro shock, the others support the entire group." - Kelvin Teo, Co-founder and CEO of Funding Societies | Modalku
Kelvin Teo, Co-founder and CEO of Funding Societies | Modalku, joins Jeremy Au to discuss the journey of building Southeast Asia’s largest SME digital financing platform. From ideating at Harvard Business School to managing a regional FinTech through the COVID-19 pandemic, Kelvin shares first-principle insights on credit risk management, the strategic acquisition of CardUp, and why regional diversification is the ultimate survival mechanism. Discover how Funding Societies navigates fractionalized markets, handles the "willingness to pay" vs. "ability to pay" dilemma, and the hard leadership lessons learned from being an early mover in startup layoffs.
Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ob9Wq9DMpko&list=PLl9u6ECOP8_7scb97PE3whKu4yJVizIOd
Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/69kVqrkQwdKExrZyxcZWRc
