Join us in the fifth installment of our fifth-year anniversary summit recaps where we feature fireside chats with thought leaders and founders across industries sharing their insights on various sectors and trends shaping the future of ASEANnovation.

Historically, the rise in massive value creation in Southeast Asia’s digital economy has been mainly driven by massive funding into horizontal ecommerce, fintech and logistics platforms. Unlike the US, we haven’t seen any full-scale regional B2B enterprise plays yet. But so far, we have seen the early innings of companies targeting this segment that have all raised significant funding rounds in recent months. Why are we seeing such companies raise significant funding during this next wave of innovation in the region? Is this the right time?

We tackle these questions and more with Jianfeng Lu, Chairman and Co-Founder of pioneering voice AI solutions platform WIZ.AI, Todd Schweitzer, CEO and Co-Founder of leading open finance platform in Southeast Asia Brankas, and Theodoric Chew, CEO and Co-Founder of Asia’s leading mental healthcare company Intellect. The conversation was moderated by Shefali Dodani from Insignia Ventures’ investment team and took place on September 23, 2022 and both the episode and transcript have been edited for brevity and clarity.

Highlights and Timestamps

(01:50) Drivers of the Rise of Enterprise in Southeast Asia;

“Emerging from COVID, I’ve been just incredibly excited by seeing traditional banks that are really starting to think about API products as a new product category and as a new revenue driver where they can change the economics of reaching their [target] populations, and reaching particularly consumers and SMEs in a different way.” – Brankas CEO Todd Schweitzer

“The market — we are leading it, but we’re also building it all together. So there are challenges, but it’s a blue ocean network we’re trying to capture as well.” – Intellect CEO Theodoric Chew

“One of the technologies we’re very proud of is our robot we call a “talkbot” which actually can talk over the phone with the users of our clients. So they’re human-like. In a short survey, more than 90% of the audience [were] not even aware they were talking to a robot…The talkbot is able to talk in 10 languages including English, Bahasa Indonesia, Bahasa Malay, Thai, even Spanish. And we also have large enterprise customers such as DBS, Singtel, and Seamoney…” – WIZ.AI Jianfeng Lu

(09:42) Evolution of Voice AI Adoption By Enterprise Globally;

“…after the pandemic, we saw a kind of a labor shortage across the world, not just in the US, but also like here in Southeast Asia. Although we have a large population here, a lot of businesses, they still found a big shortage for that…our bot is also able to help to scale into a very large volume…it is very consistent and fully compliant…” – WIZ.AI Jianfeng Lu

(13:40) Education and Expansion for Southeast Asia’s Open Finance Leader;

“We saw a regional opportunity. We did not want to get sucked into too much localization because we see our opportunity to expand as a global emerging markets company. So our regional expansion required a lot of product development tradeoffs to ensure that we had something that was geo-agnostic, but really focused on solving emerging market infrastructure.”  – Brankas CEO Todd Schweitzer

(18:51) Localization vs Globalization for A Leading Mental Health Care Platform;

“We found that actually who was really the one paying at scale would not be the consumers at least today…So we looked at employers. There was a huge segment that actually paid for it, and we looked at insurers as well, and the related health benefits players…our goal is to work with the largest employers and the largest insurers…So that means we really have to take a regional [focus] from day one.” – Intellect CEO Theodoric Chew 

(24:33) Illustrating Impact for Enterprise Customers;

“We work with a few of the largest consumer lenders, whether it’s BNPL or e-commerce merchant financing so that they can make instant credit decisions…We also are enabling payment processors and e-commerce shops to accept direct pay-by-bank, which will be 80, 90% cheaper than running through a payment intermediary…we’ve enabled [banks] to actually open up a new channel and a new product category where they can now onboard customers, or they can enable pay by bank products, without needing to build new software.” – Brankas CEO Todd Schweitzer

“Previously, those lending vendors usually hired thousands of people to make phone calls to do debt collection. But one of the customers did it without any human agent being hired because recruiting, training, quality control and human agent retention is a very tedious job and it’s very, very hard to find those talents… So they set up the standards, then later they use our bots to help them to do the phone call…For this task, they actually significantly reduced the cost and also increased productivity.” – WIZ.AI Jianfeng Lu

“One of the key things we’re doing now is to prove ROI as well — how do mental benefits and productive mental support lead to less attrition and fundamentally how do these long-term health benefits lead to a reduction in chronic health issues?… Fundamentally it’s no longer just putting in the work and getting a paycheck. It’s a lot of the benefits, the coverage, and the support they get from their employers, which is a big part of their lives.” – Intellect CEO Theodoric Chew 

About our guests

Jianfeng Lu is the co-founder and chairman of conversational AI company WIZ.AI, the latest in his career of building and leading software technology ventures in Asia. He has also been an active angel investor in Greater China, the US, and recently Southeast Asia. He was previously founder and CEO of social interaction platform Mozhe which was acquired in 2009 by Qihu 360 (NYSE: QIHU), where he then served as Vice President. Before Mozhe, he spent nearly a decade at Trend Micro Inc. (TSE: 4704) as Senior Director and Head of China Development Center.

Before Intellect, Theodoric Chew dropped out of school at 16 and started his entrepreneurship journey where he founded and brought a content platform, Existgreat, to acquisition at just 20 years old. Theodoric then headed up marketing at Voyagin, a travel tech company acquired by Rakuten, and thereafter went on to lead growth at Entrepreneur First before founding Intellect in late 2019. He was also recognised in the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list in 2022.

Todd Schweitzer is Co-founder and CEO at Brankas. Todd has held senior roles in private equity and management consulting, spanning technology, the public sector, and financial services. He holds dual Bachelor’s degrees with honors in Economics and International Studies from the University of California, Irvine, and a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government with a focus on economic development policy.

Transcript

Drivers of the Rise of Enterprise in Southeast Asia

Shefali: Today we are gonna be talking about B2B enterprise, and here we have founders that are pioneers in Southeast Asia and their respective sub-sectors. So one in finance, customer engagement, as well as healthcare.

While your businesses have been around even before the pandemic, you have in recent months raised significant amounts of funding. What do you think are the drivers for each of your companies today that have led to increasing interest in enterprise tech? I would love for you all to answer this question, but before that, I would love to hear a little bit about yourself and your company, especially for the audience.

Todd: My name is Todd Schweitzer. I’m the CEO and co-founder of Brankas. Brankas is an open finance or open banking technology company really native to Southeast Asia. We operate in Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and very soon in Bangladesh. 

And open banking or open finance looks a lot different in emerging markets and in particular in Southeast Asia. This is not your “Open-banking-in-Europe” use case, and it’s very different and a much larger opportunity than it is in more developed markets. This is a region where in Indonesia, 50% of the population is unbanked. In the Philippines, it’s more than 60%. This is a region where credit card penetration is below 5%. This is a region where online identity verification is basically done from scratch, kind of through manual KYC. 

So when you apply the typical open banking products of account data aggregation or payment initiation, you’re actually solving fundamental financial services infrastructure gaps. And so we think that’s a really exciting opportunity. 

And things have been going great and to Shefali’s question about some of the drivers. Fintech in Southeast Asia during COVID accelerated in an incredible way. A couple of things were happening. 

Number one, the traditional incumbent FIs, which really relied on their physical infrastructure and physical distribution branches, were shut down in markets like Indonesia or Philippines or Vietnam. Bank branches were closed for nine months. At the same time, the digital wallets and the consumer FinTech apps, and some of the banks that had strong digital channels all of a sudden were accelerating and onboarding hundreds of thousands of new customers from those banks that were remaining shut. 

And so emerging from COVID, I’ve been just incredibly excited by seeing traditional banks that are really starting to think about API products as a new product category and as a new revenue driver where they can change the economics of reaching their [target] populations, and reaching particularly consumers and SMEs in a different way.

And also there’s a bit of a real threat from the likes of the Go-Jek, Grab, Dana, and GCash in the Philippines that are actually taking market share from the consumer banking side. So that has really been an accelerant for open finance and fintech generally in Southeast Asia. And Brankas hopefully is going to be part of that trend moving forward. 

“Emerging from COVID, I’ve been just incredibly excited by seeing traditional banks that are really starting to think about API products as a new product category and as a new revenue driver where they can change the economics of reaching their [target] populations, and reaching particularly consumers and SMEs in a different way.”

Theo: I’m Theodoric Chew, the co-founder and CEO of Intellect. A bit about us — we are Asia’s leading and fastest-growing mental healthcare company. We essentially provide workforces, insurers and individuals as well access to full-stack mental health care across Asia. Today we have the pleasure of serving over three million members on the platform. We work with leading employers like Dell, Singtel, Shopee, Foodpanda and more, and we work and partner with some of the region’s largest insurers as well.

Just to give a bit of background for many in the room, you guys may be thinking is mental health care a huge space? And many may think it’s actually a very nascent piece. But actually, an interesting stat is that within Asia itself, two out of five people have an underlying mental health issue that’s noticeable, but less than a fifth of them actually seek or get access.

Our fundamental belief is that it’s one of the biggest crises and issues in the world in the next few years, and we are already seeing it very rapidly becoming a very big issue to be solved for the region as well. 

And a bit leading towards the question that you had as well of what we think are the driving trends for what we do in the B2B2C mental health care space in Asia — the underlying belief tracks a bit to what I just mentioned that it’s a huge issue. Many people struggle, but fundamentally mental health care systems in Asia are quite broken. It hasn’t changed over the last few decades due to the stigma, due to the cost, and also due to the supplier providers in the region as well.

However, if you look across the waters to the US, we’ve seen over the past few years some of the largest healthcare players emerging in the behavior and mental health space. And we very quickly see this trend is quickly moving to Asia, but not in the exact same manner. It requires ways of localizing care and building our own infrastructure that’s built for the region here as well. So that’s one of the big things. 

We think that this is a huge underlying issue, the awareness and awakening that is needed for mental health. It’s expanding very quickly, and in the next few years, we believe that fundamentally it’ll be as important and as big as physical healthcare fundamentally as well. So that’s a bit about what we think.

“Many people struggle, but fundamentally mental health care systems in Asia are quite broken. It hasn’t changed over the last few decades due to the stigma, due to the cost, and also due to the supplier providers in the region as well. However, if you look across the waters to the US, we’ve seen over the past few years some of the largest healthcare players emerging in the behavior and mental health space. And we very quickly see this trend is quickly moving to Asia, but not in the exact same manner. It requires ways of localizing care, building our own infrastructure that’s built for the region here as well.”

Shefali: So building onto that Theo, could you maybe share a little about some of the challenges that you faced along the way building Intellect? 

Theo: Just to give a bit of background as to what Intellect does. Fundamentally, it’s a full-stack mental health care system in a single mobile app. Today we offer anything from self-guided programs, to access to coaches, therapists, psychiatrists, and even a 24/7 distress helpline across all of APAC virtually. 

We have our app fully localized in over 10 languages from English to Mandarin, Cantonese, Thai, Korean, so on and so forth. We have importantly built a network of mental health providers across the APAC region as well. Say a client of ours has an employee in China, for example, they open the app and they get a whole app in Mandarin. They get local native mental professionals that are native Chinese speaking as well, and we do the same across the region. So that’s a big part of how we think and how we built what we’re doing as well.

I think fundamentally two big challenges are that mental health care is a very nascent space in Asia. So not just the demand, but also the supply of it. We are building and carving out the category. The good thing is that there are many proof points already happening in the US and in Europe and Asia is a very closely following market that actually is expanding in need as well. 

So that’s the first big piece. The market — we are leading it, but we’re also building it all together. So there are challenges, but it’s a blue ocean network we’re trying to capture as well. 

The next key thing I would say is really building the infrastructure. It hasn’t changed over the last few decades. We’re building those pieces here as well. 

“The market — we are leading it, but we’re also building it all together. So there are challenges, but it’s a blue ocean network we’re trying to capture as well.”

Shefali: Moving on to Jianfeng. Would love to hear more about your background and also your journey on building WIZ.AI.

Jianfeng: I’m Jianfeng. I’m very honored to be here and participate [in this panel]. We started our company WIZ.AI in 2019. We are actually a company with a vision to reinvent customer engagement and customer services using AI technology like voice and conversational AI, and also NLP, text-to-speech, and all these kinds of technologies to help to effectively and efficiently engage with customers for business needs. 

And one of the technologies we’re very proud of is our robot we call a “talkbot” which actually can talk over the phone with the users of our clients. So they’re human-like. In a short survey, more than 90% of the audience [were] not even aware they were talking to a robot. This is basically our [core] product and service right now. 

The talkbot is able to talk in 10 languages including English, Bahasa Indonesia, Bahasa Malay, Thai, and even Spanish. And we also have large enterprise customers such as DBS, Singtel, and Seamoney, et cetera. That’s pretty much [what we do].

“One of the technologies we’re very proud of is our robot we call a “talkbot” which actually can talk over the phone with the users of our clients. So they’re human-like. In a short survey, more than 90% of the audience [were] not even aware they were talking to a robot…The talkbot is able to talk in 10 languages including English, Bahasa Indonesia, Bahasa Malay, Thai, and even Spanish. And we also have large enterprise customers such as DBS, Singtel, and Seamoney…”

Evolution of Voice AI Adoption By Enterprise Globally

Shefali: I think the next question is also for you, Jianfeng. I think you’ve built a great platform. You have several patents. You’ve also been recognized globally, and we also are aware that you have teams across different regions and experts and talent is lacking, especially for what you do. So can you tell me how you see the adoption of voice AI solutions evolving across markets in the region?

Jianfeng: For the adoption of voice AI and this kind of AI technology, the first [thing] I would look at is the market perspective. In the market, the pandemic actually drove a lot of digitalization, especially for businesses.

So before the pandemic, when we talk to large enterprises, they usually think, “We are in a market with low labor cost. Why should I adopt technology to do this?” But during the pandemic, a lot of enterprises [had a lot of issues]. One of our customer’s Malaysia call center shut down. Then in the next few days, their backup call center in the Philippines also shut down. Then they had to switch back to their Singaporean employees to pick up the phone calls to support. So during the pandemic, [enterprises] contacted us to say, “We need this kind of top-class service to help us to engage with our customers.” So that’s one part. The pandemic really drove digitalization for business. 

And the second thing is after the pandemic we saw kind of a labor shortage across the world, not just in the US, but also like here in Southeast Asia. Although we have a large population here, a lot of businesses, they still found a big shortage for that. So these are the kinds of market needs I saw. 

Technology-wise, we have a very strong engineering team. We actually help to humanize these kinds of conversations. And our bot is also able to help to scale into a very large volume. For example, for one customer, we helped them to make one million calls within two hours. This is not the limit. We can actually increase [the scale] more compared to that. 

Then another thing that is very important is the consistency and quality of the conversation. The bot can handle [conversations] very consistently from the morning until the evening. And there’s no change in emotion. They are not shouting at customers. So it is very consistent and fully compliant. 

So this is very good, and one interesting case is that when we did a POC with one of our customers, they were still a little bit hesitant about using our product, but during the testing, we found there was a breakdown of their system. So we actually did some mining and data intelligence through all these calls. 

Then we got back to them and said, “Maybe check your server to see if there’s any issue.” Then they said, “Yeah, we actually would like to be able to do this kind of data intelligence. So that’s also one of the things our customer loves [about us]. 

So, after three years here, we saw the growing adoption of these kinds of AI technologies — this one book called “Crossing the Chasm”, which was very famous in the 1990s for the software industry, talked about how those innovations and new technology adoption, one important step is how to cross the chasm [into the mainstream], and I think our talkbot and our AI technologies are in that stage of the adoption. 

“…after the pandemic, we saw a kind of a labor shortage across the world, not just in the US, but also like here in Southeast Asia. Although we have a large population here, a lot of businesses, they still found a big shortage for that…our bot is also able to help to scale into a very large volume…it is very consistent and fully compliant…”

Education and Expansion for Southeast Asia’s Open Finance Leader

Shefali: Thanks for sharing. And I like the fact that you mentioned that there is consistency with the talkbots that you have today, which goes to show how sticky your clients are. So the next question is for Todd. I know driving open finance adoption is not easy. It’s an equation that involves more than just product and technology. So how do you go about educating the market and creating value with open finance? 

Todd: That’s the real challenge with building open finance infrastructure in an unregulated or not yet regulated market — we have a lot of education to do. For the Philippines they have just now started to draft the regulations on digital consent capture — according to Philippine background law, how are you gonna properly capture digital consent I’ve agreed to do a one-time data share with a lender, or that I want a tokenized long term data share for a financial management app?

Even these rules are not yet in place. So we have a lot of education and I spend a lot of my time educating regulators and working with bank partners that are starting to see more and more commercial use cases for launching banking as a service or embedded finance or open finance or whichever term you want to use.

For companies that are just now discovering the use cases for open finance, or building embedded finance products into their app, we’re running an accelerator in the Philippines and we have in a week of calls for applications had 30 qualified companies apply that are planning and that are intending at the seed stage to build embedded finance somehow into their apps.

And then educating also the end user who is at the stage kind of where credit cards were maybe 15 years ago, 10 years ago, when it was seen as highly irresponsible for you to enter your credit card details on a website. And now of course, not only do we do it without thinking, but we save our cards everywhere.

By choosing to enter a not-yet-regulated and relatively new market in a regulated industry, there’s a lot of education. So Brankas does two things. We work with financial institutions as an enterprise SaaS provider and help them become API publishers. So actually helping the banks deploy commercial APIs for account opening for card issuance, payment APIs, remittances, data, and identity products as well.

And for the banks, it’s showing them the use case and the commercial value, and actually in some cases, literally working with their team to build the business case so that they can get board approval or management approval. And then on the business side, it’s showing the different ways that open finance can be an enabler for a new set of products.

But as you described Shefali, it’s constantly educating the market and articulating the demand, showing customer case studies, showing the security reviews, and demonstrating this is a technology that can drive product innovation with our customers. 

“By choosing to enter a not yet regulated and relatively new market in a regulated industry, there’s a lot of education…We work with financial institutions as an enterprise SaaS provider and help them become API publish…for the banks, it’s showing them the use case and the commercial value, and actually in some cases, literally working with their team to build the business case so that they can get board approval or management approval.”

Shefali: It seems that you’re also a pioneer in this space. If you look at open finance, and if you were to scan regions, I think one way or the other, soon enough, you’re gonna expand to a lot of neighboring regions in Southeast Asia. So how do you go about expansion plans? That’s my first question.

And my second question — you’ve been in the industry for a very long time, I believe since 2016, if I’m not wrong. What have you learned? What are the key learnings that you would share with the audience today? 

Todd: So the first one is regional expansion. We made a bet early on that we’re not going to provide an Indonesia-specific or a Vietnam-specific solution because when we scan the market, a lot of the FIs that are looking to become API publishers or selling API products, they’re actually going from zero to one. 

And that infrastructure, that API orchestration infrastructure, the developer portals, the security and admin settings, the standardized API definitions — those don’t change market to market. Of course, maybe Indonesia has data localization requirements that Vietnam may not have, but that’s a minor issue compared to the product design. 

So we saw a regional opportunity. We did not want to get sucked into too much localization because we see our opportunity to expand as a global emerging markets company. So our regional expansion required a lot of product development tradeoffs to ensure that we had something that was geo-agnostic but really focused on solving emerging market infrastructure. 

In terms of learnings, I think I was naive to enterprise sales and when you’re convincing a financial institution or a large tech company to basically buy an embedded finance or open finance product for the first time, it is very easy and tempting to get sucked into an endless POC proof of concept or some pilot initiative, which actually does not have support to become a long term kind of multi-hundred thousand or million dollar account value. 

So I don’t think we were discerning enough and I don’t think we had the right kind of enterprise sales infrastructure — everything from pre-sales solutioning to post-sales implementation — to really support that.

So I think my big lesson was for those entering into an enterprise business, do not underestimate the complexity of the sales process, which again, as I say that, sounds like an obvious thing, but it’s very easy as an early-stage founder to get excited by people with a business card from a large institution saying they want to work with you on a POC. But I think finding that focus is actually essential in enterprise. 

“We saw a regional opportunity. We did not want to get sucked into too much localization because we see our opportunity to expand as a global emerging markets company. So our regional expansion required a lot of product development tradeoffs to ensure that we had something that was geo-agnostic, but really focused on solving emerging market infrastructure.”

Localization vs Globalization for a leading mental health care platform

Shefali: Thanks Todd, for sharing. So the next question I have is for Theo, so when we look at mental healthcare, I think it’s a need that cuts across borders. And in that case, you would need a lot of hyper-localization. And in essence, based on what you shared before, you have secured a lot of multinational clients. So how do you go about creating these local nuances to care for the individual at the same time securing these multinational clients? 

Theo: That’s a great question and one that we think a lot about and invest a lot of resources from since day one as well. One thing about mental health, fundamentally, it’s that there are some things that stay the same no matter where you’re in the world, and then some things are quite different as well. 

Fundamentally, everyone has similar mental health emotions and struggles from depression as a condition, anxiety and trauma, and so on and so forth. But what transcends that and what becomes quite nuanced are the local context nuances within every market as well. What someone in Indonesia struggles with is quite different from what someone in Singapore struggles with as well and what triggers them essentially. 

So for us since day one, one of the big themes we thought about is how do we actually get mental health care localized for Asia? Making it scalable, but also how do we make a repeatable playbook for productizing localization of the product itself. So today, it’s available in over 10 languages, and we have providers across the region plus countries to give that care. And that’s critical because for us and a big part of our go-to-market.

And taking a step back when you look at the landscape for mental health care in the enterprise space as well, who’s gonna pay for mental health care? There are consumers, there are employers, and then there are the partners in the ecosystem as well. So when you look at where the market is today, the unique thing about Intellect is that while we are B2B2C as we work with corporates and insurers, since day one, we also had a unique direct-to-consumer version of our platform accessible as well to create clout and scale. 

But when we dug in deeper, we found that actually who was really the one paying at scale would not be the consumers at least today. The market for mental health care is still a bit nascent in that respect for consumers to pay three figures or four figures out of pocket on a regular basis.

But then who’s gonna pay us? This is a real need. So we looked at employers. There was a huge segment that actually paid for it, and we look at insurers as well, and the related health benefits players. So the space we’re playing in is quite a unique one where we play in the health benefits space and the stakeholders we work with are different as well from a typical enterprise sales cycle.

And linking back to the localization question, our goal is to work with the largest employers and the largest insurers. To take for example, we are today the APAC-wide provider of mental health benefits for Dell, one of the world’s largest companies, for companies like Singtel across the region APAC-wide, Foodpanda, Shopee, and more.

So that means we really have to take a regional [focus] from day one. How do we build care that is localized but at the same quality across the region? And that’s been really, really core to what we do, but [also] to make it scalable. So we have built a repeatable playbook where we partner with local professionals, local translators, and a lot of QA and vetting processes to make sure that what we’ve built is not just translated, but actually very contextualized and evidence-based in what we do as well.

“We found that actually who was really the one paying at scale would not be the consumers at least today…So we looked at employers. There was a huge segment that actually paid for it, and we looked at insurers as well, and the related health benefits players…our goal is to work with the largest employers and the largest insurers…So that means we really have to take a regional [focus] from day one.”

Shefali: And building on that, if we look at the Western landscape, I think there are quite a few players there that have made it in the mental healthcare space. What are the parallels that you can draw between the western market and the Asia market today? 

Theo: I think in many segments, not just ours in healthcare, mental healthcare, in particular, we see it changing a little bit. But oftentimes in the past, the US leads a lot of the trends. Usually, in some of the larger categories, we see data from transport to e-commerce and for the US the mental health care category is where we see over the past five years, seven years, a lot of the mental health players have been building a platform to serve the needs of the US market.

Some of the largest unicorns today, many of them are huge companies in the US. But when we started digging deeper, what we found was that actually in Asia there are very different problems to be solved for. So that means that there need to be different approaches to it.

To give an example, the issue of mental health care in the US is that the healthcare system is quite broken in some respects. People who need care can seek support or it takes months on, and they can’t find the right provider. With the US being much more mature in the literacy of mental health, many people actually need that support. So we see great players that do a D2C psychiatry model that works really well. Some of the largest players in the US are D2C players. 

When we look at Asia, however, a different issue is in place whereby we actually see a massive issue. Some of the highest mental health crisis rates across Asia, from Singapore to Hong Kong to Japan, and Korea. It’s not news to all of us. But at the same time, quite paradoxically, we have some of the lowest openness to seeking mental health care. Traditionally speaking, we’re seeing that change rapidly today.

So our work in Asia is how do we build end-to-end care but really get people started on their journeys as well. So we took the reverse approach to what the US plays did. They went clinical and then upstream to light touch care, while we went light to touch care to get people started and already went much deeper in the care we give. So it started from self-care programs moved to coaching, clinical therapy, and we do offer psychiatry and even a 24/7 distress support piece as well.

So that’s one of the big pieces that we found. The learning was around how to build a best-in-class mental health care system. That has never been done in Asia, but what we did next was how do we make sure that we’re solving the right issues in Asia. Naturally, there are very different problems and we tackle it differently as well.

“We took the reverse approach to what the US players did. They went clinical and then upstream to light touch care, while we went light to touch care to get people started and already went much deeper in the care we give. So it started from self-care programs moved to coaching, clinical therapy, and we do offer psychiatry and even a 24/7 distress support piece as well.”

Illustrating Impact on Enterprise Customers

Shefali: I agree. I think we can draw parallels across, even different companies, how localization is very important in Southeast Asia, not just in the healthcare space, but even in the finance space we’ve seen that recently.The [last] question is can you share examples of enterprise customers that you have worked with and how they have been impacted by the innovation you provide?

Todd: One obvious example is in consumer lending in a market like Indonesia. A lot of the lenders will need to build credit profiles from scratch. So we work with a few of the largest consumer lenders, whether it’s BNPL or e-commerce merchant financing so that they can make instant credit decisions because they’re getting verified by instantly available data from bank accounts, from e-commerce transaction history, and from telco data. 

We also are enabling payment processors and e-commerce shops to accept direct pay-by-bank, which will be 80, 90% cheaper than running through a payment intermediary. And if you’re a payment processor using our aggregated APIs, then you don’t need to interact also with 10 or 15 different bank infrastructures, which may have different implementations of various tech.

And then for the banks, we’ve worked with across Southeast Asia, we’ve been enabling them to become API publishers, whether it’s Mandiri or BRI in Indonesia, or whether it’s NetBank or ACB in Vietnam, we’ve enabled them to actually open up a new channel and a new product category where they can now onboard customers, or they can enable pay by bank products, without needing to build new software.

And the marginal cost of onboarding that new customer or sending that payment is zero because it’s the tech partners consuming an aggregated Brankas API that are doing the heavy lifting on behalf of the bank. So those are some examples.

“We work with a few of the largest consumer lenders, whether it’s BNPL or e-commerce merchant financing so that they can make instant credit decisions…We also are enabling payment processors and e-commerce shops to accept direct pay-by-bank, which will be 80, 90% cheaper than running through a payment intermediary…we’ve enabled [banks] to actually open up a new channel and a new product category where they can now onboard customers, or they can enable pay by bank products, without needing to build new software.”

Jianfeng: Since Todd just shared a story about consumer lending, I will also share the same story. Previously, those lending vendors usually hired thousands of people to make phone calls to do debt collection.

But one of the customers did it without any human agent being hired because recruiting, training, quality control and human agent retention is a very tedious job and it’s very, very hard to find those talents. So right now they usually start with several human agents doing their collection job by themselves for maybe one or two weeks. So they set up the standards, then later they use our bots to help them to do the phone call.

Of course, they would also double-check with statistics. For this task, they actually significantly reduced the cost and also increased productivity. So we see more and more changes like this when using our talkbot services.

“Previously, those lending vendors usually hired thousands of people to make phone calls to do debt collection. But one of the customers did it without any human agent being hired because recruiting, training, quality control and human agent retention is a very tedious job and it’s very, very hard to find those talents… So they set up the standards, then later they use our bots to help them to do the phone call…For this task, they actually significantly reduced the cost and also increased productivity.”

Theo: That’s a good question and one that actually we have many examples of when it comes to the value we give to clients as well. But I’ll take a broad stroke and I’ll give one specific example. 

So for us, we work with employers and we will work with insurers to basically cover every single employee or policyholder that they have with mental health benefits and mental health coverage — something that’s quite new and quite nascent.

So oftentimes we get asked, is it a checkbox? Is it a nice to have piece? But digging a bit deeper, there are multiple facets that we actually saw for employers as well. A big part of what we see today is that there are underlying increasing trends and risks of employees in distress. This is not news. We actually see employees increasingly quitting companies for various reasons. It’s not to do with the pay, but the environment and the stresses they face. So there’s one underlying piece where a lot of employees recognize many employees are struggling with some levels of distress quite critically. 

So it’s a big part actually we do to tackle that aspect there. We have a very strong clinical team that runs over 10 clinical studies right now with efficacy proven on multiple fronts. But one of the key things we’re doing now is to prove ROI as well — how do mental benefits and productive mental support lead to less attrition and fundamentally how do these long-term health benefits lead to a reduction in chronic health issues?

That’s actually where we play quite a bit with the insurers as well. So there’s one piece there. And the next aspect is employers and also insurance policies today. what people expect from where they work has changed. Fundamentally it’s no longer just putting in the work and getting a paycheck. It’s a lot of times the benefits, the coverage, and the support they get from their employers, which is a big part of their lives. 

So we see increasingly not just the large global multinationals, but a lot of local conglomerates, even traditional clients we work with — we see this increasing trend where mental health care is becoming one of the largest growing important physical health aspects. And that’s why for the benefit we give to employers, we make it easy and seamless for them to cover all their employees across the region through one very simple platform.

“One of the key things we’re doing now is to prove ROI as well — how do mental benefits and productive mental support lead to less attrition and fundamentally how do these long-term health benefits lead to a reduction in chronic health issues?…Fundamentally it’s no longer just putting in the work and getting a paycheck. It’s a lot of times the benefits, the coverage and the support they get from their employers, which is a big part of their lives.”