Cross-border e-commerce sales poised for explosive growth: Visa Study [press release]
Online businesses see a world of opportunity for cross-border sales.
According to a Visa Global Merchant eCommerce Study (GME Study), e-commerce leaders globally view international expansion and finding new cross-border customers critical to driving growth, particularly heading into the prime holiday shopping period.
While a vast majority of leaders (87 per cent) surveyed believe expanding cross-border e-commerce is one of their company’s biggest growth opportunities, almost all Singapore business owners (96 per cent) agree that having an international presence is key to their company’s success in the years ahead.
Today, two in three businesses (66 per cent) that sell online have international customers. These sales account for nearly a third (31 per cent) of those business’ revenues. Even with the significant revenue from cross-border sales, more than half (51 per cent) of companies who are selling to international customers need help to optimise their international online sales processes.
Oikocredit leads US$5M Series A funding of Kaleidofin [press release]
Kaleidofin, a neobank for the informal sector customer in India, has closed an INR 360 million (US$5 million) in Series A round led by impact investor Oikocredit.
Existing investors Flourish, a Silicon Valley-based VC firm, and Omidyar Network India, also invested. Blume Ventures, angel investor Prof. Shlomo Ben-Haim, and Bharat Inclusion Seed Fund, also joined.
Founded in 2017 by Sucharita Mukherjee and Puneet Gupta, Kaleidofin provides curated, goal-based financial solutions to customers in the underbanked segments using proven financial planning and wealth management principles. For each customer, Kaleidofin begins with understanding the financial goals of the household, its main sources of financial vulnerability, preferences, and tolerance toward financial risk.
It creates individual ‘personas’ of households through multiple sources of information, such as the demographic profile, income sources, asset ownership, among others, to tailor specific financial solutions for its customers.
Seekify raises US$1.5M seed funding from Sequoia India [press release]
Customer experience SaaS platform Seekify has raised US$1.5 million in seed funding as part of Sequoia India’s rapid scale-up programme Surge.
Nishant Rao (Founding Partner at Avatar Venture Partners), Gaurav Agarwal (1mg) and Sameer Maheshwari (HealthKart) also participated.
Seekify is now available in Beta for enterprises – and the company has started multiple pilots with customers across the world. With the funding, Seekify will invest in building technology and hiring new talent across functions.
Seekify can be easily integrated with different software of businesses, allowing them to aggregate all the data that drives their customer experience. The platform helps teams to set clear goals and KPIs, providing data-driven insights using AI and ML.
Finally, it automates the workflows needed to improve the customer experience – hence closing the loop. Overall, the goal is to simplify the complexities of CX and deliver great customer experience through innovative technology.
Hong Kong gets its first virtual lender ZA Bank [Finews.Asia]
ZA Bank, co-owned by ZhongAn Online P&C Insurance and Sinolink Group, has launched to become the first virtual bank to kickstart services in Hong Kong.
According to its CEO Rockson Hsu, the name ZA represents a reversal of alphabetical order which is a reminder to ‘think out of the box and view things from a different perspective’.
ZA Bank said it would offer interest rates of 1.4 per cent for one-month Hong Kong dollar deposits and up to 2 per cent for three-, six- and 12-month deposits.
Dable Partners with Malaysia’s Malaysiakini to provide personalises content recommendation [press release]
Dable, a content discovery platform, has entered into a partnership with Malaysia’s independent news platform Malaysiakini.
With this partnership, Dable will provide a personalised content recommendation solution on the
Malaysiakini (Chinese) website, via a widget. The service will help increase the site’s traffic and boost article consumption by feeding readers with content they are interested in.
Dable is a startup based in South Korea that uses Big Data and personalisation technologies to analyse the media content consumed by visitors in real-time and provide quality, personalised recommendations.
The post Today’s top tech news: Visa study says cross-border e-commerce sales poised for explosive growth appeared first on e27.