Southeast Asian fintech startup Jirnexu (formerly Saving Plus) has raised US$3 million in Series A funding.
Jirnexu provides banks and insurance companies with a full stack technology solution that manages every stage of the customer acquisition journey – marketing, acquisition, fulfillment and loyalty – an addressable market of US$25 billion a year, based on aggregated data from EY, IDC and MarketLine from 2013 and 2014. Funding will be used to drive product development, geographic expansion and recruitment across Southeast Asia, with Malaysia and Indonesia as priority markets.
Investment into Jirnexu was led by Singapore-based venture capital firm DMP, along with global investors Celebes Capital, NTT DOCOMO Ventures, Nullabor, Tuas Capital Partners and Anfield Equities. Also participating was private investor Steve Melhuish (CEO & Co-founder, PropertyGuru Group).
Yuen Tuck Siew, CEO at Jirnexu, said, “Financial service institutions in Southeast Asia still rely on labour intensive customer acquisition practices. Expensive telesales, hard to manage direct sales agents, paper forms, long queues at bank branches, high rejection rates for minor errors – all of these make acquiring customers slow, inefficient and costly. At Jirnexu, we offer comprehensive solutions for businesses to attract, retain and monetize connected consumers in high-growth markets.”
A key technology driver within the full stack fintech solution is XpressApply, a digital application workflow management solution and CRM platform. It simplifies the consumer application process for financial products, turning dull paper-based forms into online bitesize questionnaires that can be completed within 10 minutes. XpressApply has delivered customer conversion rates 200 per cent higher than telesales and traditional lead generation methods.
In H2 2016, Jirnexu will offer XpressApply as a business-to-business (B2B) managed service, helping firms track and manage customer acquisition and lifecycles – from the moment a consumer applies for a new product to the moment they are approved. The result: better tracking, analytics, conversions and customer experience.
Dmitry Levit, Partner at DMP, commented, “Financial institutions operating in emerging markets have traditionally struggled with digital customer acquisition. In our view, Jirnexu has proven its ability to address this pain point, and has done so by building a full technology stack that manages the entire customer journey. Jirnexu enables its business partners to be innovative in the way they generate leads online, convert those leads into customers, handle their fulfilment and keep them loyal.”
This Series A round takes Jirnexu’s total funding to US$4.5 million. It will continue to build its senior management teams in Malaysia and Indonesia. Jirnexu is also hiring at all levels in product development, a team which will double in size this year.
“Southeast Asia is riding a boom in internet and mobile offerings, which has brought a new level of convenience to end-users. Whether you book a ride with Grab or shop online with Lazada, consumers are expecting the same anytime-anywhere access to all services including their personal finances. The first financial services company who can meet the consumers’ rising expectations will be the winner. That’s why my vision is clear and simple – I want to build the Amazon of personal finance in Southeast Asia, a full stack technology driven platform that enables service and value leadership to the consumer,” added Siew.
Jirnexu owns financial comparison websites RinggitPlus in Malaysia and KreditGoGo in Indonesia. It already works with some of the world’s largest financial institutions and telcos including Alliance Bank, AEON, Citibank, HSBC, Manulife, OCBC Bank, RHB, Standard Chartered, Tokio Marine Life, U Mobile, and XOX Mobile, among others. In 2015, Jirnexu-owned websites reached tens of millions of visitors, captured some 450,000 customer leads and delivered tens of thousands of approved customers and accounts.