The COVID-19 outbreak and a new round of technological and industrial revolution are profoundly reshaping the global economic structure, leading in a new wave of globalization. As the tide rises and falls in these turbulent times, globalized enterprises and institutions are striving and thriving to live with crises.

 

Here in the BRI (Belt and Road Initiative) Finance EMBA Program at Tsinghua PBCSF, students are actively seeking new opportunities under the Belt and Road Initiative. They are explorers of the new economy, aiming at emerging markets, boldly scouting for market and technological innovations, and leading enterprises to brave the storm in the post-epidemic era. They are also trendsetting in the new globalization. For this special issue, we invite Aaron Tan, Co-founder and CEO of Carro, to share his experience of bucking trends and his insights on the future of enterprise and industry development under the new trend of globalization.

 

Guest in this edition:

Jefferson Lanjie Chen, Co-Founder and CEO of Advance Intelligence Group (AIG), Student of Cohort 2 in the BRI EMBA Program

In September 2021, Advance Intelligence Group, founded by Jefferson Lanjie Chen, now a student enrolled in the BRI EMBA Program, announced the closing of its $400 million+ Series D round financing, bringing its valuation to more than $2 billion. The Group is now one of the largest independent technology startups based in Singapore.

Chen, who graduated from the School of Software at Tsinghua University and holds an MBA from Stanford University, has always dreamed of starting a business. After graduation, he worked for Goldman Sachs on a number of IPOs and M&A deals in Asia, and was responsible for greater China investments at Farallon Capital, a leading asset management firm, where he was also a partner at GSR Ventures. He was always on the lookout for innovative opportunities in the financial, retail and Internet sectors, both as a student and as an investor.

In 2016, Chen felt that China's innovation in terms of business models and science and technology had already been leading the overseas markets to a certain extent, with its own world-class Internet and sci-tech industries.

When the time came, he brought along a Group of friends with academic backgrounds from Stanford and Tsinghua and work experiences from Goldman Sachs, Accenture and Amazon to start Advance Intelligence Group in Singapore. Several banks, consumer finance companies, artificial intelligence and Internet companies that invested in Farallon Capital at the time became the first batch of AIG’s corporate clients.

In 2018, Chen, who has expanded his anti-fraud and risk control business to Indonesia, the Philippines and other countries, returned to Tsinghua University again to join the 2nd Cohort of Tsinghua PBCSF’s Belt and Road Initiative EMBA Program, expecting to expand his learning and business to a bigger platform through advanced business education.

Now, after several years of development, Chen has led AIG to gradually extend from the original enterprise service mode to different types of ToB and ToC businesses – including enterprise service brand ADVANCE.AI, merchant service brand Ginee platform, and consumer service brand Atome Financial. Last year, Chen seized the opportunity of online expansion brought by the COVID-19 pandemic to achieve reverse growth, and expanded its business to 12 countries and regions from Southeast Asia and Greater China only at the beginning to aslo encompassing South Asia, Latin America and Africa today.

As one of the earliest entrepreneurs to focus their business on the Southeast Asian market, Chen’s accurate understanding of the Southeast Asian market, forward-looking vision and continuous investment in technology innovation are the key success factors for AIG to excel. We had a conversation with Chen about the present and future of Chinese technology enterprises going abroad.

1. 1. How do you think of the achievements of AIG in recent years after it just completed its Series D round of financing of more than $400 million in September and became a unicorn tech company valued at more than $2 billion? The company has been growing against the trend under the pandemic, what do you think you did right? How did the company adjust its strategy under the circumstances of the pandemic?

I think there may be several aspects. First of all, we tried our best to bring our relatively successful experience in China and developed countries, as well as advanced talents and technologies to our target market in Southeast Asia from the early stage of starting our business.

In fact, as early as 2016, we set up a tech team in China consisting of many AI talents with Tsinghua and Stanford backgrounds, so we have a certain advantage in technology.

Secondly, in the development process of the company, we very much respect the local characteristics of overseas markets in Southeast Asia. We also set up a localized team early on, which is different from some companies originated in the United States and China. They are using more of an air force style, but in our case, it is air force plus army, a kind of two-front operation. Because we are an AI company, we need to collect and annotate a lot of model data, as well as first conduct modeling and later product model iteration. These are better done by good local teams.

We now have a structure of dual headquarters in Beijing and Singapore, with a total of more than 1500 employees, about 700-800 of whom are in China and the rest in the local market of Southeast Asia.

The COVID-19 pandemic really posed a big challenge for all companies, especially in the first half of last year. Basically within three to four weeks, all the Southeast Asian countries began seeing concentrated outbreaks, which created a lot of uncertainty for us. But we also saw opportunities in accelerated online processes. After the outbreak, global brands and international retailers have been greatly impacted. For example, we have cooperated with more than 5,000 international brands before, but their online marketing in Southeast Asia is not high. Offline sales are basically suspended under the pandemic, and they are in urgent need of new means of marketing and payment.

Therefore, we quickly made strategic adjustments, and took the initiative to close 1-2 business lines and develop 2-3 new products and business lines. We launched Atome, a pay-as-you-go platform for consumers and merchants, and Ginee, a one-stop e-commerce service platform that includes e-commerce ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning). These two business lines are the fastest growing segments for AIG since last year.

Atome's rapid growth is mainly due to online and offline retailers looking for new ways to drive sales, increase unit prices and conversion rates, and reach newer and better customer groups. Ginee, which serves e-commerce sectors, is riding the trend of traditional retailers opening online stores and managing them through multiple channels.

 

The last point is that the anti-fraud and risk management platform we started at the beginning has been enjoying relatively good revenue growth, and its overall financial situation is relatively healthy., So it has been fairly strong in the anti-risk field under the pandemic circumstances.

 

1. What are your development plans after Series D round of financing?

 

In general, the focus for 2022 is globalization, expanding our business segment from Southeast Asia to countries outside Asia, and we plan to enter the Japanese market by the end of this year.

 

In fact, enterprises will not be satisfied with just a target market or a target area, nor will they slowly expand to the global market.

 

1. You mentioned going overseas and internationalization. AIG is deeply engaged in overseas markets and has served many Chinese overseas enterprises. How do you view the opportunities and challenges for Chinese technology enterprises to go overseas in the current international environment?

I think there are definitely more opportunities. To take cross-border e-commerce as an example, it has been developing rapidly since last year. At the same time, because the supply chains of many overseas countries has been greatly impacted, China's flexible supply chains have displayed obvious advantages in e-commerce. Also in Southeast Asia, some companies are also building ecosystems, both upstream and downstream; these companies are developing very quickly.

In fact, I think the COVID-19 pandemic has made Chinese overseas enterprises more aware about their advantages and disadvantages compared with overseas enterprises.

In addition, Chinese brands like Tiktok, which have developed their own characteristics and gained traffic overseas, have led more overseas users to accept products and user experiences from China. On this basis, in fact, China's overseas companies can reach higher on the shoulders of giants. For example, Chinese companies used to rely on Facebook and Google when they went overseas initailly. Now there are traffic platforms essentially created by Chinese companies, with many successful business models that we are familiar with in China. Therefore, Chinese companies have inherent advantages when they go overseas, which is a huge potential opportunity for brand upgrading.

 

Tech wise, such as AI, China is also at the forefront of the world. A lot of Southeast Asian markets do rely on Chinese technology and talent. So those who can land in the front-end target markets, execute localization well, and continue to strengthen the technical advantage of the back-end operation, are competitive in the global scope.

 

There are certainly challenges, such as the risks of geopolitical uncertainty and complexity. In addition, it is not enough for an enterprise to only have good products and services. It is necessary to spend more time on government relationship and cultural transmission to win the minds of users in the target market. It is also necessary to spend more time on soft power to ensure a very open and more transparent communication mechanism.

 

1. AIG has opened offices in 12 market regions and has more than 1,500 employees. What experience and methodology can you share in developing new markets and managing multinational teams in Southeast Asia?

 

In fact, I think the first thing is to acknowledge the importance of local culture. Some countries may have a small population, but it is still a culture, from language to every aspect of life, and their habits are very different from other regions. Fairer decisions can be made if you accept that reality.

 

So internally we first emphasize the acknowledgement of local cultures. But the concept of One Advance is also underscored in tandem. This One Advance concept is not to say we have a fixed template in each market, but rather, each country/market has some common elements that can be derived. For example, the ways of doing things, the spirit of innovation and so on, can be refined and abstracted, so that people across different nationalities and different cultures can assimilate.

 

Internally, we make a lot of efforts on diversity, inclusiveness and sense of belonging. For instance, we celebrate national festivals and encourage all members to learn the culture and even the language of each country. The company's meeting minutes and information are distributed in multiple languages. At the annual corporate conference or on the company's social media, we also encourage countries and regions to fully display their culture and create a diversity platform. In addition, the offices located in different countries should not only maintain a certain degree of unity in the decoration style, but also have local characteristic elements . In this way, when employees move from one office to another or from one country to another, they will find themselves working in a familiar multinational environment. It is this balance and combination between retraction and release that is important.

 

1. How have the two years of study in the BRI EMBA Program changed you  personally and career wise? Do you have any memorable experiences that you’d like to share?

First of all, our program is highly international. Lecturers come from China, the United States, Southeast Asia and so on. In this way, on the one hand, we can ensure that our knowledge system is systematic and complete, and on the other hand, we can hear eclectic views on globalization from a range of fascinating perspectives.

Meanwhile, the students are also from different countries, and many of them are already business partners. In the classroom environment, we have found many new business opportunities through our exchanges. This experience is different from my previous MBA. Now we have more opportunities to practice reaching deals, and the speed and results are also solid.

 

1. What are your plans for the next five years?

The core concept of our company is to make transactions frictionless, so we focus on using AI technology to change and transform the industries of finance and retail, which are actually complementary. A lot of financial transactions must be embedded in the retail transaction scenario. Behavioural data from retail transactions feed back into financial and risk-control decisions. We will continue to focus on these two industries.

And lately, metaverse has been a very hot concept, and I've been examining it since 2014. The core of it is to envisage an end picture. We're still very early in this direction, but I'm a big believer in the vision.

So if you think about metaverse, it needs to have three elements: The first is how does  one get into metaverse? There are a lot of potentials for hardware and operating systems that can be developed. The second is what does metaverse look like, what is its form? It uses computer graphics for AI rendering, auto-generated content recommendations and decision making. Because in the metaverse, the interaction is not simply between people and computers, but more importantly with other users. It is multi-dimensional, and there are a lot of AI technologies that can be applied. The third is how are economies set up and run in the metaverse? It has a fundamental relationship with blockchain, which will substantially improve the experience of both financial and retail services in the future.

What we see today on the mobile Internet will be reinterpreted and redeveloped in the metaverse, or the so-called Web 3.0 Era. Therefore, our company is to help our users to embrace the Web 3.0 Era and achieve a more perfect interaction when metaverse arrives through continuous innovation and technological research and development on the basis of the existing mobile Internet platform.