An ex-Lazada’s exec’s startup is helping companies turn finance into a growth engine

What does it take to open a bank account or make a payment these days? For the average consumer, access to the internet and a smartphone is enough, thanks to the arrival of digital banking services, e-wallets, and other developments in the fintech space.

Photo credit: koonsiri / 123RF

However, while consumer finance has become more streamlined and efficient, the same cannot be said for business finance, which remains a complex and complicated affair in Southeast Asia, involving many disparate parts and legacy processes that can be long and tedious.

Business owners often have to open corporate bank accounts in person, spending hours at the bank, and then wait a few weeks for their applications to be approved. They also face extremely high foreign exchange rates and slow processing times, which limit their ability to transact with customers and vendors abroad. This only gives them the chance to have one or two corporate cards, which slows down business activity.

“In today’s day and age, we are seeing multiple sectors making the shift towards digitalization, from retail stores to online apps, restaurants to cloud kitchens,” says Andrea Baronchelli, CEO of Aspire, a business finance solution for startups. “But the same could not be said for the business finance industry.”

Navigating the business finance space

As the former chief marketing officer of ecommerce giant Lazada, Baronchelli witnessed first hand the challenges that digital businesses face with managing finances as he and his team worked to bring companies online and onto Lazada’s platform.

Andrea Baronchelli, CEO at Aspire / Photo credit: Aspire

“I saw the real issues that small business owners were facing, including long waiting times, paperwork, hidden fees, opaque legacy systems, and exactly how these types of hurdles can slow down and hamper a startup in hypergrowth mode,” he shares.

Despite the problems with business finance processes, it is an essential and necessary part of any company’s operations. Firms need to ensure that vendors are paid on time, that customers pay on time, that budgets aren’t exceeded, money goes where it needs to go, numbers tally, and everything is accounted for.

Startups are also becoming increasingly aware of the importance of implementing finance processes early in their journeys, instead of thinking of it as something to worry about somewhere down the road.

“Startups need to set up proper processes for their finances right from an early stage,” shares Alvin Ip, Aspire’s CFO. “No company has an unlimited amount of money, so businesses need to ensure their finances are in order so that they can grow much faster and more efficiently.”

Alvin Ip, CFO at Aspire / Photo credit: Aspire

Additionally, finance is now seen as a key growth engine rather than just a back-office function. As companies seek to grow further and become more efficient, finance departments need to focus more on value-added activities, such as financial planning and analysis, strategic planning, and risk management instead of menial and repetitive tasks.

However, that is where the problem lies.

“On average, there are seven different financial services a startup needs to rely on,” says Baronchelli. “This results in a highly fragmented process that is not synchronized one way or the other, causing a lot of wasted time that could be better spent on more productive work.”

This sentiment is echoed by Ip.

“The finance department [of a company] often spends a lot of time on accounting, crunching the numbers and reconciling them,” he says. “It doesn’t have time to analyze the numbers and find insights to support the decision-making processes.”

These challenges inspired the development of Aspire. The firm offers a comprehensive suite of services that address all the finance requirements of a company at any stage of its journey: These services range from opening a corporate account, invoice and payments processing, and even multicurrency and international transfers. The firm also offers cashback and other benefits on corporate cards, enabling easy integrations with software such as Xero and QuickBooks, allowing businesses to manage and understand their finances easily.

“Using the data and insights on our platform, business owners get an invaluable bird’s eye view of their finances, which also helps with future investments and plans for the future,” says Baronchelli.

By entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurs

Aspire prides itself on having a suite of solutions that are built “by entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurs,” and continually iterates its products in collaboration with a valuable in-house resource: its own finance team.

Aspire’s finance department operates on the company’s own platform, using it for everything from budget management to claims processing. This has allowed Aspire to move faster – claims can be paid out to employees within a day, for example. Departments also don’t need finance to approve every new purchase as the system helps track the budgets for each part of the business automatically, giving department heads the power to manage their own spending.

Photo credit: Aspire

All this has helped make Aspire’s finance team far more efficient, according to Ip.

“The platform has enabled us to have better control, better monitoring, and better tracking of the performance of our company,” he explains. “As a hypergrowth startup, we can leave the small stuff to the platform, and focus on the big stuff, like focusing on how to better serve our customers, to better understand our markets and our data, to make the decision-making process go faster.”

For example, as Aspire works to build its customer base, having data on its finances in real time allows it to make effective decisions on where to best focus its customer acquisition efforts.

“We can see which channels we’re spending on, and which ones we’re seeing the best return from,” shares Ip. “Through this, we can better understand the behavior of our customers, and focus our energies on the channels that are the most effective.”

Aspire’s finance department also gives the firm’s product team feedback on the services it uses and suggests improvements or other features that can be added to Aspire’s offerings.

“The product manager might not fully understand the internal processes and what is needed by finance departments, which is where we come in to work with the product manager to make it even better,” adds Ip. “If it works for us, it’ll work for other startups out there.”

This approach has served Aspire well – it counts firms like recruitment startup NodeFlair and activewear label Anya Active among its customers, and currently operates in four markets in Southeast Asia, namely Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam.

The firm also hit US$1 billion in annualized transactions in May 2021 and raised US$158 million in series B funding in September 2021. Plans for a series C round are in the works.

Finance as an engine for growth

As more and more businesses understand the value of finances as a a key part of their overall growth strategies, Aspire aims to be pivotal in changing the way companies manage their finances.

To that end, Baronchelli says that Aspire will continue to improve its suite of products and expand into more markets in the region.

“We want to empower business owners with the finance tools they need to be successful, so that they will go on to make meaningful impact to the communities we are all part of,” he concludes.

Built by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs, Aspire is an all-in-one finance solution that aims to simplify business finance processes for companies in Southeast Asia.

Learn more about Aspire here.

This content was produced by Tech in Asia Studios, which connects brands with Asia’s tech community. Learn more about partnering with Tech in Asia Studios.