How he grew Jirnexu from a two-man startup to SEA’s first ‘full-stack’ fintech company

Yuen Tuck Siew founded Jirnexu in 2012 and grew it from a two-man startup in Malaysia to Southeast Asia’s first full-stack fintech and finserve company. It builds anytime-anywhere customer acquisition and life cycle management solutions for banks and insurers.

Here, Siew and I talk about how he came to build Jirnexu and the challenges he faced.

Could you tell us about your background and how you became an entrepreneur?

I was an investment banking analyst for three years, then I joined a hedge fund in 2007. Literally six months after I left the bank, the financial world started falling apart. I saw a lot of banks disappear, but I’ve retained this deep interest in banks and the financial system.

I decided to go back to Malaysia in 2010, as my wife and I thought it would be nice if our son grew up with his grandparents around. I left Malaysia when I was 13, so I also wanted to see what it was like to live and work in my home country.

Having been away for 15 years, I had to start my personal finances again from scratch. The whole experience was just bizarre to me because I had been in the UK where I could do everything online. In Malaysia, it took me two hours to open a bank account, I had to find an agent in a mall to get a credit card, and comparing prices online was just impossible. So as a consumer, I felt that there was an opportunity to provide a better service.

Also, looking at where Malaysians were, no one was doing online transactions in 2011. But in 2012, people, including my mother, started ordering on Groupon when Rocket Internet hit. We started seeing all demographics buying off from online platforms just because the value was so compelling. That was the indicator of how our own business would work in the market. If people don’t trust basic ecommerce transactions, then I don’t think they would trust online financial transactions.

So, that’s how I got started.

We did that for most of 2013, and the experience was just, frankly, miserable. It was a bad experience for our consumers. They would come to our website, then we’d send them to a bank website, but sometimes no one would contact them. And even if they were called, they would have a terrible experience.

We also weren’t getting paid very much because the banks would say, “Well, you’re not really delivering customers.” And we’d tell them, “According to the customers…” It was not a very constructive relationship.

In 2014, the founders got together and decided that the pure comparison business wasn’t really scaling. We thought, why don’t we try and solve the basic problem of making sure customers can actually get the product they want online?

We solved that by building out the technology and providing the services for the platform. So now, we don’t hand over the customer to the bank or insurance company until they’ve essentially finished the process.We can also transact with insurance companies, so they don’t get involved at all. Banks only take over for KYC checks or credit processing.

What does being a “full-stack fintech and finserve company” mean?

What is the revenue model?

What are the next steps for Jirnexu? Are there other markets you want to tackle?