‘My job is to fix the problem of my customers’: fintech execs discuss early strategies

When 2C2P’s initial customers approached the firm with their pain points, the now two-decade-old payments platform accepted the job despite not having any solutions yet and only developing the code after the fact.

Founded in 2003, the Singapore-based company didn’t raise a lot of funding, so getting a bigger volume of job orders and earning a piece of the pie was its chance to get noticed in its early days.

“Whether we can get a billion dollars from one merchant or getting a billion dollars from 10,000 merchants doesn’t matter to us. We’ll look at how we can get a larger and larger TPV (total payment volume),” 2C2P founder and CEO Aung Kyaw Moe said during a session at the Tech in Asia Conference.

The company’s principle is simple: to make money every time it serves a customer so it can avoid negative margins. According to Moe, this principle has helped 2C2P maintain profitability since 2019.

2C2P founder and group CEO Aung Kyaw Moe / Photo credit: 2C2P

But this strategy comes with a price.

2C2P would regularly choose to work with bigger enterprises rather than SMEs, as the latter required giving out bigger subsidies. Because of this, Moe said his company has been branded as being unsupportive of the industry.

But in all this, the founder has learned to value customers. This was especially true when 2C2P would have sales cycles that spanned two to three years just to land one large enterprise client.

“As a technology founder, I’ve never thought that I’m a founder or CEO until today. My job is simply to fix the problem of my customers,” Moe said.

In fact, the founder would at times recruit his clients into the company – more than half of the firm’s executive teams were previous customers, he shared.

“Having a team around me and telling them ‘I don’t know’ has been the real learning for me.”

Clients at the heart

When Moe shared these sentiments at the conference session, other co-founders were quick to agree.

For Tessa Wijaya, co-founder and COO of Indonesia-based payment gateway Xendit, getting a big international brand as a customer early on was a breakthrough.

Expansion ahead