Perfectsen, a Mint-like app for Southeast Asia, makes perfect sense

I’ve always wanted to use Mint, an online personal finance management tool that is integrated with your local bank. In fact, I’m prepared to start a whole song and dance routine about it.

But here’s a problem: Cutting-edge Silicon Valley startups tend to avoid Southeast Asia, so Mint isn’t available outside of the United States and Canada.

A new up-and-coming Malaysian startup, however, has the potential to duplicate the same sort of success Mint attained in America.

I’m talking about Perfectsen, which is angel-funded and supported by Malaysia’s Cradle Fund.

Founded in January 2011 by a group of finance, business, and IT professionals, Perfectsen hopes to offer a similar value proposition to consumers like you and I: A personal finance tool that automatically tracks your bank transactions, saving you the trouble of inputting financial transactions every time.

What this means is that with a tab (clicks are so passe), all my bank transactions will be tabulated into the expenses and income column of my personal budget — saving a lot of time in the process.

That’s where the similarities between Mint and Perfectsen end.

Serial entrepreneur ST Chua and Perfectsen’s CMO, explains to SGE that it is more of a B2B, white-label money management app, more akin to Meniga in Europe.

Which means, instead of reaching out directly to consumers on the Internet like Mint does with a B2C model, Perfectsen’s distribution strategy is to work through the retail banks (In Singapore, there’s DBS, OCBC, Standard Chartered, and more). And by being white label, they stay inconspicuously in the background, so consumers won’t see a distinction between the app and the bank’s online services.

“The result of that is that Mint has to spend on marketing to acquire each and every customer whereas we automatically get all of the existing bank’s online banking users from day one,” says Chua.

It’s a smart move. I’ve seen the same strategy employed by Singapore-based Swiff vis-a-vis their consumer-oriented cousin Square. While this approach saves time and money in the long-run, it does bring a different set of complexities that could sink the startup.

Perfectsen must ensure that their interests are perfectly aligned with the banks, something that Swiff hasn’t demonstrated that they’ve figured it out.

At the moment though, they seem to be providing a clear win-win for banks. If well-executed, retail banks will enjoy increased engagement on their websites. Consumers will also have a more positive perception about the bank’s online services. Lastly, Perfectsen will provide banks with customer data that improves their targeted marketing efforts through an analytics feature.