Advice for a Philippine startup moving to Singapore

[Luis Buenaventura Il]

On the suggestion of Hugh, I'm posting here with some questions about moving our fintech startup (currently registered in the Philippines) over to Singapore. Our goal is to leverage the better governance, wider visibility, and larger investor community to grow our company as quickly as possible. 

Our basic pitch is that we're bringing modern tools to traditional money transfer businesses: we use blockchain for robust cross-border settlement, we develop messenger bots for customer support, and we provide an instant payments API to any point in the Philippines. Our current business customers are out of Korea and Canada, and our platform currently powers about $60,000 a day in inbound remittances.

My immediate goals for this trip (I'm in Singapore this week) are as follows:

1) Meet similar entrepreneurs who can give me advice about setting up and fundraising here

and

2) Connect with investors who specialize in fintech

Would greatly appreciate any feedback from the group :)

[Hugh Mason]

Welcome to Open Frog Luis

On Monday, 23 May 2016 08:39:57 UTC+8, Luis Buenaventura Il wrote:

I'm posting here with some questions about moving our fintech startup (currently registered in the Philippines) over to Singapore. Our goal is to leverage the better governance, wider visibility, and larger investor community to grow our company as quickly as possible. 

The story of Ghost's decision to move to Singapore is interesting: https://blog.ghost.org/moving-to-singapore/ 

[Irish Delos Santos]

Welcome to Open Frog :)

Cheers,

Irish

On Monday, 23 May 2016 08:39:57 UTC+8, Luis Buenaventura Il wrote:

[drllau]

There are advantages and disadvantages with relocating FinTech Singapore ... just for you to get a bird's eye view

Pros

1) strong govt support, esp incentives and fairly open-minded (but not necessarily light-touch) financial industry regulation
2) quite a few local banks are operating accelerators though they may be a form of accuhire

3) high level of banking sophistication, and operating knowledge

Cons (no particular order)

1) as a currency zone SG is not yet the ASEAN hub (though ambitions), people I've talked to see HK and the RMB opportunities as bigger markets as SG alone is too small a market

2) lack of technical depth, you're more likely to throw a stone and hit MBAs or marketing guys than programmers in the CBD and generally higher labor costs

3) somewhat conservative startup mentality ... this is a hard topic to broach but essentially with high risk high return startups you want something radical but not outright crazy ... see for some of my FinTech commentary like micro-payments. In general, Singapore has a reputation for being conservative and pragmatic which may be good for fiscal stability but less so for disruptive technologies. It's a hard line to follow but my general observation is that most of "obvious" markets and immediately addressible pain-points have already been occupied so unless you have a unique selling point, then you are competing on execution and the thousands of chinese copycats.

Then on the pragmatic side, there are some gotchas when seeking Entrepass ... the visa requirements need a careful perusal, govt grants require min (40%? local shareholding), some founders can't draw salary as need to satisfy work visa, need for auditor, and the generally high cost of wages (though balanced by usually higher productivity). One possibility is to have a light-weight holding entity (essentially the financing vehicle) which holds the philipines operating company and can easily expand to other subsidiaries. I've seen examples with a combined SG, US-NY UK-London entity just to satisfy the financial regulations. As for investors ... it takes time ... think of it as a long-time dating game so you have to put in the face-time.

Lawrence

http://www.linkedin.com/in/drllau

On Monday, 23 May 2016 08:39:57 UTC+8, Luis Buenaventura Il wrote: