Leadership Perspectives
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Caecilia Chu: Mobile wallet first-mover builds her business for agility
The Co-founder of YouTrip and Independent Director at SGX-listed iFAST is also a firm believer in bringing different experiences and perspectives together to catalyse creativity and innovation.
Caecilia Chu is very clear about her life’s purpose, and it shows.
Co-founder and CEO of YouTrip, she has grown a bootstrapping two-person startup into one of the region’s best loved multi-currency mobile wallets. Under her leadership, the travel payment first mover secured more than US$100 million in funding within five years of its launch.
With YouTrip now a trusted companion for many Singaporeans on their travels, Chu has also taken on new responsibilities. May marks two years since she was tapped to be an independent director on the board of digital financial services firm iFAST Corp, one of Singapore’s fastest-growing public-listed companies. The board appointment is Chu’s first at a listed firm, and the experience has been mutually beneficial, she shares.
“They are a very entrepreneurial company, also founder-led,” she says. “We ask similar questions, such as how do we stay at the leading edge of what technology can offer?”
Indeed, being consistently innovative has been Chu’s mission for the better part of the last two decades.
Hailing from Hong Kong, Chu is an alumna of The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and completed her MBA at Harvard Business School.
Before YouTrip, she worked in investment banking and business consulting, and tried and failed starting her own businesses. It was moving to work in the Chinese fintech sector, with stints at wealth management platform Lufax, and mobile payments company QF Pay, that was “the turning point” in her life.
“At that time, China was quite ahead of other countries in terms of mobile penetration. I saw the future of where financial services would be, and that really resonated with me. I saw how technology could bring so much positive impact.
To build my own company in the financial services space, using the latest technology to bring benefits to people – that was what I really wanted to do,” she shares.
Agility and innovation
Chu saw the opportunity for such services in Southeast Asia, which still had a fragmented, nascent digital financial services industry.
In 2018, YouTrip launched its app in Singapore, offering users the ability to save on foreign exchange rates and fees while spending overseas. It is licensed as a Major Payment Institution by the Monetary Authority of Singapore, owns principal memberships and issuing licences with MasterCard and Visa, and is now integrated with Google Pay and Apple Pay.
When the Covid-19 pandemic brought travel to a grinding halt, and could well have decimated their fledgling business, Chu and her team pivoted to offer users multi-currency payment services for their global online shopping.
When that still did not make up for lost business, the team went back to their data again. They discovered many customers who were maxing out their e-wallet limits were actually small business owners using the service to pay their suppliers. 2022, they started YouBiz, the firm’s multi-currency corporate card platform, which onboarded more than 3,000 SMEs within its first year.
In 2023, the volume of total payments processed by YouTrip grew by 200% from the year before, to more than US$10 billion in annualised transaction volume.
Today, a team of about 120 sit in a large open-plan office in Ayer Rajah, the former light industrial estate turned into a hip startup commune. Chu sits at one end of a row of desks among the marketing and communications team, while co-founder Arthur Mak oversees the product and engineering team diagonally across the room.
“We’ve gone through some times, but times will get tough again. Right now I believe we have a strong product-market fit, but the market could shift again,” Chu says. “Part of the journey is being always ready and agile…tomorrow could be different and it’s ok. We will learn how to navigate that.”
Alchemy of cross-pollination
As an entrepreneur at the forefront of one of the fastest-moving industries, Chu has little doubt about what helps drive a successful business – diverse perspectives. For one, the 5-member board of YouTrip has an international make-up, with directors hailing from across Asia.
“I’ve always found that learning from each of these different experiences and perspectives, from different geographies and industries, has been why we stay creative and innovative,” Chu asserts. “The cross-pollination of ideas from different perspectives around business and customer segments, markets, and industry gives you a broader set of tools and frameworks to think about problems.”
At the same time, she believes her work at YouTrip provides insights that she is able to bring to her external board responsibilities. “Having an active operating role encourages me to be at the forefront of what is happening, and helps contribute to boardroom conversations [in terms of] what I see as new technology trends, or how the talent market is.”
Still, Chu was hesitant when she was first approached for a possible appointment on iFAST’s board. At the back of her mind was the knowledge that SGX had recently revised its listing rules to require board diversity disclosures in annual reporting.
“The last thing you want to hear is they picked you because they have to check all these diversification boxes,” she says. “But while they said yes, these demographics will help diversify the board composition, what they truly value is the diversity of opinions. And that certainly goes beyond demographics.”
Incorporated in 2000 in Singapore, iFAST (founded in 2000 by Lim Chung Chun) is a significant player in digital wealth management in the region with assets under administration of nearly S$20 billion at the end of 2023. Apart from Chu, its nine-person board has two other women independent directors. One heads a cybersecurity firm and the other is a specialist in mergers and acquisition.
Healthy board dynamics
While a diversity of perspectives is a foil to group think, group dynamics also have to be nurtured.
“We’re not necessarily trying to build consensus, or agree or disagree with each other, and I think that’s really important,” says Chu of the board discussions both at YouTrip and iFAST.
“The goal is to make sure opinions and ideas are being heard, and voices are represented. Many times, especially in business, there may not always be a right or wrong [answer]. It’s about how we strategically navigate the journey together and surfacing ideas, rather than forcing each other to come to an agreement.”
In Chu’s experience, what has really helped board members is the time they spend together outside of the boardroom. In the case of iFAST, directors make it a point to gather for the occasional meal and to attend functions in support of iFAST and its founder.
Ultimately, in Chu’s view, much progress has been made in Singapore’s corporate sector, particularly in the aspect of gender diversity. “Singapore has done a lot of great work around women empowerment, and encouraging and advancing women leadership. I think that is very helpful in encouraging more women to come forward to take on these leadership roles.
“We should really look at how much progress we have made together and be confident and comfortable in saying, ‘I can only imagine what we’ll see in the next five years. [The proportion of women leadership] is going to be very different in an extremely positive way’.”
Every moment is a teachable moment – learning from diversity