Jirnexu, a bank and insurance company tech solution provider formally known as Saving Plus, raised $3M in Series A funding, according to a release. Funding will be used to drive product development, geographic expansion and recruitment across Southeast Asia, with Malaysia and Indonesia as priority markets. The round was led by Singapore-based venture capital firm DMP, along with global investors Celebes Capital, NTT DOCOMO Ventures, Nullabor, Tuas Capital Partners, Anfield Equities and private investor Steve Melhuish (CEO & Co-founder, PropertyGuru Group).
“Financial service institutions in Southeast Asia still rely on labour intensive customer acquisition practices,” Jirnexi CEO Yuen Tuck Siew observed. “Expensive telesales, hard to manage direct sales agents, paper forms, long queues at bank branches, high rejection rates for minor errors – all of these make acquiring customers slow, inefficient and costly. At Jirnexu, we offer comprehensive solutions for businesses to attract, retain and monetize connected consumers in high-growth markets.”
This Series A round takes Jirnexu’s total funding to US$4.5 million. It will continue to build its senior management teams in Malaysia and Indonesia. Jirnexu is also hiring at all levels in product development, a team which will double in size this year.
“Southeast Asia is riding a boom in internet and mobile offerings, which has brought a new level of convenience to end-users. Whether you book a ride with Grab or shop online with Lazada, consumers are expecting the same anytime-anywhere access to all services including their personal finances,” added the Hedge-funder turned FinTech entrepreneur. “The first financial services company who can meet the consumers’ rising expectations will be the winner. That’s why my vision is clear and simple – I want to build the Amazon of personal finance in Southeast Asia, a full stack technology driven platform that enables service and value leadership to the consumer.”
Jirnexu’s XpressApply, a digital application workflow management solution and CRM platform, aims to simplify the consumer application process for financial products, turning “dull paper-based forms into online bitesize questionnaires that can be completed within 10 minutes.” Later this years, Jirnexu hopes to will offer XpressApply as a business-to-business (B2B) managed service, helping firms track and manage customer acquisition and lifecycle to better tracking, analytics, conversions and customer experience.
“Financial institutions operating in emerging markets have traditionally struggled with digital customer acquisition. In our view, Jirnexu has proven its ability to address this pain point, and has done so by building a full technology stack that manages the entire customer journey,” explained DMP Partner Dmitry Levit. “Jirnexu enables its business partners to be innovative in the way they generate leads online, convert those leads into customers, handle their fulfilment and keep them loyal.”
Jirnexu owns financial comparison websites RinggitPlus in Malaysia and KreditGoGo in Indonesia and collaborates with Alliance Bank, AEON, Citibank, HSBC, Manulife, OCBC Bank, RHB, Standard Chartered, Tokio Marine Life, U Mobile, and XOX Mobile.