Aspire: Fintech for starters

For many entrepreneurs, starting up a startup turns out not to be an easy bit. They may have a great idea and dedication in spades; but do they also have the time, patience and energy to keep all the mundane moving parts – from managing suppliers, inventory and invoicing, to bill payments, deliveries, lines of credit and payroll – running smoothly?

Small and even medium-size enterprises (SMEs) can rarely afford the luxury of simply adding staff dedicated to such minutiae, but it is vital that they are handled effectively. If only there was an ‘all-in-one’ platform that covered it all – even automating much of it – with easy-to-use, easy-to-understand, real-time convenience. Users could spend more time actually growing their business, less pulling their hair out.

To the rescue comes Aspire, an all-in-one service app aimed squarely at startups and SMEs. It has already gained thousands of clients in several Southeast Asian countries, including Hong Kong, their most recent expansion.

Back-of-house on one easy platform

So what does Aspire do? Its Founder and CEO Andrea Baronchelli describes Aspire as a better solution for any digital-age company trying to do business in a bricks-and-mortar financial world: “Think about a company that does most of its business digitally. They live in a new kind of economy – and yet they find themselves going to a traditional institution and queuing for an hour just to get a number code so they can add one of their users to their account, just so they can do a basic transaction or make a payment, or just to open an account.

“Most startups and SMEs by their very nature don’t fit the typical profile of banks’ commercial customers. They’re geared to serve a more physical asset-heavy economy, though that is changing somewhat now.”

Aspire essentially exists as a layer of software on top of financial services, enabling users to perform traditional tasks on their own digitalised terms. For example, the app enables users to create an invoice directly in the system and send it to a client, receive payments in multiple currencies and reconcile them, and synchronise with the accounting books. As a company grows, they can also use Aspire to pay salaries and suppliers, set budgets and vendor management policies and much more – all without the need to queue up, visit multiple institutions, open accounts in multiple countries, or sign stacks of paper forms.

Discovering the demand

Baronchelli’s career began in traditional finance in his native Italy, then banking in London. His work took a more entrepreneurial turn in 2011 when he relocated to Singapore and founded Lazada, an e-commerce company that was later acquired by Alibaba in 2017.

“It all helped me learn about what it is to start a company, as well as exposing me generally to Asia-Pacific,” Baronchelli recalls. “When I was at Lazada, I spent a lot of time with businesses that had decided to start a digital journey. They were selling mostly online and they wanted a digital product, digital marketing, digital finance, so we decided to build a brand around meeting their needs – Aspire.”

Founded in 2018, Aspire now employs approximately 600 staff – about a quarter of whom work at its headquarters in Singapore – and serves more than 50,000 client businesses globally. Importantly, the reach of Aspire’s users is even more extensive, thanks to the platform’s ability to facilitate payments in more than 30 currencies across over 130 countries.

Fulfilling Hong Kong aspirations

This year saw the platform launch in Hong Kong – a market Baronchelli regards as “a perfect fit for what we do. Hong Kong ranks very high in entrepreneurial spirit”.

“We have a very strong proposition for companies that are very international, and in Hong Kong 70 percent of businesses either pay or receive payment from clients or suppliers in different currencies,” he points out. “Also, in Hong Kong the vast majority of SMEs are to some extent digital, and they understand things like tools and applications.”

Underlining Aspire’s ambition to truly meet the needs of its users no matter where they are, the platform has already begun rolling out new features and functions tailored specially for Hong Kong clients.

InvestHK, Baronchelli says, was a vital resource for Aspire’s move into the territory: “For us, their comprehensive insights about the market, the players, the business and regulatory landscape – it helped us to prepare for various interactions long before we actually entered the market.”

InvestHK further provided what he calls “connectivity” – facilitating crucial links with “stakeholders and players in the ecosystem” that made covering the groundwork easier and faster.

Experiences to relate with

Aspire’s fast growth and acceptance among entrepreneurs and SMEs across borders attests to the essential ‘rightness’ of the vision that started it all, though Baronchelli admits that there were some challenging moments in getting the venture off the ground. Gaining their first investor, he said, took real persistence, though once they had committed, others soon fell into place.

Through it all, Baronchelli has learned from experience. To those who are following in his startup footsteps, he advises: “When you’re just starting out, you’re in a rush and everything is very exciting. But it’s important sometimes to stop and ask yourself some questions. Are you really doing what you need to do? A lot of your assumptions will turn out not to be true – and you’ll learn this as you go along.”