Financial institutions are digitizing their product design, sales and operations, in order to cut through middlemen and reach end users. But one fintech is working with insurers and banks via their marketing departments.
Mojodomo is a Hong Kong-based company that digitizes coupons and vouchers, like gift certificates. Citi and Mastercard are introducing it to their B2B customers. The company is now raising an initial seed round of funding to help it expand to other regional markets.
“The Citi virtual card account lets us offer a redemption-based payment model to clients using our loyalty voucher platform,” said Dennis Shi, CEO of Mojodomo.
The insurance use case
The best way to understand what this startup does is to take one of its current use cases: insurance.
Enterprises, including insurers, banks and other corporations, pay hundreds of billions of dollars per year in coupons and vouchers, as a means of winning or rewarding consumers.
An insurance company may, for example, hand out supermarket coupons or vouchers for holiday mooncakes. Insurers might do so via their tied agents, as an incentive for agent networks.
We offer a redemption-based payment model to clients
Dennis Shi, Mojodomo
But agents are also middlemen who own the customer relationship – an arrangement that insurance companies are keen to sidestep, particularly if they can avoid spooking the agents they depend on for revenues. Hence the vouchers as one way to engage with end users.
This activity is paper-based. It is based on pre-paid vouchers (the insurer buys loads of them from the mooncake shop), with no quantifiable return on investment. The insurer hands out the vouchers to its policyholders, but has no means of knowing who spent them. Many vouchers go unredeemed, or customers give them away to others.
Adding the retailers
Tyrone Lynch, chief investment officer at Mojodomo, says the company’s platform allows insurers to issue vouchers in the form of credit, with each tied to a token, similar to a credit-card number. Insurers can issue these digitally – perhaps as an incentive to get people to download their app – and they only pay the retailer when a voucher has been redeemed. With everything tracked, the insurer’s marketing team can get a precise hold on what’s working and who’s cashing in.
The mooncake shops would lose out on giant, up-front bulk sales. They’d only get paid for vouchers that redeem. But the payment would be instant, via Mastercard and the banking system, versus having to wait for the insurance company to send them the money owed. Today, retailers have a cumbersome audit requirement to report the vouchers they do receive, whereas there’d be no need with a digitized process.
We’re using digital tools to move into an open-loop platform
Tyrone Lynch, Mojodomo
Lynch says the company is in a proof of concept with a global insurance company in Hong Kong that wants to connect with its most lucrative policyholders, particularly when an independent sales agent quits. It is also working with mainland Chinese banks. These institutions can issue a voucher either directly via SMS, or from their app.
“They were getting only about 50% utilization of their prepaid vouchers, but now they’re redeploying their marketing budget and getting realtime feedback on their clients,” Lynch said.
Revenues from marketing budgets
Mojodomo is more of a marketing business than payments, at least in its revenue model. Instead of charging the merchants (the mooncake shop) like a credit-card company, it charges the marketers at the insurance company or bank 8% of the value of redeemed vouchers.
That’s a large fee – but Lynch says it’s worth it to marketing departments that need to deploy their budgets but haven’t been able to find reliable ROI measurements.
“Most enterprises are simply digitizing their paper-based vouchers,” he said. “They’re still operating in a closed loop. We’re using digital tools to move into an open-looped platform.” A closed-loop means customers can only convert with the issuer itself: like using a Starbucks voucher. But open-loop is based on credit, using a B2B payments model, so that now the retailers or other third parties are part of the circle.
Mojodomo’s tech itself is not unique: it’s raising money now to be first into various Asian markets, such as Taiwan and Singapore, while relying on partnerships with Citi and Mastercard to get introductions to clients – such as the global insurer in Hong Kong and the banks in mainland China. Citi has also provided a credit line, while it is relying on Mastercard’s virtual card and payments rails.
In the case of the Chinese banks, part of its selling appeal is digitizing vouchers that customers can redeem overseas, using QR codes at participating retailers. Using Mastercard, the company is giving Chinese banks a means of issuing loyalty points that customers can use abroad. The fintech is still working on a mechanism for foreign exchange.
The fintech is currently seeking a $2 million seed round but expects to immediately follow up with a $15 million Series A round early next year. The proceeds are to go to building a presence in multiple markets, including credit lines. To date the company’s founders have bootstrapped it by about $500,000.
