A Career Journey Amidst Pandemic in Ayoconnect, A Fintech Startup
Ayoconnect is an Indonesian financial technology company that aims to organize the entire bill ecosystem within Indonesia. With around 130 million Indonesians or 50% of entire Indonesia’s population is recorded making transactions online, Ayoconnect’s domain in the digital bill payment industry certainly provides a useful solution for Indonesian businesses.
Today, the growth of Ayoconnect has even increased by 500% compared to early 2020. Truthfully, being a part of a company that is able to withstand the damage caused by a pandemic is something that I am personally proud of.
Maybe the question is, how did it happen?
I joined Ayoconnect in the early 4th quarter of 2019. Prior to Ayoconnect, I was a business analyst in one of the largest tech-consulting companies with a global presence. Back then, what motivated me to embark on a new challenge was my interest and thirst for knowledge as well as exposure to digital business. How the world would be sickened with a global pandemic a few months later was clearly out of my expectation.
I was hired to join Ayoconnect’s commercial team where my responsibilities include doing market sizing, analysis, sales reporting, forecasting, and offering payment solutions to other companies. At that time, the company has started to shift its business model to become a B2B company. The pivot stage provided an amazing exposure since there are so many things to be revamped. Previously, Ayoconnect focused on building a consumer-facing mobile app as the core of its business. Today, Ayoconnect grows their business by providing various solutions to help other companies accelerate their growth.
In the long term, businesses should refrain from the drawing of battle lines in Indonesia’s fragmented payments landscape and create a payment ecosystem that takes into account payment preferences of the local consumers.
— Kelvin Phua, via The Jakarta Post
When the focus slowly was shifted to B2B in early 2020, the centralized product and B2B pricing management were becoming the main focus of my work. I am privileged to have a supervisor, Ayoconnect’s COO and Co-founder Chiragh Kirpalani, that saw my potential and capability to conduct in-depth data analysis. I was given the opportunity to build and analyse Ayoconnect’s data from scratch. Post that, everything related to product arrangement and pricing determination mostly falls under my plate.
Understanding the market’s position and condition is a crucial part of this position. To assist me in my work, a teammate was transferred to my division. As the scope of work grows to include tracking inventory usage and purchasing, building a prioritization filter for product integrations, maintaining our business’ growth and margin, and analysing price mismatch, we hired another Data Analyst and had our division named as Data and Insights.
At the end of 2019, we only had two channel partners. Today, we have 40-and-counting channel partners that utilize our solutions to manage the growing online transactions that are driven by the pandemic. Personally, it feels amazing to see and be a part of a company that has been growing significantly.
Despite having done more than half of my journey with Ayoconnect remotely, things are still going in accelerated speed. I really appreciate the remote collaboration that happened between the whole team, our visionary founders, and our business partners.
Let this be everybody’s success story and let’s not end it here. Not me, not solely Ayoconnect. It’s also yours to celebrate.
Ayoconnect is Indonesia’s most advanced Open Bill Network. We are a remote first company with a team of 100 people dedicated to drive digitalization and financial inclusion through technology. You are more than welcome to become part of our growing team. Follow us on our LinkedIn and Instagram to discover available positions in our company!
