The Halo-Halo System: Creating a Unified Brand for a Global Financial Community
This article was originally published in Slope’s Behind the Brand. It is reprinted here with their generous permission. ✨
Welcome to our third edition of Behind The Brand, a weekly newsletter featuring leaders at startups and VCs to highlight their unique perspectives on design, brand, and marketing for founders, operators, and investors across the early stages. At Slope, our goal is to build category defining creative for exceptional companies, and we believe brand is applicable to everyone in different ways depending on your role, stage, or industry.
This week, we’re excited to feature Zach Marks, Co-Founder & CEO at Jia.
With a mission to build a friendlier, fairer, more inclusive financial world, Jia provides blockchain-based financing to entrepreneurs and small businesses in emerging markets and rewards them with ownership to create wealth and prosperity for themselves and their communities.
Having recently come out of stealth, they raised a $4.3M oversubscribed round of seed funding led by TCG with participation from BlockTower Capital, Hashed Emergent, Saison Capital, Draft Ventures, Spice Capital, Compa Capital, and Global Coin Research.
First off, what is your background and how did you come to start Jia?
I’ve spent most of my career working to expand financial access in emerging markets, and that came about thanks to my love of traveling to new places and hanging out with street food vendors. My first job out of college was teaching English in India. While I was teaching, I became close with Jhumka, the chai wallah who served samosas and chai at my school. I saw this person who worked incredibly hard, was good at what she did, and wanted to grow her business to provide a better life for her family but couldn’t because she had no access to fair financing. As I traveled and spent more time with chai wallahs in India or taqueros in Mexico or matatu drivers in Kenya, I saw just how universal this challenge was — hence the $5 trillion credit gap — and the real human cost behind that number. Solving that challenge has become the mission of my career.
My work at Jia is born out of my experience working on previous approaches to financial inclusion. After teaching, I started working with traditional community-based cooperatives, what I call Microfinance 1.0. While these groups work great at a local level, they don’t scale very well, and that led me to fintech lending, what I call Microfinance 2.0.
While fintech lending has proven scalable, I believe it’s gotten away from microfinance’s community-based roots. That’s what we’re working to build at Jia — Microfinance 3.0, where borrowers aren’t just customers at the end of a one-way transaction; they are owners and builders of a global financial community.
Solving problems in emerging markets means a very large scope of different sectors, cultures, and geographical locations. How do you build a unified brand system and tell a singular story that will connect with different audiences across the globe?
This is such an important challenge. Since community is such an essential piece of our brand, we work really hard to ensure we’re seen as a Filipino brand in the Philippines and a Kenyan brand in Kenya. For now, telling a brand story that makes a Jia member — say, a sari sari store owner in Manila or a spice vendor in Nairobi — feel like we’re coming from the same place as them is more important than for us to create an elevated global brand that looks made for a VC in Los Angeles.
That said, of course we want to maintain a unified brand that resonates across borders so that members of the community — borrowers, investors and builders who might be scattered across three continents and have very different backgrounds — feel connected. Maybe it’s because I’m saying this from Manila, but I liken the process of creating our brand to the Filipino dessert halo halo, which means “mix-mix.” When you’re making halo halo, you take a little bit of this, a little bit of that — maybe you start with some purple ube from Luzon in the north or ripe jackfruit from Mindanao in the south, then add mango from Cebu, some Japanese adzuki beans, and top it with Spanish leche flan. It borrows ingredients from a rich diverse heritage and celebrates them together. We work to do that in everything from our logo to the look and feel of our products and the language and voice in our messaging.
I think a good example of this halo halo mindset is the story of our name. We knew we wanted something that resonated across cultures, was born out of our global polyglot founding team and still told the story of our mission. So we got to Jia because, to start with, in my cofounder Cheng’s native Mandarin, jia (家) means home or family, and that is the central financial unit we are expanding upon. Then in Hindi, which I learned while living in India, jiya (जिया) means heart, and we aim to provide financial services with a heart. And finally, in Swahili, which we speak with our Kenyan team and small business members, njia means road or path, and we’re building the path to financial independence.
You recently came out of stealth, how did you prepare–from a brand and design perspective–for the large influx of eyeballs on Jia during launch?
For our first few months of operations, we were focused on shipping product experiments, meeting our users, and learning how we could be a trusted partner for them to grow their businesses and provide fair financing and a helpful community. This meant we had a range of brand experiences across different markets and audiences. Then when it came time to say “hello world,” we had to go back to the dressing room and freshen up a bit. We gave some new love to our brand — staying rooted in the colors, shapes and textures of our markets in Africa and Asia, but also cleaning things up a bit for new eyeballs from western investors and staying funky for our Web3 community.
When we launched, we were overwhelmed with interest from investors, borrowers, and folks who wanted to join our team. The main call-to-action of the launch was to participate in our Pioneer Fund — our first on-chain liquidity pool connecting global investors with small businesses in emerging markets. After that pool filled up within 24 hours of launch, we wanted to make sure we still had some way for people to participate in this brand moment, so we created a commemorative launch NFT (mint.jia.xyz).
The NFT design is an extension of our logo evoking the patterns we see in the communities of our members in Kenya and the Philippines. In the first few days more than a thousand people minted their NFT, but what was even more compelling was that a significant number added on a voluntary donation to a pool that directly provides interest-free financing to microretailers in Nairobi and Manila.
How are you building community with small businesses across the global emerging markets, and how will education of the on-chain components of Jia factor into that?
When we started Jia, we knew we wanted to go beyond the basics of providing capital; we wanted to create a community for businesses to thrive. This was based on conversations my cofounder Cheng and I had with microfinance customers, who would always tell us they needed more than just money to grow their businesses — they needed professional services and resources to help put that money to work. One way we have begun providing those resources is through an online community where entrepreneurs are trading tips on everything from accessing cheaper supplies to how to take their businesses online. Next we’re working on launching a business service provider network connecting small businesses with global experts across marketing, legal, finance, accounting, operations and sales to help businesses grow.
But as we grow and launch new features, it’s so important to keep speaking our members’ language and talking about what matters to them. Today, blockchain technology powers what we do in a way that creates a better solution for our members — for example, by lowering their cost of capital. But they don’t necessarily know or care that there is some on-chain component in the back-end. What matters to them is that we are meeting a pressing need in their daily lives — liquidity for their businesses. By meeting this need today, we’re becoming their trusted partners so that eventually, we can introduce them to other blockchain-powered products that meet other needs — for example, helping them beat local currency devaluation by giving them access to stablecoins.
Ultimately, by helping them build an on-chain credit history and providing education through products that speak their language, which the majority of today’s crypto and financial products do not, we can unlock the rest of the world of Web3 for them.
Who or what inspires you the most?
Our users. It might sound cheesy, but it is really so true. The small business owners using Jia to access fair financing are really the local heroes who should be on the cover of Forbes.
Our first borrower in the Philippines is a baker named Armando. Every day, he gets up three hours before sunrise, drives his scooter to his bakery, and gets the ovens going to make his trademark malunggay pandesal, a fluffy breakfast bun made with moringa. (They are delicious and worth the round-trip ticket to Manila.) He’s on his feet for eighteen hours, serving customers, taking and delivering orders, restocking flour and yeast, giving advances to his employees, and doing it all with a smile and never a complaint. This man is providing so much for his community — their staple daily bread, their jobs and wages, food on his family’s table — and yet has been totally ignored by the world’s financial system. The fact that we can put people on the moon and develop brain implants to let a paralyzed person walk but can’t think up a way to provide fair financing for a business like Armando’s is absurd to me. But seeing him get up every day in the face of that and go to work with a smile — that inspires me.
