Introducing our featured guest, Adrian Ma, the visionary behind Cashwise. Boasting 25+ years of experience in IT and finance, Adrian's journey weaves through engineering, operations, and sales. He has been an integral part of telecom companies who have gone on to public offerings and multimillion-dollar exits. Adrian is a trailblazer in fintech, web 3.0, blockchains, and cryptocurrency, reshaping the financial landscape. He is also an Antler fellow, which is an exclusive club for the most innovative startup founders.

In this newsletter, we delve into Adrian's insights on Cashwise, the dynamic financial ecosystem, the transformative power of Artificial Intelligence, and the thrilling realm of Web 3.0. Join us for a captivating exploration of the future of finance, guided by a true industry luminary.

How did you get into the start-up space, what was your journey like?

I was a part of the telecom industry in the late 90s and during that phase, of course, there was the Dot com bubble. However, in the mid-2000s there was significant deregulation in the telecom space and I joined some very well-funded government-backed start-up companies. Two different power utility companies were launching into the telecom space. Of course, they had almost unlimited funding and very good brand names which contributed to them being very successful. One of them went public five years after I left, the other was acquired for CDN $206M. So that was my first exposure to the start-up culture and going through that process taught me about startups and learning how to sell I realized I liked it and that was my start.

What is Cashwise? What is it doing that's different? How is it helping or changing the status Quo?

So, what we do as a company is we take a customer's cash flow data, analyze that, and identify when money is not needed. So with that information, we automatically move it into an investment fund such as money markets.

Today, at launch, we partnered with Airwallex, and we partnered with Syfe. airwallex is a payment company, and Syfe is an investment company. Whenever the money is not needed, it's automatically moved into the Syfe. And of course, because we know the cash flow when they need to spend the money, we automatically can move money back into Airwallex. So let's say they have to make a payroll, or rental payments, or anything large. The money is sitting there waiting for them before they need to make the payments.

So very simply, that's what we do. What makes us unique is the fact that many other software focus on analytics or planning but not actioning the plan, we do all three

And how is the investment ecosystem reacting to your disruption?

Actually, this is why the investment companies are quite excited to work with us. Traditionally, investment companies, do the sale, they open the account, but they don't have any means to make someone put money in the account. What we do is that we automatically deploy the money for the customer, we find the money and move it. And so for investment companies, this is quite a game changer for them because they no longer have to call the customer back and say hey, you opened an account, but you didn't put anything in. So our differentiator is both on the investment company side but also for our customers, because they don't need to use the manpower to find the surplus cash for investment nor do they need to manage the balance in their operating account since we monitor that daily for them.

I am just curious and I am sure a lot of people reading this would also have the same question, what is the difference between a financial company and a fintech company?

Yeah, because, if you think about financial services, the bank, financial services, the investment company, these are all licensed entities. The government has to go through all these certifications with them and they have to do reporting and a whole bunch of stuff. Cashwise is more of a fintech company. So what we do is we connect to the financial services companies, and we use APIs that they publish. The customer account is always in their name. We just have a connection to the payment company, we have a connection to the investment company and we can manage the flow of information and the flow of the money. We never touch the money. So that's another differentiator and that's also why Fintech is a very exciting space. Since you're not touching money, you don't need to be confined to stringent regulations, which means it can apply globally as well. That's something I think many of the readers would be interested in knowing and many VCs love this for scalability.

So who is an ideal customer for Cashwise?

So we've kind of distilled our customer profile into three different areas. ne area is startup companies, they don't necessarily have a CFO or finance person, and they're very busy. So they will raise a certain amount of money anywhere from 100k to millions.

They don't necessarily do anything with the money so we can come in to help them manage their cash and payments and give them better returns on their investments. The second type are companies that have been around for a few years and are somewhat mature profit-wise. A lot of times they have a finance team but they are most focused on the operations of a company like collecting receivables and making invoices and they are missing out on utilizing the extra funds they have to get better returns for their companies. The last type is family offices, they may have multiple companies that they own and a consolidated treasury can benefit them where they can look at cash positions across all companies and optimize cash flows. They can also see the deployed cash.

What stage of growth are you on with Cash-wise?

So our VC pre-seed was at the end of April and we kicked off in the May timeframe. We have a product out now. We're onboarding customers and our goal is actually to do another funding round, probably towards the end of the year. Our primary focus now is to accelerate some of the onboarding for customers, get some numbers in there, get some traction, get some data points to talk about, and be able to show how many customers we have, how they use us, and things like that. Our goal is really about customer acquisition at this stage, we're very focused on this, and it will feed into our funding valuation as well.

As an Antler fellow, can you take me through the funding process of a pre-seed startup?

Sure. So we went through the Antler program, headquartered here in Singapore. They put together various founders, and they have a 10-week program

to get people to create ideas and form companies around them. Coming out of the program at the end of April, we got our initial pre-seed funding after the investment committee gave us the nod. At the time, the investment was 125k USD which helped us start building our product. So we launched a company, at the beginning of May, and we released our product at the end of September. Now we are looking to raise another round before the end of this year.

As you know the global phenomenon that AI is, is that a threat to your line of work? How are you planning to use AI in your space and how are you expecting it to change over the next 5 to 10 years?

Yeah, so I look at AI as an opportunity.

Today, AI is what everyone sees as AI as generative AI for the most part, where it creates new scenarios and creates various things.

It's not necessarily the most predictable and repeatable scenario. So for financial services, it's maybe not there yet. It may make sense as an interface to help customers manage things. But as a management and optimization engine, we'd prefer to be more predictable. So today, it's not a big issue for us, this AI threat. We do see it coming into play as we get into more complex scenarios for our customers.

Another thing I do see as we move forward in time is that we have great interest rates today. I don't see that lasting forever either. We do see possibilities where we can leverage some AI for better analytics as well to help customers optimize other aspects of their cash decisions including FX (foreign exchange) and short-term debt.

Since we are on the topic, do you think Web 3.0 funding will bounce back after the Funding winter?

I think absolutely. If you look at the web 3.0 space, there was just this event two weeks ago, the token 2049 event in Singapore. It was quite a high-energy event. Everyone's spirits were up. There were lots of VCs there that were specifically Web 3.0 only. So actually, funding is out there but for the right type of projects.

I think, for us, we weren't really in Web 3.0 with CashWise so we're just kind of observing.

Some VCs were hybrid they did have an interest in both Web 3.0 and Web 2.0 companies. we did speak to some of these.

I think in general, Web 3.0 is probably in a very good place right now, because everyone’s kind of working their way through to get to the [bitcoin] halving. It’s always a grind right before the halving and then once that happens, things start moving again.

Apart from your Web 2.0 experience you also have some Web 3.0 experience, if I am not wrong. What was that experience like?

That's right.

I started monitoring the Web 3.0 space in 2013 but I never really bought anything or touched it till about 2017. And of course, 2017 was a big year for Ethereum and smart contracts. All my experience before that was just getting to know blockchain better and not much else. In 2019, I started my own blockchain company. I was focused on automating these smart contract layers because of all the volatilities, because of all the tokens and smart contracts. The scenario is that you kind of have multiple things that layer on top of each other. For example, you might have USDT or USDC at the base, then use them in some smart contracts and combine them with some other tokens. Then you start layering on additional contracts. If one of the base tokens has a problem, you have to unwind everything to get back to the base tokens. So each one of those steps can take a long time, they all happen on the web browser, which can be hacked, the website you interact with can be hacked, , your computer can be hacked, and/or you can make a typo and think you’re on the right site but it’s a fake. All these kinds of risks, and not to mention, that doing anything might take 45 minutes or more because you're going to have multiple smart contracts and websites while chaos is happening all around. So during that time frame, in 2019, my idea was to build a self-custody wallet that had all these automations built in, that can go directly to the blockchain, bypass all the websites, and do what you need to do. So the core idea was really if you were sleeping, or if you're on an airplane, or you're traveling and there's no signal you would know that there was an exit plan that would kick in automatically on your assets if something happened. Without my solution, you could be ending up with zero assets by the time you wake up or get back online. So in this model that we had, we had certain triggers, and when triggered, it would start unwinding and exiting from everything. So from start to finish, it would only take two minutes and you would be ahead of everyone else that had to go through all the websites and stuff. So we were able to get in and out of things in a few minutes and that was quite exciting. Unfortunately, around 2019 was also when all the government clampdowns on crypto started happening so we couldn’t advertise or promote our product officially. Various governments also started blocking specific websites related to crypto services so we had to start building different ways around to remain functional.

Yeah, so technically, what I built for Web 3.0 was a treasury management, risk management platform. It would manage your risk.

Do you have any plans to integrate this into Cash wise?

You know, I do see Cashwise may be bringing in some of those elements because a lot of Web 3.0 companies also have significant conventional holdings. But they also have these holdings in crypto. Traditionally, they don't have a process or people to manage their cash reserves because they are focused on building the tech. They also don't necessarily have time to manage their crypto side either. So we're looking at possibly giving a hybrid Treasury where there's both web 3.0 and regular treasury in a single platform.