This time, the tiger really came.
Huang Shuojun still remembers the scene when he opened a securities and futures account in Singapore. In September 2019, he flew from Beijing to Singapore and went to an offline business hall under the guidance of his colleagues. It took more than one hour to complete a set of procedures from obtaining the number, filling in the form, providing supporting documents to opening an account.
Such time and process were basically expected by Huang Shuojun, but when he was told that the securities and futures accounts should go to different floors for processing, there was still a little surprise, which means that within the brokerage, stocks, futures, and even foreign exchange Different business lines such as, derivatives, etc. have not been opened up at the user information level.
On the other hand, the cumbersome account opening process gave Huang Shuojun a bit of confidence. In July 2019, Tiger Securities’ Singapore wholly-owned subsidiary officially obtained the capital market service license approved by the Monetary Authority of Singapore. As the head of Tiger Securities’ internationalization, Huang Shuojun’s trip is to prepare for Tiger Securities’ business development in Singapore.
As a leading Internet brokerage firm with a well-known investment in US and Hong Kong stocks, Tiger Securities is not satisfied with only acquiring customers in the Chinese circle. It wants to expand its reach to the world.
The strategic significance of the layout of Singapore lies in: It is in the same time zone as China, and has similarities in culture. It is very suitable as a training ground for the early stages of international expansion.
“Singapore is our root and our bottom. In the future, we also hope to enter the Southeast Asian market.” said Liang Yijin, head of marketing at Tiger Securities Singapore.
The “tiger” is here
Liang Yijin is a Singaporean. Before joining Tiger Securities in 2020, he has worked in a local brokerage for ten years. As a veteran in the industry, Liang Yijin heard that Tiger Securities can be traced back to 2016. At that time, a colleague told him that in addition to Robinhood, another brokerage with ultra-low commissions appeared, and “the mobile platform (APP) is very good.”
It is a coincidence that Liang Yijin then made a plan called “Anti-tiger Action” at the request of his boss, in order to discuss what kind of coping strategies they need to adopt if the tigers come to Singapore.
At that time, there were 10 local brokerages in Singapore, with similar business models. They all traded offline through recruitment brokers to win customers to trade on their own platforms. The usual means of competition was to fight a commission war.
Actually, the business model of local brokerages in Singapore has been unchanged since the 1980s and 1990s and lasted for nearly 40 years. However, with the growth of the new generation of users in Singapore, the demand side has changed.
In the past when information was underdeveloped, most retail investors relied heavily on the stock trading advice provided by brokers, so the commission paid to brokers included the service remuneration, but nowadays Singaporeans under the age of 35 invest Most of them research and make decisions on their own, and don’tBrokers again need to recommend stocks, but low commissions are more attractive to them.
Furthermore, the younger generation of investors are more inclined to use mobile apps for information inquiry and transactions, but most of the local brokerages in Singapore still focus on the PC terminal, and insufficient attention and investment in the mobile terminal.
The same goes for the account opening process. Although the offline account opening process is cumbersome and time-consuming, some local traditional brokerages did not realize this and did not move the account opening to online at that time. This also became a “fatal injury” for local brokers during the epidemic.
The general trend of industry development will naturally be noticed by senior practitioners like Liang Yijin. This is undoubtedly helpful for Tiger Securities to set up a local team in Singapore at the beginning.
As early as 2018, Tiger Securities applied for a Singapore capital market service license, and at the same time, it was interested in contacting local brokers to find out the local situation. The establishment of the preliminary relationship allows Tiger to quickly form a team after obtaining the official qualification for the exhibition in 2019.
In November 2019, Huang Tianjun, CEO of Tiger Securities’ Singapore subsidiary, joined the company. He has worked for a traditional brokerage for many years, and joining Tiger is a brand new attempt for him. Since then, Huang Tianjun once talked to people that since the systems of traditional securities firms in Singapore are mostly purchased from third-party suppliers, to change a function requires promotion of external partners, which is often inefficient, but in Tiger Securities, because of the underlying Self-developed, which made the function development extremely fast. “Strong sense of technology” is one of the reasons why he joined Tiger.
Since then, under Huang Tianjun’s promotion, Tiger Securities’ market, compliance, and anti-money laundering teams have gradually been put in place.
This time, the tiger really came.
Icebreaking Journey
The problem faced by the little-known Tiger Securities when it first arrived is: How to win the trust of Singaporean investors, let the Tiger brand enter the user’s perception, and achieve a “cold start” of the business.
In the Singapore market, there were once American brokerages returning home, and some European brokerages took nearly 10 years to open up the situation. “For new cross-border players, Singaporeans are still cautious.” Taking the forerunner as a lesson, Liang Yijin believes that Tiger Securities must continue to localize to gain customer trust in order to gain a foothold.
The first task is to find seed customers. Liang Yijin and Huang Tianjun first used their relatives and friends as “guinea pigs.” The first version had a lot of English bugs. Some people complained that “the expression is not authentic.” “Tianjun and I checked each function and each small label of the app one by one.” Liang Yijin recalled with a smile, “English is Singaporean.” The main language of communication, the app is full of “pidgin”, how can customers’ first impression of you be good?”
Nearly thousands of bytes, and it took about two weeks to complete.After confirming the text on the interface, Tiger Securities launched the first lucky turntable to draw red envelopes on Facebook on January 22, 2020. There are many young people who pay attention to technology gathered here, which is in line with the portrait of Tiger Securities customers.
Looking through it now, the event at that time only received 53 likes and 15 shares. Although the data has received very little response, through repeated postings, there is indeed a natural inflow of customers.
“From the top 10 users to the top 50 users, we have done a lot of research, including the needs of these customers, their preferences, and what they pay attention to. They are very particular about them.” Huang Shuojun said that the initial focus was not on running volume. It is to polish products and localize them through feedback from local customers.
“This batch of seed users has a group, I put it on the top, and I will look up every day. There are also dedicated colleagues who will summarize all the opinions.” Huang Tianjun has a table in hand, each user’s suggestion They are all marked in red, yellow, green and other colors, representing different priorities. Also marked with the expected processing time and processing progress, he will pull the product, R&D, and operation bosses to check this table every week.
Internal requirements, every problem must be resolved quickly and never procrastinated.
For example, every Singapore citizen or visa holder has a SingPass ID, which is equivalent to every person’s electronic identity. Some users suggested that Tiger Securities should connect to the government database and directly retrieve SingPass information when opening an account to simplify the account opening process. This feedback is marked with S level, which is the highest priority. Huang Tianjun immediately went to coordinate. By February 2020, this function has been launched, realizing the goal of local users to complete the entire process of account opening and deposit within 7 minutes.
It is worth noting that the selling points of “fast” and “full online” will be infinitely magnified in 2020, which is swept by the epidemic, and become the best slogan to attract users.
At that time, on the one hand, the epidemic caused global stock markets to fluctuate, which was regarded by many investors as a golden opportunity to enter the market; on the other hand, due to the epidemic prevention measures in the city, many offline business halls were closed, which caused investors not to Don’t switch to online, and traditional brokers have less investment in automation, and online channels are unable to parry for a while, and the time to open an account can even be as long as more than a month.
In contrast, Tiger Securities “opens an account in the afternoon, and the first order can be placed at the opening of the U.S. stock market on the same day” efficiency has allowed it to gain word-of-mouth communication in the private domain. A local user recalled that he was interested in trading U.S. stocks because the U.S. stocks melted four times in 10 days in March, because he wanted to enter the market quickly to catch this wave of quotations, “a friend recommended tiger”.
High-speed growth period
By May 2020, Tiger Securities has accumulated a small number of customers in SingaporeHowever, the reputation is more limited to local players who play US and Hong Kong stocks. In order to further penetrate the local market, another move of the team is to list Singapore stocks.
“Provide local stock trading. Many customers who have traded star stocks even if there is no demand for US and Hong Kong stocks before will come to try it.” In addition to broadening the scope of customers, Liang Yijin also pointed out that this makes customers more assured. “Everyone thinks that you really took the effort to localize and join Singapore’s trading products, instead of having a “try it” mentality.”
Another important significance of joining Star Stocks is that So far, local users in Singapore can trade Star Stocks, REITs, US and Hong Kong stocks, Australian stocks, options, futures, funds, etc. through Tiger Securities “one account, a sum of money” Diversified global varieties.
An industry insider said that most of the foreign brokerages in Singapore did not provide local stock trading, and the trading varieties provided by local brokers were scattered. In other words, Singapore lacks a centralized platform to allow customers to conduct one-stop transactions, causing retail investors to have to open multiple accounts at different brokerages. Not only does account switching cause many inconveniences, it is also easy to miss the market. “Tiger Securities just made up for this gap.”
Data also supports the above view. Since Tiger Securities launched Star Stocks in Singapore in June, customers have grown rapidly.
At the same time, since June 2020, the company has gradually increased its advertising on Google and social media in Singapore, and launched more pull-up activities, such as recommending friends to send stocks, etc., using social fission The gameplay enhances customer acquisition.
“Happiness is happy. Every day I open the backstage, I can see that the numbers are increasing.” Liang Yijin recalled, but the spiraling number of customers put pressure on the customer service team. At that time, there were only 3 or 4 English customer service providers. Later, The amount of inquiries was so great that he rushed to the front line to answer customer questions, “I really want to have an interview if I can speak English.”
The voice of Singapore’s consulting volume overload soon spread to the country. Huang Shuojun went directly to the domestic customer service department to “borrow someone” without delay. “Everyone is great.” When he returned to his desk, the domestic support customer service was in place. “There is a consensus within Tiger, and internationalization is the core strategy. Everyone is very happy to help.”
Today, the scale of the customer service team supporting internationalization has been expanded to about 30 people, and all resources are basically available.. Correspondingly, starting from the second quarter of 2020, the number of customers opening and depositing accounts in Tiger Securities Singapore has doubled for the third consecutive quarter.
This means that the Internet brokerage, which was still in its infancy a year ago, has made a breakthrough in Singapore at a staggering speed in just one year.
Be the global Tiger
“Tiger’s core is a technology company.” Liang Yijin once summarized the difference between Tiger and Singapore’s local brokerage. Whether it’s low commissions, one-stop services, the ultimate efficiency of account opening and depositing, or Internet-based operations, the ultimate focus is on R&D and algorithms, which allows the tiger to move forward quickly once it exerts its strength, and it also makes it more competitive in the competition. stamina.
A person close to Tiger Securities revealed that in order to better support the internationalization strategy, the company built a large growth platform this year. The concept of “middle station” has been frequently mentioned by Internet companies in recent years. It is usually described as a pillar that allows front-end business to move flexibly, but keeps the big rear basically unchanged.
There are two levels of consideration for the establishment of the Tiger Securities Central Taiwan. First, since the previous customer inflow channel information is in the marketing department, and the relevant data is kept in the operation department, if you want to analyze how a customer’s life cycle evolves from new recruiting, retention to conversion, you have to run data from different departments and do fine data. Difficulties exist in chemical operation. On the other hand, as the internationalization strategy rolls out, different regions may have similar development needs. For example, a set of codes must be rewritten for different markets, which will cause a huge waste of resources. At this time, a unified, common and highly scalable middle station is extremely important.
It can be imagined as a continuously running chip that can be docked with different components. It not only collects core data, but also helps the front-end to quickly share, replicate, and verify technologies and commercialization experiences in different markets.
“To a certain extent, it also reflects that the company is preparing to enter more markets and become larger in scale.” An Internet person analyzed that from Google, Facebook, Internet companies have been able to change flexibly in the battle.
“Singapore is fighting ahead, and our goal is the world.” Liang Yijin doesn’t like the term “Singapore market” because 30% of investors who open accounts in Singapore are not locals. In fact, Securities in Southeast AsiaThere are widespread problems such as long account opening cycles, high commissions, and poor mobile phone experience. In his view, Singapore’s accumulated experience can give Tiger the potential to cover the entire Southeast Asian region.
The internationalization ambitions of Tiger Securities don’t stop there. Previously, the company has stated that New Zealand, the United States and other places are within the “range” of its internationalization strategy. In the third quarter of 2020, Wu Tianhua, the founder and CEO of Tiger Securities, further stated that Tiger Securities will speed up the process of internationalization, and publicly predicts that in the next 12-24 months, overseas customers including Singapore will account for the company’s new deposit customers More than half. This data is 40% in the latest quarterly report, which continues to rise compared to the previous quarter.
Focusing on the Singapore market, the growth momentum will continue to be strong after entering 2021. At the end of January 2021, the “Game Station” long-air showdown was in full swing. Interested Singaporean retail investors moved after hearing the wind and couldn’t wait to join the battle. However, the account opening and depositing cycle of traditional brokers can’t keep up with the rhythm at all. Early word-of-mouth accumulation has caused a large number of customers to turn to Tiger Securities to take over this wave of market dividends.
“Our users have grown rapidly.” Liang Yijin said.
When he joined Tiger Securities a year ago, Huang Tianjun gave him his expected growth target. He had no bottom at the time, because after all, Tiger Securities started from scratch in Singapore, so it is not easy to take root. But a year later, he found that this goal was not only achieved, but also constantly being refreshed.
With more than ten years of experience in the industry, he can still fight new battles. Liang Yijin said that this makes him very excited every day. “This is a product that continues to mature. Almost every week and every month, new functions are launched. Continue to receive user feedback and then continue to iterate in this loop.”
“I feel like I am back to the state I was in when I first stepped into this industry. I feel that everything is fresh.” He laughed and said, “I’m young again.”