Business

Last week, HelloGold participated in the week-long Singapore Fintech Festival. As members of the Finlab accelerator run jointly by UOB and SGInnovate, HelloGold was invited to present daily at the UOB booth in the Singapore Expo. Both Robin and Dave were then invited as panellists at the Inclusive Blockchain Conference held at the Singapore University of Social Sciences, while HelloGold was one of the co-sponsors of the ACCESS Singapore party.

During the week, Singapore University of Social Sciences appointed a number of individuals who are experts in their field as Fellows. Robin was appointed as one of these Fellows and he will be providing support and giving advice in his area of expertise in the university’s FinTech education and research activities.

The Festival was a good opportunity to meet other projects in the blockchain space as well as those in the broader fintech landscape. Discussions for partnerships on various fronts were initiated including on KYC, smart contracts, exchanges, and on-ground marketing.

Robin presenting on HelloGold at the Singapore Expo

Dave on the panel discussing Blockchain, Identity, and Security

The year end party was a good chance to catch up with other members of ACCESS

In the same week HelloGold received the Most Innovative Islamic Retail Product of the Year at the Islamic Retail Banking Awards held in Dubai (victory dance here!). While in Dubai, early discussions were initiated with parties interested to invest in HelloGold in the Middle East as well as with National Bonds on the setting up of gold-backed sukuks.

Robin with the CEO and CCO of National Bonds

On the recruitment front, HelloGold has added two more new members to the team in addition to the 6 new employees introduced in the last update. They are:

Gary — QA tester

Nate — Marketing analyst

Both of them will provide key support functions to expand the reach of the HelloGold app.

Since deploying changes to the marketing approach 3 weeks ago, customer acquisition numbers have been trending up — over the last week total KYCs were 3x higher than in the first week since changing the approach. We now stand on 5,000 registered customers. Most importantly this was achieved while significantly dropping the customer acquisition cost.

As a result, HelloGold will be looking to double marketing spend over the next month. So what worked? There were 3 main factors:

Better creatives: moving from showing figures to showing a gold bar improved response rates by nearly 100% Malay language ads: estimated cost per registered customer of ads in Malay is nearly 50% of those in English Better optimisation

Moving forward there are reasons to expect even better performance. In the marketing pipeline are:

Better ads — the recently published ‘nasi lemak’ creative has delivered customers at 30% lower cost.

2. Content and email marketing

3. Improved website and SEO

4. Roadshow events

5. Offline advertising, PR, brand building

The ‘nasi lemak’ creative

Furthermore the marketing team is doubling in size. As people are hired and settle in their jobs, execution of marketing plans will accelerate.