Harvard MBA student pitches idea of P2P lending start-up Funding Societies to CEO of major bank in Asia - and hits a homer
Founders have raised US$1.2 million from venture capitalists in Singapore and Jakarta to back their project
Kelvin Teo, a Harvard Business School student who is building a web-based peer-to-peer lending start-up as part of his curriculum, pitched the project to a potential partner: DBS Group Holdings, Southeast Asia’s biggest bank.
Omitting his student status, he sent the proposal last October to CEO Piyush Gupta after guessing the latter’s e-mail address.
At DBS’s Singapore headquarters, the CEO received the message. Gupta had been seeking ways to harness the internet to improve banking services and Teo’s venture, Funding Societies, might work. Three hours later, the executive sent his reply: interested.
Today, Teo, 29, and his classmate and Funding Societies co-founder, Reynold Wijaya, 27, are seven weeks from graduation at Harvard in Boston. They also have deals signed or pending with DBS and other Southeast Asian banks to collaborate with their start-up, which connects investors with borrowers from small and medium-size businesses.
Their success as entrepreneurs, while still enrolled in the top US MBA programme, shows how banks in Asia are eager to join with financial technology firms rather than get beaten by them.