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Caecilia Chu: From crisis to conquest
Despite previous failures and the upheaval of a global pandemic, the CEO of YouTrip has led her company to impressive regional growthHelmi Yusof
Published Thu, Jul 11, 2024 · 08:00 PMCAECILIA CHU BELIEVES IN “NEAR-DEATH” business experiences. The kind where the company’s fate hangs by a thread, revenues decline or stay stubbornly thin, investors express deep “concerns”, office morale plummets to new lows, and employees start updating their resumes in anticipation of losing their jobs.
These experiences are the crucible in which good entrepreneurship is forged. In such dire circumstances, when a company is stripped down to its core, that’s when the strength, creativity, and agility of the leader are tested. “An entrepreneur needs a near-death experience under their belt. It’s painful and humbling, but it’s training that’s required to grow,” says the CEO of YouTrip.
In her entrepreneurial journey, the near-death experience occurred twice. First, when an e-commerce platform she co-founded with a friend in 2012 failed to take off. “We were 20 years too late in that space; there were already too many competitors. So we closed it after struggling for about two years.”
Second, when her 2018 baby YouTrip, a digital wallet helping users save significantly when paying in foreign currencies, ran into the mother of all calamities: the global Covid-19 pandemic. “The travel segment is an important part of our business. So when borders shut down, we watched our business volume fall by 80 to 90 per cent overnight. It was pretty much a straight vertical line down.”
A voracious reader, Chu has pored through hundreds of biographies of great women and men who underwent tumultuous periods to become who they were. Her home library has about 1,000 yellowing books filled with highlighted paragraphs and marginalia. She knows that if a person can survive the turbulence, they can potentially emerge stronger, more focused, and better equipped to face future challenges.
While she couldn’t save her first business – an e-commerce venture whose name she refuses to whisper even now – she was determined to save her second. “YouTrip was doing well before Covid struck. It was hockey-stick growth from 2018 to 2019. Having closed one company that couldn’t get traction and opening another that could, we were incredibly appreciative of its early success. So even though the pandemic nearly destroyed us, we knew we had a good product. Luckily for us, our investors knew too. They stuck with us and saved us.”
Exponential growth
As a versatile multi-currency digital wallet, YouTrip has millions of users across the region. Many use it as a debit card for seamless transactions across more than 150 currencies without incurring additional fees. As the earliest of its kind to launch in the region, YouTrip scaled very quickly, garnering large user bases in Singapore and Thailand.Charting an expansionary path even during Covid, Chu and her co-founder Arthur Mak then launched YouBiz, a corporate card targeted at SMEs. It offers zero currency exchange fees; unlimited virtual and physical cards, each with customisable spend limits; and cashback. For small businesses trying to save every single dollar, the card is a financial lifeline – especially during Covid.
By April 2023, just five years after its launch, YouTrip had become operationally profitable. Though Chu declines to say exactly how many users it now has, she reveals that the user base today is five times what it was before Covid. By the end of 2023, the volume of total payments processed by YouTrip had grown by 200 per cent from the year before, rising to US$10 billion a year. These exponential growth numbers have attracted funding of US$105.5 million, with the latest injection of US$50 million coming from well-known venture capital firm Lightspeed, which has investments in Snapchat and Stripe.
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YouTrip now employs 250 people from 14 different countries. It has a perfectly balanced gender ratio of women and men, a very rare feat for a fintech company. Walking around the office, one also notices a few rainbow flags displayed on employees’ desks, denoting LGBTQ+ pride. Chu says: “We believe in having a very diverse team, whom we encourage to speak up and share their opinions. We have a diverse range of customers, so having a diverse staff ultimately helps us to understand our customers as well.”
Tiny home, big dreams
Chu was born in 1983 in Hong Kong to a postman and a kindergarten teacher. They lived in a subsidised public housing estate for low-income families. “It was really small and not the most comfortable of places,” she says. Her studiousness and natural mathematical abilities helped her earn scholarships to pursue her undergraduate studies in finance at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and complete her MBA at Harvard Business School.Soon after graduation, she started the aforementioned short-lived e-commerce site with Mak, a tech whiz. But when it sank, she found work in the Chinese fintech sector instead, with stints at wealth management platform Lufax and mobile payments company QF Pay. With China being way ahead of other countries in mobile penetration, the experience helped them conceive YouTrip for South-east Asia.
“In China, we saw every person and every business use their mobile phones to make payments. We thought we saw the future of where financial services would be. And because it is very important for Arthur (Mak) and me to be the first mover this time, we decided to move to South-east Asia.
“When we landed in Singapore, it became clear to us that the multi-currency issue was a really meaningful problem to solve. Everyone we spoke to was either talking about where they went for their last holiday or work trip, and where they were going next. As for businesses, it was very fragmented. One might have a back office in Malaysia, a customer servicing team in the Philippines, and a technology team in India. There’s so many multi-currency financial operations going on.”
After successfully launching YouTrip and navigating it through the challenges of Covid, she is now focusing on expanding across the region with the help of trusted local partners in each market. She is also enhancing her products by adding new perks and features, such as remittance services, bank withdrawal options, and other functionalities. Additionally, she is exploring the use of AI to improve customer service, personalise user experiences, and streamline operations.
With so much on her plate, how does the mother of two young children unwind?
“I love to read – especially biographies. Since young, I’ve been drawn to biographies of great men and women. When you read about their many years of struggle, you get a different perspective on what it takes to be successful. I especially love reading about Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and Tony Hsieh.
“I think that, for many entrepreneurs, this is a journey that we stumbled upon. We didn’t expect it to be so challenging – and perhaps it’s better that we didn’t know. Because, the truth is, the journey is really tough.”
Photography: Ivanho Harlim & Shysi Novita Fashion direction: CK Hair & make-up: Alison Tay, using Dior Beauty & Goldwell
