Fusionex International on accounting tech

Accountants are in a terrific area to offer ‘as the bridge between service and also tech’, says Darren Kong, handling supervisor, company method and partnership at Fusionex International, an information modern technology options company. As well as he should understand– with a level in used bookkeeping from the UK’s Oxford Brookes University, Kong exemplifies this brand-new breed of crossbreed accounting professionals, or what he terms ‘technology accounting professionals’.

Fusionex International is really different from most organisations, notes Kong, whose duty entails making the organisation’s roadmap and also involving very closely with numerous stakeholders making up service partners, business, SMEs and also trade associations (the ‘partnership’ part of his job title). He attributes this to owner as well as team Chief Executive Officer, Dato Seri Ivan Teh, who urges multitasking in order to support skilled all-rounders. ‘He frequently stresses the significance of expanding “inside-out” and welcoming a cross-fertilisation technique in our duties, where we get associated with as many elements as possible,’ Kong describes.

This holistic and integrated strategy is vital to solving the challenges dealt with by several organisations in the technology sector, particularly the SMEs that consist of near 70% of the Fusionex client base. At its core, a tech conundrum is about addressing a business concern. Companies, especially SMEs, intend to ‘recognize just how to start, when to start, as well as what is the expense and return on tech investment’, Kong explains. ‘Our role is to aid our fellow business companions dissect these concerns and develop the appropriate method and roadmap for their service.’

fusionex international

Secret to identifying that approach is to create data-enabled remedies that match what Kong describes as the three vital phases of a business’s growth. Throughout the start-up stage, services need help in terms of branding, inhabiting their customer database as well as finding the ideal market. After 2 to 3 years, they must have created a particular amount of historical sales as well as customer data, and Fusionex aids them to evaluate these datasets to utilize their sources better as well as sustainably: concentrating on costs, matching them to the ideal customers and demographics, as well as managing their marketing invest a lot more effectively.

By the third phase, a service must have grown right into a considerable, export-ready business with bigger capital and also sources. ‘This is the stage where you need to automate a great deal of procedures as well as prepared them for the digital area,’ describes Kong, pointing out procedures such as onboarding electronic profession assistance, in addition to the need for smooth assimilation of logistics and supply monitoring.

While the industry is currently experiencing explosive high development, Kong is transparent concerning the obstacles dealt with by tech companies, consisting of around skill and also financial disruption. ‘Many specialist innovation firms still locate it difficult to hire the right “fit” at the correct time,’ he claims. ‘Thus, they purchase training as well as talent-matching as early as tertiary education and learning degree.’

Maintaining the skill
At Fusionex’s head office in Petaling Jaya, management is plainly placing its money where its mouth is to pull in as well as maintain skill. Fusionex’s ‘workplace of superheroes’ eases the everyday work with rewards such as superhero-themed rooms, cupboards with free snacks, pool tables, fitness center, karaoke, massage chairs as well as restoration pills topped 3 floors. The workplace is in tune with the wants of the 500-strong local personnel as well as Kong thinks that this is one variable that keeps the unintended attrition rate down to much less than 8% a year.

Strategic collaborations also enable Fusionex to punch over its weight. In 2017, the firm partnered with Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, to give cloud-powered software solutions to companies in the ASEAN area. Business in different fields consisting of monetary services, trade facilitation, ecommerce, retail, aviation, travel as well as friendliness, and also manufacturing have taken on these services to drive performance.

Fusionex remains to perform additional study and also technology right into big data analytics (BDA), artificial intelligence, AI and also the Web of Things at its laboratories as well as R&D centre in Petaling Jaya, in order to present tech-enabled company solutions that are suitable as well as affordable in the regional and also Asian context. ‘There are many new technologies riding on the growing use AI, machine learning and deep learning. These brand-new technologies are relocating towards the enhancement of a more active company environment, to adapt to consumer benefit, higher standard of lives as well as medical care, and resulting hopefully in less wastefulness,’ claims Kong.

The entrepreneur who turned down US$63m

PETALING JAYA, July 21 — Ivan Teh, Fusionex founder and managing director of AIM-listed Fusionex International Plc, has quietly gone on building a big data company that has had an eye-popping 1,000 per cent cumulative growth rate since its launch in 2006.

There are many things that stand out about Ivan, but one of them is this – his business had no angel investor, nor any venture funding. It was purely built on cash flow from satisfied customers and, in the first six months, on the sweat and toil of Ivan who put in 18-hour workdays to understand customer needs and build the software platform himself. He was a one-man show.

“It was an intense period,” he concedes, looking back. “I was speaking to my contacts and potential customers trying to understand their needs and to get a finger on the pulse as to why people would purchase my software. This was then followed by a lot of thought processes that went into trying to do something different.”

And what was this something different?

Fusionex Founder
Fusionex Founder

Nothing sexy, really. He just resolved to give customers a solution that was easy to use and effective to help them make sense of their data.

“People get confused. There are a lot of options out there to build your own big data solutions but in all honesty, most organisations don’t care, or don’t have the skill sets. This was the pain point I wanted to solve,” he says.

As anyone who has ever tried it knows, the hardest thing to do is to hide the complexity of very tough problems behind an easy-to-use front-end solution for customers.

This then translated into building the platform that Ivan worked on himself.

“From preparing the templates to coding the software to the documentation, I did it all myself,” he says, adding ‘pau ka-liao,’ colloquial Hokkien that roughly translates to ‘doing everything by one’s self.’

“It was an intense, exciting and, to be honest, painful time, but the great thing is that you woke up every morning highly motivated because you knew you were not doing anything monotonous,” he says.

Fast forward from those startups days in 2006 to Dec 18, 2012 and Fusionex listed on London’s Alternative Investment Market (AIM) exchange with a big data focus, one of the sexiest terms in tech today.

Indeed, during the pre-IPO (initial public offering) roadshow, 38 of the 50 institutional investors who approached came on board. “The response was overwhelming,” says Ivan.

In all, Fusionex had RM200 million (US$62.8 million) committed to it, with the IPO offer oversubscribed by 300 per cent.

Amazingly, Ivan only took RM60 million (US$18.9 million), which is what his company had set out to raise. “I was told it was quite unheard of. But to me, taking all that money comes with a sense of responsibility. You have to do something in return. We could have taken the money and spent it differently and on the wrong strategy. That does not help your credibility,” he says.

Instead, what he did earned Fusionex huge credibility and translated into the fact that there were no selling shareholders on its IPO. In fact, everyone was interested to buy more.

Ending Dec 31 2012, Fusionex’s share price stood at £3.965 (RM21.48), more than double its IPO price of £1.70 (RM9.20) on Dec 18 2011. http://www.klkntv.com/story/38616519/fusionex-founder-follows-unique-funding-path