Wecash Vietnam

Background

Wecash was a fintech startup focused on lending and credit scoring. It originated in China and expanded its market to Southeast Asia, India, and Brazil in 2017-2018.

My Role

As a Technical Program Manager (TPM), I was responsible for launching Wecash Vietnam. This involved building the delivery process, managing projects, coordinating all teams, and delivering the local website and apps. I also supported building local teams and working cultures. We used Scrum and collaborated with cross-regional teams to develop and deliver Wecash Vietnam.

I was also responsible for defining the user flow for the MVP to validate the willingness of users to provide data to apply for a loan.

Product

Wecash aimed to build a better credit scoring and lending system by utilizing Big Data and AI.

Since each country has its own legal regulations regarding lending and debt collection, Wecash Vietnam had to adapt the Wecash Indonesia’s system infrastructure and lending process to comply with Vietnamese regulations. The biggest challenge was convincing users to provide as much data as possible for the underwriting process and training our AI model. There are three main sources of data:

• Data from the user’s device, such as contact lists, phone records, location/GPS…
• Data uploaded and input by the user, or recorded from their activities with our platform, such as personal information, proof of income, repayment history…
• Data from third-party services, such as social network sites, e-commerce sites, OTAs…

We launched an MVP version with pre-designed small loan packages and a simple backend to store user data. Users had to go through sequential steps to provide the necessary data to verify their identity and their purpose for the loan. After that, an identity analyst would analyze the information. If all conditions were met, we would approve the user’s loan request. All of the process was manual to quickly validate the concept in Vietnam.

After the MVP launch, we discovered that many users were willing to provide their data to apply for a loan, even though the drop-off rate was pretty high (approx 70%). This proved that we could add more features and channels for data collection as long as users had incentives.

We then launched a few more apps with improved UX/UI and more features to validate and test the market until we finalized with an official brand for Wecash Vietnam.

Key Takeaways

• Wecash piqued my interest in product management and taught me the importance of an MVP to validate an idea or concept.
• An MVP must be launched quickly, even if we have to do everything manually.
• Users are willing to go through a tremendous process as long as their incentives are powerful enough.
• Cross-team collaboration and communication are crucial if you want to push the project forward.