Financial technology, or most commonly known as FinTech, is a business made up of companies that adopt latest technology and innovation with existing resources in order to contest in the marketplace of traditional financial establishments and mediators in the delivery of financial services.
FinTech companies consist of both early startups and established financial and technology companies trying to replace or develop the usage of financial services of various B2B and B2C companies.
Last year The Global Fintech Landscape Reaches Over 1000 Companies, $105B In Funding, $867B In Value according to VBProfiles’ upcoming Fintech landscape report. The Fintech scene in Asia is also rising swiftly, led by India (49) and China (31) because of their population size (2.7 billion people) and a fast-growing middle class.
Aimazing is one of such FinTech Startup which has developed a secure and contactless payment system using inaudible sound waves and a set of proprietary algorithms. Research Stash had a chance to talk to Yi-Kai Kong who is one of the co-founders of Aimazing to know more about their inspiration for building a new type of contactless payment system.
What is Aimazing and why did you start it?
Aimazing is a B2B startup that enables close proximity authentication to be done with Soundwave.
When was the company founded and who are the co-founders; please provide short bios of them?
The company was founded in 2015. Aimazing started off as a mobile wallet company, building and marketing our own consumer-facing mobile wallet application. However, due to unsustainable burn rate, the company made the hard decision to pivot in 2016. The business pivot became what Aimazing is today, a B2B company that sells the sound-based payments technology we originally built for our own mobile wallet to other mobile wallet companies.
Ting Fung Jing is the CEO of Aimazing, after graduating a university in Taiwan, he spent time in the financial industry. He had two successful startup exits under his belt. They are a social media and e-commerce startup respectively.
Kong Yi Kai our CTO studied Computer Science at National Taiwan University and is an experienced full stack developer. He was the lead developer building a job matching system for the Ministry of Education in Taiwan. In 2015, he was the recipient of Best Poster Award at ACM MobiHoc.
Yar Hong Chiong, the COO, is a Physics undergraduate at Nanyang Technological University. He was previously with an early-stage startup, Fipin, which does on-demand laundry services. He handled everything to keep the company in operations.
How does Aimazing work?
Aimazing uses ultrasonic sound waves to transfer payments transactional data with speakers and microphone. Therefore, enabling a secure and seamless Tap&Pay user experience that can also be device & OS agnostic.
How much are the products/services priced at? How has the response been so far?
Aimazing is charging approximately $1 per terminal SDK integrated and a volume-based tiered transaction fee. Aimazing has seen favorable traction, we are integrated with Singapore largest restaurant reservation site, also currently in POC and discussion with several partners, notably one of Singapore largest telco.
What type of people tends to incline towards Aimazing?
Aimazing has seen interest from many industries. From hotel door locks to events check in, there are many possible use cases for Aimazing technology. However, Aimazing has been focusing on FinTech and payments, and we have established a relationship with multiple banks and mobile wallet companies.
What’s Aimazing’s international presence now? What’s the goal? How does this relate with revenue?
Aimazing now has an established company in Taiwan and is in talks with potential partners from Taiwan and Indonesia. The goal is to establish a fruitful working relationship with these international parties, and with traction, we look to raise a seed funding round by end of the year.
What are your achievements so far?
- Aimazing participated in the first Slush Singapore Pitching Competition during Singapore Week of Innovation and Technology (SWITCH) in 2016 and was one of the Top 30 finalists.
- Aimazing was also one of seven startups on Channel NewsAsia StartUp Season 4.
- The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) awarded Aimazing with the MAS Fintech Awards, second place in Singapore Founder category.
Anything exciting happening in the near future?
Through these partnerships, Aimazing’s vision is to eventually establish a payment network that focuses on the unbanked in South East Asia. Will be pretty exciting to bring this vision to reality.
Sounds like a great technology right? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below.
