The past year has truly been a catalyst for transformation for many businesses around the world, including YouTrip. Co-Founder and CEO Caecilia Chu shares more about what to expect in this step forward — not just for consumers, but for businesses as well.
The past year has truly been a catalyst for transformation for many businesses around the world, including YouTrip. While we undoubtedly had our own set of challenges to overcome brought by the pandemic, it has also opened up ample opportunities for us to evolve our multi-currency wallet to serve more users’ payment needs.
From being a go-to travellers’ card that has accompanied jet-setters to over 200 countries, we’ve also become the best payment method to save when shopping with favourite foreign brands online, at a time when travel came to a standstill.
These changes have given us a renewed purpose to our mission of providing multi-currency payments with the best value, convenience and greater reliability.
With that, I’m excited to share today that YouTrip will be embarking on our next phase of innovation growth. In this step forward, we’ll be developing a wider suite of products that will elevate the cross border payment experience – for consumers and now, businesses. To power this innovation, we know we need a strong team of engineers, developers, creatives and marketers to make our ideas into a reality. On that front, we will also be expanding our home in Singapore, with the establishment of an innovation lab and growing our teams across engineering, product development, marketing and many more.
This is a crucial part of our efforts to strengthen Singapore as our regional headquarter for Southeast Asia and develop products that work for our users in the region.
Creating a New Frontier of Multi-Currency Payments
First, we’ll be bringing a fresh look and experience of the YouTrip app that you love – we call it “YouTrip 2.0”. This is a significant step as we reinvent ourselves as a travel wallet to a broader digital payments app for seamless multi-currency spending. Beyond debuting a new brand identity, you can look forward to additional features such as a virtual card, an interactive exchange rates dashboard, YouTrip exclusive deals, and the ability to hold more popular currencies in your wallet and more for YouTrip 2.0.
Secondly, beyond our everyday consumers, we’ve also observed that YouTrip has played a crucial role in businesses’ payments journey.
Speaking to some of our users and fellow business owners, many shared that YouTrip has greatly helped their company save on cross border fees when making payment to other overseas vendors. Such conversations also led us to unveil other pain points that businesses face with existing corporate payment products such as slow transactions across borders, and high exchange rates – additional costs that can chalk up to significant amounts for small businesses.
As a startup ourselves, this hits home. Especially as companies become increasingly distributed and operating in a more global manner, we know first-hand the importance of having a payment method that helps save time and money.
Registration of interest for YouTrip Business is now open
With that, we are introducing YouTrip Business – a payment product for enterprises of the future. This new multi-currency corporate credit card promises higher spending limits while transacting at the best exchange rates in 150+ currencies, with credit terms offered to selected business account users. With YouTrip Business also enables companies to issue multi-currency cards to employees, and streamlines all expenses in one platform.
Just as how we started out by solving travellers’ pain points, we hope this will be another valuable product to help businesses – big and small – optimise their spending.
Both products are in their development stage and we can’t wait to share more during the respective launches in early 2022. Businesses who are interested to be informed on the launch of YouTrip Business, feel free to register your interest below.
Growing Our Team of Innovators
Our YouTrip team in the Singapore office
To take our developments forward, it’s crucial that we nurture a strong team of innovators of our own. That has propelled us to establish a dedicated innovation lab in our Singapore office to fast-track our technology capabilities and product developments. As part of this new move, we will be hiring over 50 new roles across our engineering and product development teams — double our current workforce in Singapore.
And as we hire, we also want to nurture future cohorts of fintech talents with our newly-launched Software Engineering Graduates Programme. This will be a two-year training initiative to provide entry-level engineers with the core knowledge, mentorship and job rotations to master domain and technical expertise valuable for today’s fintech landscape.
We are thrilled to grow our YouTrip team in Singapore, and share our knowledge with future talents as we drive the next generation of cross-border innovations together.
No Better Place Than Singapore
Singapore has always been a special place to us, being the first market where we introduced YouTrip to the world.
And in many ways, this sunny island is the best place for us to propel our innovation forward. Beyond a robust tech environment and a flourishing fintech hub, it serves as a critical gateway to Southeast Asia’s extremely exciting digital economy. It only makes sense then to strengthen our YouTrip regional headquarter right at the heart of it all as we scale and bring our products to more users across Southeast Asia.
This is a new phase of growth for YouTrip, and I am excited about the progress we will make. Especially with our new innovation lab and a strong, creative and resilient team, we look forward to advancing our developments and delivering the best multi-currency payments products that everyone deserves.
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