Embedded Finance was the hot topic of 2020, and it will only continue to be more fascinating in 2021 and moving forward.

This is a follow-up post from ‘An Introduction to Embedded Finance’ where we covered the trend of embedded finance and opportunities within the space. This article will go deeper into the prioritisation of embedded finance product features that non-fintech founders /product folks can use to think about when thinking about embedding fintech services/functionalities into their product roadmap/business strategy.

We are restricting our analysis to Tier #1 Embedded Finance companies as categorized in the previous article below.

There is no reason Venture Capital industry dynamics and early-stage investment frameworks should be opaque, and we should aim for a world where capital is a commodity, information is free, and there is an even playing field between founders and VCs. See some of our writing on venture and business models here and our 2020 EOY Report.

We are focused on building a practical education in evaluating early-stage business models, giving smart, ambitious people, who are passionate about learning and working with early-stage companies, hands-on part-time experience at a VC fund, and a strong curated community of founders, operators and community builders. …

We are still trapped at home, but the pent-up demand behind domestic holidays/staycations, the establishment of travel bubbles and travel corridors reflect a long-term future where we return to the world of travel. COVID-19 vaccine optimism is also starting to flow in at a startling pace.

The travel industry has been crippled, but we see signs that it is beginning to start to roar back under safe and altered travel guidelines.

As VCs, we take long-term views and make long-term conviction bets, and are excited about the future of this trillion dollar market, looking into the different business models and trends that have underpinned the travel industry long before COVID. …

As we at Saison Capital looked back at our LP winners, and improve on LP strategies moving forward, we were particularly excited by the rise of first time GPs, and micro-VCs [defined as <150m].

Below is an early framework we initially developed for thinking about LP investments and introducing 3 categories of VCs within early-stage GPs that guide our LP investment framework.

Within early-stage GPs, we found 3 buckets of GPs that existed:

Category #1: Mass portfolios (“Spray & Pray”)— w/ 1–3% ownership — typically 100k-200k ticket sizes, with 20 to 80 companies per fund

Category #2: Large Coinvestor — w/ 5–7% ownership — typically 500k — 1m ticket sizes, with 15 to 30 companies per…

We are happy to be able to announce that we have joined the SG United Program, where we can now offer an additional VC Associate Traineeship under terms sponsored by the Singapore Business Federation and Workforce Singapore.

If you are a Singaporean or PR with at least 1 year of work experience (pre-2019 graduate) looking to transit into an investment role, with an eye to a potential conversion to a full-time role, apply here.

This traineeship will be identical to any Associate position that we run at our fund, and is ideal for any young professional looking to break into the venture capital scene. …

Talent freshness is the issue of candidate relevance to the job market — i.e. not just that a candidate had been looking for a role, but how ‘fresh’ is their desire to find a new role.

This is about our experiences building the SEAcosystem.com talent database platform, and what we learnt about talent-freshness in the HR/recruitment process.

A side project, SEAcosystem.com, started during COVID in April 2020, is a talent database that laid-off talent could use to list themselves and their backgrounds, with an option for companies to also post jobs. …

Co-authored by Jeremy Au and Chia Jeng Yang

You are probably aware that Southeast Asia is one of the world’s fastest-growing tech opportunities in the world. The internet economies in Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, and the Philippines are growing by 20–30% annually; Indonesia and Vietnam are growing in excess of 40% a year. With the third-largest labor force, behind China and India, SEA has outpaced the rest of the world on growth in GDP per capita since the late 1970s. …

Fintech is a vast, endless place, which makes the trend of infrastructure democratization even more exciting. We have previously written about the types of fintech infrastructure, specifically about embedded finance in ‘An Introduction to Embedded Finance’.

In this piece, I wanted to dive into the different categories of fintech infrastructure business models (categorized by value proposition rather than the place in the value chain), the types of questions to assess these companies, and where the different types of companies will go. …