The COVID-19 pandemic has altered the business operations across all industries including the payments industry. The steady transition from cash payments to cashless payments has been intensified by the impositions such as lockdowns and social distancing. Making the most of these opportunities, several new players are coming into the payment landscape. Likewise, with an aim to become a catalyst that transforms the way people use, manage, and monitor payments in their businesses and how merchants interact and transact, Teddy Tee established Cashlez in 2015.
Graduated from the University of Arizona with a Bachelor of Science in Management Information System, with magna cum laude recognition is 2001, Teddy was always passionate about computers and business. He started his career in financial service in 2002, mostly in the business and technology division. He served in senior roles for several major multinational banks including ANZ, MayBank, and UOB before working with VISA Indonesia as the Director of Merchant Sales and Solutions. While working there, he noticed some issues on the merchant side, such as difficulty for un-bankable small merchants to accept non-cash payments, transaction reports, etc.
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We just have to adapt with the change and be relevant to the challenges that we face.
To combat this, he came up with a solution to help merchants by incepting Cashlez, where merchants can accept non-cash payments and real-time report transactions. As the Founder and CEO of Cashlez, Teddy sets the company vision, mission, and executes it together with his team. He builds the leadership team and company culture and oversees product development and implementation. Moreover, he also manages business collaboration and plays a key role in setting the goals and budget as well.
Simplifying Electronic Payments
Cashlez is a financial technology company providing a value proposition for merchants and mobile players. The company helps merchants to simplify and combine many different sources of electronic payments. The solutions provided by Cashlez include,
• Cashlez Mobile-POS Application: It is a free mobile point-of-sale where merchants can arrange their products in the Cashlez application.
• Cashlez PAY: It provides integrated non-cash payment options including credit/debit card, QR payment, Cashlez-Link for e-commerce transaction, and virtual account to the mPOS application.
• Cashlez Reporting: A powerful back-office dashboard, for businesses to manage and monitor all transactions, bills, and settlement reports at anytime and anywhere. Merchant won’t need to reconcile transactions manually because it will be automatically reconciled.
• E-Billing: It is a system that assists in generating and delivering invoices, as well as accepting customer payments. The flow of an invoice through an electronic billing system can be sent from the merchant back office and delivered to any of the sub-accounts to be opened in any device to make it fast, efficient, and mobile-friendly.
• Business Payment Solution Provider (BPSP): This works in collaboration with VISA, to facilitate the business-to-business (B2B) segment between buyers (sellers) and suppliers to receive and make payments online utilizing business card product. This platform can also be used to record and execute the payments of taxes and bills, wages, rental fees, supplier payments, as well as insurance.
• Loan: Business fund loans for merchants, in collaboration with banks.
Adapting to the New Normal
The pandemic has disrupted the payments industry significantly. Teddy, however, believes that this situation has allowed the Cashlez to see which services can be maximized. Adapting to the current situation, the company aims to make it easier for consumers to make non-cash payments or receipts without having to be in a face-to-face scenario. Moreover, presently, people are opting for digital transactions over cash.
“Based on data from Bank Indonesia, the digital transactions in Indonesia increased 65% during the pandemic. I am sure that it will be the long-term effects, which will benefit the sector that we are in,” he adds. In the wake of the pandemic, Cashlez expanded partnerships with business partners, banks and non-banks. It also strengthened the mutual integration with its group company, Softorb Technology Indonesia. Moreover, the company created more innovations in products and services which are relevant to the current customer behavior.
Uplifting the Morale with Communication
Cashlez operates with more than 100 employees and its culture includes teamwork, integrity, professionalism, excellence, and creativity. In these revolting times, it becomes necessary to keep the workforce motivated. To do so, Teddy often encourages them, sometimes by Email messages to reassure them that their role is critical. He ensures the safety of the employees by providing enough space for social distancing, temperature measurement, masks, and hand sanitizers.
Moreover, he shares the milestones that Cashlez has achieved so far, and the direction the company is heading towards. “These successes and updates are not only helping people feel like they belong to something, they motivate people, because they subtly communicate why people’s actions have meaning and value,” Teddy asserts.
Creating Value for Merchants
Teddy believes that companies need to be more creative and innovative to respond to the pandemic. He strives to provide a solution that would help merchants survive as well as bring more businesses in these hard times. “I’m sure if we succeed to create values to them, they will be loyal to us and can grow together with Cashlez,” he adds. For the year 2020, the company aims to increase its revenue up by 200% and get 10,000 merchants.
Advice for the Aspiring
Being a successful entrepreneur, Teddy advises the aspiring entrepreneurs to stay positive amid the pandemic. Moreover, to survive and thrive in this unprecedented situation, he urges them to be innovative and make most of the available opportunities. He recalls Darwin’s law, “It’s not the strongest or the biggest of the species that survive, not the most intelligent, but the ones that are responsible to the change.”
