Island Fintech Weekly (16 May)
Greetings Islanders,
Here in Singapore, the feeling of being on an island has become just that much more real, as the country descends back into heightened measures to fend against Covid-19. Notably, under current measures, conferences like the Bloomberg New Economy Forum, where Elon Musk was supposed to speak at in November are likely paused. Dining is also paused, both indoor and outdoor. This is understandable given the high transmission rates that we can attribute to dining.
This week, I write the usual Dips (it’s the second edition, I get to say usual now). For Dives, it’s not the usual, no fintech story. Sorry. I have added some consolatory additional reading that is actually around fintech to make up for it!
Here’s to hoping that the lockdowns will help things get back to normal. I really want to get chance to see the Dogefather in real life, and also sip a Pandan Sour at Low Tide, an excellent new cocktail bar that opened up recently that I shall visit, only in my dreams 🍸 ☁
Note: If you’re interested in contributing content or getting involved with Island Fintech Weekly, reach out to me! vinay.palathinkal@gmail.com.
🎣 Dips
Gojek has received a $300M investment from Telkomsel, a subsidiary of Indonesia’s largest telecom provider, Telkom, following a $150M investment in November last year.
Google Pay has partnered with Wise and Western Union to offer money transfers natively within Google’s GPay platform - starting with US to India and US to Singapore corridors, before eventually broadening coverage to include more corridors.
Singapore fintech Validus secures $37.4m in SME lending credit from UK asset manager, Fasanara Capital.
Chime, the largest neobank in the US, agreed to a settlement to remove language around banking. This may have trickle down effects to other similar players such as Current, Revolut, SoFi, Cash App - all of whom use language around banking services.
Goldman Sachs re-launches a crypto derivatives trading desk, after an initial start in 2018 that halted following the dramatic price crash that year.
Remittances app Paysend has set up an APAC HQ in Singapore. Paysend appears to focus on card-to-card based international transfers, relying on MasterCard Send and Visa Direct.
Beijing-based wealth management platform, Snowball Finance, plans a $300M US IPO.
🐋 Dives
🇸🇬 How a 19 year old fooled the press.
Like I said earlier, I’m going to use my own journalistic freedom to take a fairly non-fintech detour today - the captivating rise and fall of a B2B SaaS founder, Harsh Dalal, right here on our shores in Singapore. It was Terence Lee’s excellent investigative Tech In Asia (TIA) story that broke the initial ground: ‘Scrutinizing the remarkable tale of this teenage Forbes 30 under 30 inductee’. The broader story also revealed some of the issues around startup news coverage and due diligence, which probably necessitates an entire critique of its own. We can leave that for a later edition.
Harsh Dalal made it to the Asian edition of the Forbes’s 30 Under 30 list earlier this year, and for a young tech founder, this can be a pretty big deal from a future fundraising perspective. I understand Harsh is only 19, so I won’t be trying to impugn his character here and keep things as objective as possible.
Before and after the 30 under 30 induction, Harsh scored multiple interviews with major press outlets, including Channel News Asia (CNA), The Straits Times, 89.3 Money FM, even Singapore Tatler, a magazine focused on high society culture. Through these interviews, Harsh convinced the outlets and most of the readership alike (except to some people on Reddit) that his company, Team Labs, produced B2B software used by major corporations and had raised USD $25 million. For what it’s worth, they have a convincing website, if not for the many dead links.
At one point, it felt like Harsh was everywhere.
Pictures of Harsh, especially the one where he sits confidently for a CNA interview, were all over my newsfeeds - shared by many of my friends on most major social media platforms. We were proud that Singapore could raise a talent like Harsh, and at only nineteen! Our enthusiasm for tech talent, coupled with the fact that Harsh made it on major publications like Forbes, The Straits Times and CNA, most folks expected that the lad would be legit - and wanted to celebrate him for it.
Except that it wasn’t. A lot of this was made up.
After this became clear to most of the pressers, Harsh was removed from 30 under 30 Asia, and CNA removed one of the two feature videos on Harsh and Team Labs. See below for the removal notes.
Forbes: Forbes is taking the step today to remove Harsh Dalal from the 30 Under 30 Asia list for 2021, which was originally released on April 20. His removal comes after a careful consideration of the findings of a comprehensive review of the information that was used to qualify him for the list, as well as new information that has come to light in recent days.
CNA: Editor’s Note: Media reports have emerged which investigate and provide new details on Team Labs. CNA has begun its own investigations into this story. We will also seek Harsh Dalal’s replies to these media reports. We will take all appropriate steps once our editorial review is complete.
I won’t get into most of it here because TIA’s article does an excellent job. But in case you haven’t had a chance to read it already, what I can tell you is that the story involves fake employee LinkedIn accounts, made-up statistics, all the way up to high fiction around venture capital. The venture capital bit really gets me. Harsh claimed, in the original January 2021 CNA article, that Team Labs raised USD $9.8 million from Grand Canyon Capital and Startup Capital Ventures (SCV), as well as sovereign wealth fund Korea Investment Corporation (KIC). When the investigative piece was being conducted by Tech In Asia, Harsh claimed that SCV and KIC did not invest. He was probably advised by counsel to state this, because stating otherwise could incriminate him. However, Harsh affirmed that Grand Canyon was an investor, and that the numbers around his valuation and the amount raised was produced by Grand Canyon. The trouble is, Grand Canyon Capital is probably fake - the lack of a web presence and the dead links on the website being a giveaway.
So how did Harsh fool the press? Harsh’s first feature was in November 2020, “On The Red Dot” - a now removed video from CNA. With a cursory Google search, Team Labs and Harsh’s profile reveals few details. The clues - the lack of employees, dead links, few existing news articles - are spread throughout, and I feel that it should not be incumbent on readers to verify the truthfulness behind such sources.
Many are surprised as to how Harsh managed to score this first initial story without any major releases or articles around Team Labs or its fundraising. CNA did write that Harsh’s mom, Manju Dalal is, in fact, a financial journalist (her Twitter even states Ex-Bloomberg, Reuters, WSJ). I know it’s common to have shared sources and trust in journalistic sources - often in good faith. It’s also good to have supportive parents! But Harsh’s inveterate lying means that assumptions in good faith can’t often hold up - a tale we often see in early stage tech, where the pressure to perform can be very high and even debilitating.
If Tech In Asia, and perhaps even Reddit, had not caught Harsh Dalal quite so early, then, bred by the media coverage and raised in the fanfare, Singapore could well have birthed our very own Elizabeth Holmes. And that I am glad that stopped the story at this point here. If, a la Theranos, false promises were made to investors on the basis of eloquence and veracity alone, Harsh would be seeing far more serious legal and financial challenges. And so the optimist in me hopes that we’ll forgive Harsh, and see this as a teenage misadventure - a smart kid who got lost in the hazy sway of media attention. And I hope that this also provides Harsh an opportunity to course correct toward a less clout-obsessed future.
🗾 Fintech-focused reads
Robinhood’s Big Gamble (The New Yorker)
Should Fintech Startups Hire Bankers? (Forbes)
How Open Banking Could Help Latin America Build The Next Multibillion-dollar Fintech Startup (Crunchbase News)
Digital Remittance Providers Eye Asia Pacific Markets (Fintechnews Singapore)
Revolut’s Puzzle (Aika Ussenova)
🏝 Twitticisms