THE BRIDGE

tag Zuu

Japanese finance advisory startup ZUU raises $3.7M from Fenox VC, angel investors

SHARE:

See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based finance advisory startup Zuu announced on Thursday that it has fundraised about 450 million yen (about $3.7 million) from Fenox Venture Capital and several angel investors. Angel investors participating in this round include Jiro Suzuki, the former CEO of Malaysia Debt Ventures Berhad; he is renowned for the right-hand man of the former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad. See also: Japan’s fintech startup Zuu names new CTO, boosting matchmaking platform development The Zuu move follows their previous funding worth 105 million yen (about $1 million at the exchange rate then) from several angel investors including Japan’s mobile i-mode web service inventor Takeshi Natsuno. Coinciding with this, the company appointed Fenox general partner and CEO Anis Uzzaman as external director, former Freebit CFO Tetsuya Sano as external auditor and Jiro Suzuki as advisor. Zuu currently comprises 23 full-time workers, 7 freelancers and 15 interns. Accoding to ZUU CEO Kazunari Tomita, the company will use the funds to strengthen human resources. Leveraging Fenox’s network in the US and that of Jiro Suzuki in Southeast Asia, they plan to expand their finance vertical media business from Japan to the world. Zuu launched Zuu Online, a finance…

zuuonline_featuredimage

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based finance advisory startup Zuu announced on Thursday that it has fundraised about 450 million yen (about $3.7 million) from Fenox Venture Capital and several angel investors. Angel investors participating in this round include Jiro Suzuki, the former CEO of Malaysia Debt Ventures Berhad; he is renowned for the right-hand man of the former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad.

See also:

The Zuu move follows their previous funding worth 105 million yen (about $1 million at the exchange rate then) from several angel investors including Japan’s mobile i-mode web service inventor Takeshi Natsuno. Coinciding with this, the company appointed Fenox general partner and CEO Anis Uzzaman as external director, former Freebit CFO Tetsuya Sano as external auditor and Jiro Suzuki as advisor.

Zuu currently comprises 23 full-time workers, 7 freelancers and 15 interns. Accoding to ZUU CEO Kazunari Tomita, the company will use the funds to strengthen human resources. Leveraging Fenox’s network in the US and that of Jiro Suzuki in Southeast Asia, they plan to expand their finance vertical media business from Japan to the world.

Zuu launched Zuu Online, a finance vertical media site and the first service for the company, in September 2012. It has acquired 10 million monthly page views from 2.5 monthly unique users. In the samre year the company launched an online asset management tool called Zuu Signals, which suggests users what stock should be sold or bought as represented by three colors as used in traffic lights. They won the Intelligence Award at RisingExpo 2015, a startup showcase event hosted by Japan’s CyberAgent Ventures in August.

rising-expo-2015-intelligence-award-goes-to-zuu
Zuu’s Tomita(right) receives the Intelligence award at RisingExpo 2015.

In an interview with The Bridge Tomita told us why Zuu Online can maintain robust growth and monetization:

Online media sites and vertical media sites have completely different business models. The former attracts an audience with informative content while the latter has to help an audience solve problems. In other words, the former aims to satisfy readers with interesting stories, but the latter is more likely to encourage readers to take an action like buying something after finding relevant information, similar to e-commerce sites.

Finance vertical media typically monetize themselves through affiliate marketing by driving user traffic to financial products. We have partnered with securities and property assets companies, and our commission is relatively higher than other sectors when a user creates an account.

Vertical media sites have to deliver high quality content to readers as well as online media sites. The more high quality content they want to produce, the more production cost is needed. But Zuu avoids this problem in smart ways.

Tomita continued:

We aggregate content for Zuu Online from analysts working for think tanks or securities companies, such as NLI Research Institute, Gentosha, Société Générale, BNP Paribas and Monex Securities. They provide us with their analyst reports intended for their client institutional investors, aiming to gain brand awareness among not only businesses but also individual users.

We also provide content provided by our employee writers to companies for their owned media although we cannot disclose their specific names. Since financial companies are likely to appropriate a budget for owned media marketing, content production jobs from these companies are likely to bring us high profitability.

zuu-signals_screenshot
Zuu Signals (fictional picture)

In terms of the characteristic of content, we were told that Zuu Online has “chemistry” with NewsPicks, one of Japanese major news curation apps, which contributes to driving user traffic to Zuu Online. Regarding Zuu Online as an entrance, Zuu wants to enable visits to a variety of other services involving financial information resources. Later this year, Zuu plans to roll out a membership-based system where all users will be requested to enter their profile so that the company can provide various resources tailored for each user.

We were told that they can’t disclose details about how the upcoming service looks like but it appears to have something to do with data mining.

He added:

Typical e-commerce sites can recommend users what to buy next based on their purchase history. However, financial products are not daily necessities so we can’t predict what users want to buy in the future based on what they have bought in the past.

For instance, when a user logs into any of Zuu services to read a specific article, it can help banks understand his/her preference and provide their preferable financial services or products. We have four people who have served as CTO at other companies. They are working on accumulating user data towards that.

Zuu Online is a media site for users to solve problems. They visit our website because of our fulfilled resources, however it may confuse our readers in choosing which articles to read. We will be more focused on customizing, recommending and matching the best choice of our resources to each of our readers.

Hiring people is a big challenge for many startups, but Zuu could acquire an interesting talent which helps them acquire further interesting human resources later on. It will be interesting to see the upcoming service, which is to launch between this yearend to next year’s beginning.

Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

Japan’s fintech startup Zuu names new CTO, boosting matchmaking platform development

SHARE:

See the original story in Japanese. In August, Tokyo-based financial advisory startup Zuu fundraised 105 million yen (about $1 million) from four angel investors including Japan’s mobile i-mode web service inventor Takeshi Natsuno. Another news recently came in from the company. Zuu recently announced that it has appointed Masaki Goto, the former CTO at Japanese learning startup Best Teacher, as CTO. In addition to the fact that Japan’s governmental IT promotion agency heralded him as a “talented genius” in the computer industry with his learning management system project, he’s also known for conducting at Ryukyu Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra in Okinawa. Goto joined Zuu as a technical advisor to the board in July but he committed to the team upon the appointment at this time. Since its launch last April, Zuu has not been exposed to media much, so I have had no opportunity to hear from them despite many  years of acquittance with the company’s CEO, Kazunari Tomita. Inviting such a talented engineer like Goto, what is Zuu trying to do? We had an opportunity to hear from Tomita and Goto at their office. Financial services for consumers ranging from banking and brokerage to insurance are called retail finance. The internet penetration makes them possible to complete transactions online, in ways like online banking and online stock trading as well as  online insurance…

zuu-tomita-goto
From the left: Zuu CEO Kazunari Tomita, newly-appointed CTO Masaki Goto

See the original story in Japanese.

In August, Tokyo-based financial advisory startup Zuu fundraised 105 million yen (about $1 million) from four angel investors including Japan’s mobile i-mode web service inventor Takeshi Natsuno. Another news recently came in from the company.

Zuu recently announced that it has appointed Masaki Goto, the former CTO at Japanese learning startup Best Teacher, as CTO. In addition to the fact that Japan’s governmental IT promotion agency heralded him as a “talented genius” in the computer industry with his learning management system project, he’s also known for conducting at Ryukyu Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra in Okinawa.

Goto joined Zuu as a technical advisor to the board in July but he committed to the team upon the appointment at this time. Since its launch last April, Zuu has not been exposed to media much, so I have had no opportunity to hear from them despite many  years of acquittance with the company’s CEO, Kazunari Tomita.

Inviting such a talented engineer like Goto, what is Zuu trying to do? We had an opportunity to hear from Tomita and Goto at their office.

zuuonline_featuredimage

Financial services for consumers ranging from banking and brokerage to insurance are called retail finance. The internet penetration makes them possible to complete transactions online, in ways like online banking and online stock trading as well as  online insurance services. These are beneficial for providers in absorbing operational costs, in addition for consumers in terms of convenience in that they don’t need to visit a store.

However, this kind of financial products sold online requires consumers to have a high literacy in purchasing and ordering. It may give you a high flexibility of choice in favorable perspective, but you need to completely judge yourself in choosing which financial services you will adopt.

Seen globally, only 20% of financial services are provided via direct sales channels. The remaining 80% are sold via indirect sales channels from financial planners to insurance canvassers. It means the majority of consumers buying these financial products require someone’s advice upon purchase. No matter how things change along with time, the need to sell financial services via indirect sales channels will never disappear.

Zuu provides a matchmaking platform that connects consumers who want to buy financial services via indirect sales channels and providers like financial planners giving advice or selling these products. To date, while users have had to depend on their friends to find a good advisor, these advisors have had no way to approach their potential customers.

Having Goto as CTO, Zuu is trying to develop the core of this matchmaking platform. Tomita elaborated what they want to proceed from here:

Our business is connecting businesses and consumers. To make it possible, we developed a system of gathering advisors and launched 10 media sites for engaging consumers. We cannot disclose the details at the moment, but we’ll be working on a platform that keeps a tight grasp on consumers, which will be launched during the period from this year-end to the beginning of next year.

Zuu targets consumers with net financial assets worth ranging from $280,000 to $4.7 million, which means they are not super-millionaire but in the upper middle class that have some money in their bank  accounts. In terms of market scale, they are 10 million out of all 50 million households in Japan, so 20% of all households in the country are Zuu’s potential customers.

Hearing from Tomita and Goto, I came up with an idea that there’s a tendency commonly seen in typical fintech startups. As we previously heard from Crowdcast about their business, there are typically existing giants that target the top tier of a pyramid of users. Those in the bottom layer manage themselves so they are unlikely to use convenient advisory services. Therefore  startups can find a huge market potential in the middle range.

However, you wouldn’t expect so much on sales per customer in the middle-range tier. To make your business profitable, you will need to leverage crowdsourced forces and provide your services more efficiently. At the bottom line, Zuu targets the middle-tier customers in financial services while Crowdcast wants to acquire that in the expense reimbursement market.

Goto is devoting himself to development with his team members.
Goto is devoting himself to development with his team members.

As you can easily assume from the fact that  Zuu has as many as ten media sites, they have been focused on content development to date. They have exceeded one million monthly unique users in total, thus we can see they are one of the biggest operators of money issue-focused websites.

While Zuu is about a 25-person team including full-time and part-time workers as well as interns, only about five to six people out of them are being committed to systems    development under Goto. However, to accelerate development of the aforementioned platform, they are currently strengthening the engineering team, so the number of their engineers will exceed that of non-engineers soon.

Goto elaborated how they will acquire talented engineers:

Engineers who want to keep up with trends typically start their careers at a systems integration company, then hop around giants like Google or gaming developers, and now they are set for fintch startups. They may go to the healcare or IoT (Internet of Things) space later on, but I think people who want to do something new are gathering around fintech startups.

While it’s quite difficult to hire engineers in the startup scene, fintech startups may be more likely to gather good people because this is the hottest space not only for entrepreneurs and investors but also for engineers. It will be interesting to see what service Zuu will launch during the period from this to next year.

Japan’s financial advisory startup Zuu secures $1 million in angel funding

SHARE:

Tokyo-based Zuu, the startup that operates financial advisor matching platform Zuu Advisors, announced today that it has fundraised 105 million yen (about $1 million) from four angel investors including Japan’s mobile i-mode web service inventor Takeshi Natsuno and listed-company owners. The company provides a dozen web services including Zoo Advisors Support, a website of marketing tips for brokers and salespersons of wealth management products. Other websites include Japanese property market trend news site Tokyo Premium Real Estate and wealth management-focused portal Zuu Online (US Edition), both are available in English. The company will use the funds to strengthen their engineering and marketing teams to roll out improvements of their web services. Zuu was founded in 2013 by Kazumasa Tomita, who previously worked in the wealth management department of Nomura Securities.

zuuonline_featuredimage

Tokyo-based Zuu, the startup that operates financial advisor matching platform Zuu Advisors, announced today that it has fundraised 105 million yen (about $1 million) from four angel investors including Japan’s mobile i-mode web service inventor Takeshi Natsuno and listed-company owners.

The company provides a dozen web services including Zoo Advisors Support, a website of marketing tips for brokers and salespersons of wealth management products. Other websites include Japanese property market trend news site Tokyo Premium Real Estate and wealth management-focused portal Zuu Online (US Edition), both are available in English.

The company will use the funds to strengthen their engineering and marketing teams to roll out improvements of their web services.

Zuu was founded in 2013 by Kazumasa Tomita, who previously worked in the wealth management department of Nomura Securities.