Keep up with the latest FinTech and private market news, business tips, and thought leadership from industry leaders, mentors, and professionals.
Join our mailing list to receive information on upcoming Helicap platform updates and webinars.
If you're excited about the potential of private markets and fintech, we've got a job for you.
Here’s wishing all our clients, partners and investors a Merry Christmas! Join us as we celebrate a new milestone: 3000 members and counting.
In the past 12 months, we’ve scaled up, quite incredibly; growing multiple times from where we were after the first year of incorporation, reaching 3000 members and surpassing US$100 million worth of cumulative investments. For this coming year in 2022, we’re poised to make a greater impact.
To end off the year, we sat down with our CEO, David Z Wang and other senior members of the team to hear what they have to say on the year and plans for the upcoming new year. With that, we are pleased to share our holiday edition of the Helipad with some highlighted extracts mentioned below.
As we come to the final weeks of the year, we did a quick look-back as a company to celebrate some achievements that we’ve made despite the pandemic and look forward to a better year for ourselves, our clients and the people who’ve benefited from the financial inclusiveness created.
David Z Wang: We have this mantra called “doing great deals”, so we are very happy to not do a deal if we think it is not great, within the scope. We looked at 500 companies and only invested 20 in the last three and a half years. I don’t think any of our competition will have that kind of patience and ability to hold on.
Oftentimes you’ll find that many online platforms will have a-lot of products. Some of them have very short periods of due diligence. We’re not fans of that. We are between a traditional firm that does six months due diligence and a firm that does it in 48 hours. We try to automate most of the processes so we are kind of in between and we have a position there.
We are also very particular about our reputation in the market, so we make sure what we do is friendly enough. People understand our intentions very clearly, understand our pricing and constraints. Obviously we put investors and employees first and that usually allows us to make good decisions. Great deals are very important, it is the DNA of the company.” – CEO and co-founder, David Z Wang
Our institutional-grade credit analytics platform is a technological break-through. Created from scratch, the platform churns and analyses millions of loan data points from alternative lenders, and extracts meaningful credit insights into alternative lenders’ performance. It is a key tool for our fund to make data-driven investment decisions and select top-performing alternative lenders to invest in.
The success of this technology can be seen in our achievement of US$100 million in cumulative investments made with zero default under a balance sheet lending model over the last 3 years.
Quentin: Helicap fund is probably one of the top performing private debt funds in the region, for the past 3 years. We’ve managed to create a consistent historical track record of between 9-11% every single year. We are looking forward to continuing that performance.
With strong fundamentals of our business in place, we are now ready to shift our gears to conquer greater grounds. Below are some mentions of our plans for the coming year.
Quentin: With our credit analytics now fully ready, we are looking to expand our offerings to growth startups and growth companies in the region and also to work with larger financial institutions. At the same time, we will be launching a fund that is truly dedicated to financial inclusion, the launch of that fund to take place in the second half of next year.
Tan Zhi Wei, Executive Director for investments and analytics: One of the things we have noticed is that it is really difficult for startups to access capital and we’ve seen in the US and Europe the proliferation of this kind of new, more flexible financing that is less dilutive and really focuses on helping startups drive their revenue growth. We think it will be a great opportunity and a great way to help startups across this region grow.
What is RBF? In short, it is an alternative financing model in which the return is in the form of neither fixed payments nor shares, but a percentage of the company’s future revenue.
Jitendra Jaitawat, CTO: One of the key trends that I’m very keenly observing is the adoption of blockchain technology and the decent relation to finance and seeing how at Helicap, we can bring that work to the real world finance where we try to promote financial inclusion for the product we provide.
Now that you’ve heard from our inspiring leaders, keep a lookout here for these exciting new rollouts. Responsible investing has always been our core belief and we know that many investors are looking to use their wealth strategically to achieve maximum social and environmental impact.
Finally, have a Jolly Christmas and we wish you Happy New Year!
– from all of us at Helicap
Investment involves risk. Past performance is not necessarily a guide to future performance or returns. The value of investments and the income from them can go down as well as up, and you may not get the full amount you invested. Rates of exchange may cause the value of investments to go up or down.
Any forward-looking statements, prediction, projection or forecast on the economy, stock market, bond market or economic trends of the markets contained in this material are subject to market influences and contingent upon matters outside the control of Helicap Pte. Ltd. (“Helicap”) and therefore may not be realised in the future. Further, any opinion or estimate is made on a general basis and subject to change without notice. In presenting the information above, none of Helicap, its affiliates, directors, employees, representatives or agents have given any consideration to, nor have made any investigation of the objective, financial situation or particular need of any user, reader, any specific person or group of persons. Therefore, no representation is made as to the completeness and adequacy of the information to make an informed decision. You should carefully consider (i) whether any investment views and products/ services are appropriate in view of your investment experience, objectives, financial resources and relevant circumstances. You may also wish to seek financial advice through a financial advisor or and independent legal, accounting, regulatory or tax advice, as appropriate.
