Arthur Mak is Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of YouTrip, SEA's leading financial technology company dedicated to creating a next-generation borderless banking platform for the region. Before founding YouTrip, he was Product Lead at Tencent.

👋🏼 How would you explain your job to someone outside tech?

I build products for customers to feel like a local no matter where they are in a borderless world. And we do so with technology and innovation at our core while putting our customers at the forefront of our priorities.

For consumers, we offer YouTrip, a multi-currency mobile wallet that comes with a MasterCard to allow you to spend with no fees in over 150 currencies.

For business owners, we offer YouBiz as the next-generation, borderless banking platform that fuels their ambitions to expand globally in the most cost-effective manner.

🧐 What's something about you or your job that would surprise us?

I actually started out as an aerospace engineer. I designed rockets at NASA and aircraft engines of the F-18s at General Electric (those that Tom Cruise flew in the latest Top Gun movie!).

Later on, I made the move to consumer products and worked on electric car designs at the MIT Media Lab, as well as launched 80 different products across the globe for VTech. Eventually, I traveled to China to work at the WeChat Product Center as a product lead.

Having spent a large part of my time away from family and accumulating thousands of dollars in FX fees on my travels and overseas spending, I created YouTrip to solve my own problem.

I feel fortunate that my variety of work experiences has put me in good stead to tackle the dynamic challenges that come with creating complex yet intuitive products in the ever-evolving fintech industry.

🏆 What has been the biggest highlight of your career so far?

The recent launch of our B2B payment product YouBiz alongside our amazing team has been one of the biggest highlights of my career. It started from conception to launching the product within the span of just a few months.

With the world opening up once more, SMEs are accelerating their overseas expansion plans, leveraging resources, reaching out to customers, and engaging services globally. And this is where YouBiz steps in — we see opportunities to re-imagine how financial systems of the future can help businesses to grow in this increasingly globalized world.

Our multi-currency banking platform offers unlimited cashback on all spending, as well as zero foreign currency transaction fees and free virtual accounts, providing SMEs an affordable and convenient avenue to reap major cost-savings and fund collection means beneficial to their businesses.

🔍 What's a startup trend or space you're watching this year?‍

I'm keeping an eye out on the evolution and potential recovery of cryptocurrency and NFT platforms. Also, there are constantly new opportunities to uncover as the FinTech ecosystem becomes more integrated both locally and regionally.

💼 What advice would you give someone starting out in your industry?

In the fintech industry, it can sometimes be difficult and challenging to experiment. A simple FinTech product often needs to be connected to multiple live financial systems that manages people's money and their trust. Nevertheless, I would encourage anyone starting out to find a place and team where they have room to learn fast by failing forward. I believe that is the best way to build up your intuition and creative confidence to create great FinTech products.

Also, here are two golden rules for doing anything related to payments: don't miss a transaction and don't double count a transaction by mistake. Put in the hard work to trace every cent.

🗣 What's one thing you can keep talking about for hours?

Our YouTrip and YouBiz products! I enjoy sharing about them as they are truly handy for frequent travelers, online shoppers, fellow entrepreneurs and business owners.

Also, brainstorming about anything.

🎥 What's your favorite movie/TV show?

The Wheel of Time

🍨 What's your go-to ice cream flavor?‍

Strawberry (Häagen Dazs)