F(DEV) and Fastwire: Helping Start-ups Scale-up

The Philippines has a very nascent startup ecosystem, especially when compared to its ASEAN neighbors. Some of these factors include the current lack of early stage funding so far in the market and limited number of growth-stage technology entrepreneurs. Moreover, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Philippine startups have recently started to gain significant momentum. However, a glaring obstacle that they all must go through is scaling up. This is where F(DEV) and one of its newest ventures, Fastwire, comes in. 

Established in the middle of the pandemic in the Philippines in 2020, F(DEV)  is the premier venture builder and digital startup studio backed by the Filinvest Development Corporation (FDC). The objectives of F(DEV) include bringing start-up ideas from the lab to the market and scaling them up quickly, forging ahead with new tech-driven businesses that address  hugely untapped markets in the Philippines and Southeast Asia.

Likewise, Fastwire is an innovative SaaS solution that aims to make financial operations easy for businesses. Its goal is to enable businesses to scale-up using software versus headcount, especially when it comes to its financial processes. With this, why don’t you join me in learning more about F(DEV)’s CEO and one of Fastwire’s founders, Xavier Marzan.  

Can you give us a short background about yourself?

I currently run a corporate-backed venture builder called F(DEV). We invest in and incubate new startups that aim to address different underserved market opportunities in the Philippines. We started in late 2020, in the midst of the pandemic. We currently focus on opportunities related to fintech and e-commerce, but we are also exploring new sectors such as sustainability and mobility among others. Prior to this, I was very much in the midst of the fintech space. I started and scaled up TrueMoney here in the Philippines: from 1 person to 500 people, 0 to 7,000,000 customers. It’s a fintech company that enables merchants, especially in the provinces, to offer various kinds of financial services to the masses. I also led GCash as its CEO prior to the Ant financial investment. I have been involved now in scaling up two fintech unicorns from the region. Prior to this, I have been in various business development and consulting roles, both locally and in the United States. As of the moment, one of the things I’m very passionate about is being an advisor and angel investor to a number of fintechs and B2B startups, both here and abroad. Being in Fintech is where I also saw the operational challenges most financial teams have. You’d be surprised at how a lot of large organizations  and fintech companies are still struggling with paperwork and highly manual processes. This is the challenge  we are aiming to solve for with our new venture, Fastwire.

How do you view your own personal role in the PH startup ecosystem? How does F(DEV) fit into this?

I’ve been tracking the Philippine startup ecosystem now since I came back, probably about 10 years ago. I’ve definitely seen a huge spike in activity the last few years, thanks in part to the pandemic. There has been more startup funding in general, especially coming from abroad. I think the level of funding today is more than twice that of pre-pandemic levels. I also see a lot more emerging founders and startups locally in addition to companies wanting to enter the Philippine market. The fact is, the local startup scene is still very nascent. I did this analysis with my team, and I would say that the Philippines is approximately  5-7 years behind Indonesia, and a couple of years behind Vietnam today. There’s a lot more things we need to do. There’s also still not a lot of people who have been involved in high-growth startups or have gone through exits. Coming from being a startup operator and being in this high-growth fintech space the last several years, I feel that responsibility: to provide guidance  to emerging  founders, to share what I know in terms of scaling up Filipino tech startups, and more. If you look at F(DEV), it helps other startups as well by providing that support system, whether its product, operations, marketing, HR, and sales among others, together with the ecosystem from our parent company. What we’ve done is short circuited that journey of startups from an idea, to pilot, to being commercially available to the market, and to raising funding and scaling up. We’ve launched a number of startup ventures, and what we’ve seen is we can shorten the first couple of years into about 6-12 months.

What made you interested in focusing on Fastwire? What problem/s are you trying to solve?

Fastwire is one of the startups that we’re incubating. The problem that we’ve seen actually dates back several years ago, when we ran fintech companies. What we saw was that while the front-end customer experiences, especially in fintech, are very digital, the tools and processes at the back office, inside the business, still remain very manual. Before, we would hire hordes of people just to manually encode information into a system. We felt that it was really hard for any digital business to scale up given these manual processes and operations. We’re launching Fastwire to help solve these operating problems and to help businesses and their finance teams scaleup using software instead of headcount.

What makes Fastwire a unique startup compared to others?

If you look at fintech today, most of the players that you see focus on business-to-consumer offerings. There’s not a lot of players who focus on helping businesses modernize – taking their legacy and manual operations and shifting them  to a new way of doing business so that these businesses can be more competitive in an accelerated digital future. There are some but not many. We hope that Fastwire would be one of those business-to-business fintech companies that would focus on SMEs and Enterprises. The other facet is we’re an extremely customer-focused team – all of us are really close to the problem and customers and we get to spend a lot of time with actual users. The insights there we put directly into the product. 

What is your long-term vision with Fastwire?

We envision Fastwire to be the de facto platform for every business’s CFO, not only in the Philippines, but the entire region as well. To do that, we need to take very complex operations and financial processes and make them very simple and design it with the best possible user experience. We want Fastwire to ‘humanize’ finance, so to speak, and make financial operations fast and easy, especially for internal teams.

As you may know, the startup ecosystem has rapidly grown during the pandemic. With this in mind, what do you think has driven this rapid growth?

I think there are several factors and they all have to come together. When it comes to any startup ecosystem, I tell people that they always need three (3) things: (1) access to the market, (2) access to capital, and (3) access to talent. On access to market, the Philippines from a demographic and economic standpoint has always been attractive. With the digital acceleration  that we’ve experienced the past 2  years, the Philippines has now become a prime digital market in the region. We are expected to be the fastest growing market, if not one of the fastest, in terms of internet GMV. On access to capital, there has been a lot more funding of capital coming from abroad, more than twice that of  pre-pandemic levels. There are also now a lot more startups raising Series A/B funding and we’ve seen that happen over the course of the past 12 months. All these create more and more interest from investors because you now have more case studies and success stories. On access to talent, I see a lot more emerging founders and tech startup entrepreneurs locally. There’s also a lot of interest now coming from university students wanting to get into tech startups. You now have access to a broader talent pool.

Xavier Marzan is the Managing Director / CEO at F(DEV), the venture and innovation arm of the Filinvest Group of Companies, and Board/Advisor of several tech startups. He was previously the Founding CEO at TrueMoney PH and CEO/COO at GCash. He is a digital venture builder, changemaker, and fintech influencer, passionate about building and scaling up MISSION-DRIVEN and HIGH-IMPACT digitally-enabled ventures that solve real challenges as well as reach underserved sectors in the Philippines & Southeast Asia

Visit www.techshake.asia if you would like to know and connect more with F(DEV) and Fastwire.