Soft Space raises US$5mil for strategic investment

By Digital News Asia May 25, 2017

Partnership will introduce an omnichannel CRM solution to enhance clients’ digital engagements
Merchants can also leverage on the chatbot services within the solution to engage customers

Soft Space raises US$5mil for strategic investment

MALAYSIAN fintech company Soft Space Sdn Bhd, raises US$5 million from Japanese e-commerce company transcosmos inc to form a capital and business affiliation in the digital payment industry for traditional businesses in Malaysia and Southeast Asia.

The Soft Space and transcosmos inc partnership introduces an omnichannel customer relationship management (CRM) solution that helps enhance clients’ digital engagements to a new level by delivering ads, loyalty marketing programme that can directly send tailored discount coupons to customers’ smartphones that leverages on both offline and online data.

Merchants can also leverage on the chatbot services within the solution to further engage their customers.

Soft Space is a digital payment company in Asean that provides payment solutions, which focus on mobile payments that include its flagship Mobile Point-of-Sales (MPOS) solution.

Soft Space has obtained a centralised EMV Level 2 certification for cloud-based server, and their solutions are certified by EMV, PCI and major card schemes; making it secure, credible and recognised globally.

Soft Space was granted the Domestic Investment Strategic Fund (DISF) and Pioneer Status Incentive for high technology industry by Mida in December 2013 and the grant has accelerated Soft Space’s growth.

transcosmos inc provides a one-stop digital communication, omni-channel marketing, and e-commerce solutions with multiple customer engagement features integrated with “transcosmo’s DECode”, a DMP (Data Management Platform) service suite which aggregates various informational data gathered via various communications channel ergo providing analysis on AI (Artificial Intelligence) technologies.

According to Frost and Sullivan research, Southeast Asia is one of the world’s fastest-growing regions for e-commerce revenues estimated to exceed US$25 billion by 2020. There is a strong demand for retail goods and mobile commerce and people are jumping on the e-commerce bandwagon to seize on this opportunity.

“We are elated about this new partnership. Adding Soft Space’s mobile payment solutions to our existing DEC (Digital Marketing, E-Commerce, Contact Centre) solutions will further increase the value of our digital transformation services for our clients, especially in the Asean market where we cannot ignore consumers’ shopping behaviour in brick-and-mortar stores” said transcosmos inc president and COO Masataka Okuda.

“We seek to contribute for the clients’ business expansion by offering our CRM services, capitalising on offline data, in addition to the online data, through implementing mobile payment solutions offered by Soft Space, a company which has a dominant presence in the Asean region” he added.

Chief strategy officer of Soft Space Chris Leong (pic) said, “Alibaba Group recently announced the launch of the world’s first Digital Free Trade Zone (DFTZ) outside China in Malaysia. We believe that this would be a catalyst of the next wave of e-commerce growth”.

He also said, “As payments is integral part of any commerce, this partnership will position both companies to be the leading players in the region to help businesses transform digitally in all aspect of the business and to monetize on the trend of e-commerce for brick-and-mortar businesses in the region.”