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What if all your loyalty points, credit card deals, and travel rewards lived in one open ecosystem, built around you instead of the banks?

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In this episode, we talk to David Wang, founder of Krip, Hong Kong’s first centralised credit card deals platform, now part of HeyMax, the Singapore-based startup redefining loyalty across Asia.

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David shares how recognising just how much value gets lost in everyday spending led him to build Krip, a platform that helped Hongkongers spend smarter and ultimately drew the attention of HeyMax. In this conversation, he reflects on building a startup from scratch, navigating its acquisition, and finding new purpose leading the next phase of growth, all while reshaping how loyalty and rewards actually work.

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What You’ll Learn:

• How Krip became one of Hong Kong’s standout fintech success stories
• Why HeyMax’s “open loyalty” model could change how you earn and spend rewards
• What founders should know before considering an acquisition
• The emotional reality of entrepreneurship, how to balance the highs and lows
• Where travel, tech, and loyalty are converging next in Asia

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Transcript

David B. Wang (00:00)
This notion that there is a very simple problem to solve, which is helping people maximise all of their deals and discounts and rewards. It's relatively simple issue, but when you actually bring that to fruition, you're not just helping people save money, you're also helping businesses better engage with their customers. You're helping payment companies better engage with their customers as well by virtue of this daily engagement, right?

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Jonathan Nguyen (00:32)
Welcome back to another episode of the Unsensible Podcast where we talk to the unhinged founders who think that they can defy their Asian parents to change the world. Today we're talking with one such person, David Wang, who built one of Hong Kong's first personalised credit card deals platform. But I'm not going to tell you any more than that. I'm going to let him pitch it because it's his first time on the podcast. And the second rule of the podcast is you've got to pitch. So David, over to you.

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David B. Wang (01:03)
Thanks so much, John, and thanks for having me on the podcast. I was the founder of Krip, which is Hong Kong's first centralised credit card deals platform. And our vision of the platform has always been to help people spend smarter by maximizing all of the deals that they have access to with the cards in their wallet. Last month, Krip has been acquired by a hotshot startup out of Singapore called HeyMax. Therefore, I'm wearing the shirt. So HeyMax is a Singapore-based platform that helps everybody earn miles on their everyday spend.

And in essence, helping you to maximise your everyday spend through your different cards and payment options to earn towards your next free travel. And the reason we have been acquired by HeyMax is because fundamentally we believe in the collective vision to help customers maximise their everyday spend. Now in Krip, it was about maximizing through finding better discounts and deals offered by merchants. And at HeyMax, it's about one step beyond that, right? Once you actually made that payment, how can you maximise those rewards for your next trip and we fundamentally believe that we are living in an age of what we term travel economy. I everybody loves to travel and experience the world. Miles is very much core part of that journey and how can you earn more miles towards that next trip, that next travel experience. That's what HeyMax is about and fundamentally what I built at Krip really resonates strongly with that vision at HeyMax and that's what led to us to sit under one roof. So now I represent HeyMax to bring this vision forward to Hong Kong and beyond across Asia and rest of the world.

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Jonathan Nguyen (02:34)
That's great news because I remember we caught up at Singapore Fintech Festival last year. You were working hard man. You were like really working the room trying to, you know, talk to as many people as you could. I'm sure it's been a wild ride. Tell us a bit more. How was it on the other side? Well, would say

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David B. Wang (02:52)
It's been a very, very organic journey actually that brought us together. We were in Singapore actually starting last year as we looked to expand Krip outside of Hong Kong and to take that into other parts of Asia. And so in Singapore, that's where we first met HeyMax. And funny enough, the CEO of HeyMax, Joe, also attended University of Michigan, which is also where I...

where I'm from, so we share a little bit of those roots from way back when. And a lot of the initial conversations really was around engaging each other and exploring how we can work together. Really under the premise that we share that same vision, again, really helping people to maximise their rewards on their everyday spend. And between Joe and myself, we're both, I guess what you can call miles junkies. We love to travel, we love to tap into our miles bank to figure out what's the best way to get to our next trip. That conversation started really around a partnership discussion.

And over time, think as we spoke more around our collective vision, around how we think about open loyalty, around how we can build solutions to get people to their dream, which is again, travel being a core part of that. We realised it actually would be much more of a, you know, synergy for us to actually bring our expertise together and to bring sort of Krip and HeyMax under one roof to really accelerate that vision to grow HeyMax, obviously as a Singapore based company at the moment.

but to bring that forward into Hong Kong towards other markets across the region. So it has been a very, very organic conversation and it came together reasonably quickly, I would say, in the grand scheme of things. Very excited to be able to continue to deliver on that vision together within the HeyMax ecosystem and to be working closely with Joe and the rest of the HeyMax team, which is an incredible team, obviously, for what they've been able to accomplish thus far. Back to my University of Michigan days, actually.

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Jonathan Nguyen (04:37)
How did you start on this journey?

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David B. Wang (04:42)
I would say that's where the entrepreneurship spirit was rooted in. Because I had the actual experience of founding a student club at the time. And to be able to realize the fruits of the labor and to see the impact my sort of humble vision could bring to people and the way that it could affect people's lives, right? At the time, the student club in short was really helping students to discover their career path based on their skills, their passions.

their backgrounds. And it was one particular student that we helped mentor through this club, eventually helped him land a job at Wall Street in a very suitable role for his skillset background. And when he finally got that job, he was so thankful of all of the help that we gave them. And for me to see that personally, just a little humble vision that I had starting out the student club and then to actually see the fruits of that labor materialise into a very positive outcome in a way that could meaningfully change his life.

That was something that was very meaningful to me. So that vision has always stuck with me to continue to do so in my career. And that did not happen right away because I started my career in finance and investment banking and ⁓ venture capital. But I would say that that experience actually equipped me with all the relevant skills for me to actually take on this monstrous of a task of which is starting a company and being an entrepreneur, which has been fun, but of course, it's very challenging. Now getting to how Krip started was really...driven by this entrepreneurial spirit, I've always been looking for ways to identify areas where I could bring about my humble vision and to deliver change. And as a credit card geek of sorts, guru, if I can call myself that, I was going to a tea shop, I'm actually buying tea for my mom for her birthday. The cashier sort of pointed out that, hey, if you use this specific card, you get X amount of discount plus some freebies. Maybe naively, I thought I knew all the deals that were in the market. But turns out I didn't know about this, right? And so of course I jumped on the deal, but was later on I realized this was just the tip of the iceberg. There were actually hundreds, if not thousands of more of these deals that were left to chance, essentially. This notion that there is a very simple problem to solve, which is helping people maximise all of their deals and discounts and rewards. It's relatively simple issue, but when you actually bring that to fruition,

You're not just helping people save money, you're also helping businesses better engage with their customers. You're helping payment companies better engage with their customers as well by virtue of this daily engagement, right? If I could just leverage that a little bit towards where the conversation is now with HeyMax, the beauty of HeyMax is that they take this actually one step further, which is, okay, we've helped you maximise your spend, but what are you getting in return?

In this case, you're earning miles on everyday spent, which is very, relevant because of the travel economy that we mentioned, right? So in a nutshell, to me, it was always that vision to bring about positive change. And I'm very thankful to have been able to do so in a couple of different settings and very excited to be able to extend that now within the HeyMax umbrella.

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Jonathan Nguyen (07:41)
Wasn't a smooth ride though, was it?

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David B. Wang (07:43)
It never is. It shouldn't be.

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Jonathan Nguyen (07:46)
Well, I mean, if it was easy, everyone would do it. Right. So like the, the, I found really interesting listening to you in Tokyo was there are so many deals out there and you know, from a consumer perspective, actually there's a lot of money left on the table, but also from a business perspective, it's just nuts. How much marketing spend this is that goes completely unnoticed and wasted, right? On the client side, what's their kind of

Like pain point, do they feel this as a pain point or do they just wonder why these things aren't working?

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David B. Wang (08:21)
Now, absolutely. I think when you think about brands, businesses, payment companies, one of the biggest challenges in this day and age, especially with this overabundance of information is how do you engage your customers? Right. And when you think about from a loyalty standpoint, which is fundamentally what this is about, there's quite a few different ways you can go about it. I would summarize that into generally two ways. So one is offering discounts and that's literally where Crypt sits in, right? Which was about helping people find discounts. Although discounts are attractive, they do tend to eat into company and businesses margins. And that's obviously not ideal, especially if you're running on a thin margin business. The other way to solve for loyalty is essentially to build your entire loyalty program, right? So for example, American Express has done that very well with their rewards program.

That's not a small undertaking. And for a business that doesn't have scale, it can very quickly turn into a cost centre. And so for a lot of businesses, they struggle to engage with customers because they don't want to enter margins and they don't have the budget or the means to build out a scalable loyalty program. A lot of companies end up in sort of this closed loop or coalition loyalty program or their own little mini program that fails to actually reach the customers that they're trying to engage.

All of these businesses and brands are essentially trying to get engaged with the end customer, you and I, right? And so all of these loyalty programs need to ensure that they're actually serving the interests of the customer and not the business or the banks as such. Not to say that they cannot derive benefits to them, but it has to be customer centric to begin with. From Krip's perspective, having an open loyalty perspective is essentially having a centralised aggregated deals database so that

Every bank is an equal piece of the puzzle so that customers can find all the relevant deals on all of the banks. But extending that one step further is to actually create value in that ecosystem. This is where the single source of loyalty currency, in this case, MaxMiles, the mouse currency that we run, creates this open loyalty ecosystem that essentially customer gets put in the center of it to be able to dictate where their loyalty lies with these brands and partners. And that actually enables businesses and brands and companies to actually engage these customers much more effectively. The use case here, for example, is if you put $10 in to reward the customer in the form of miles, that $10 will actually get you, for example, a transaction versus if you were just spending that on an offline channel that's not generating a direct ROI. I would say that a lot of companies are already starting to see the value of that setup. Certainly in Hong Kong, as we're bringing HeyMax into market,

We're seeing insurance companies, e-wallets, banks, retail companies, all looking to jump in on this open loyalty solution to adopt MaxMiles as a currency of choice because it saves them costs and it generates potential high return spent on their marketing dollars. So I think that's where we see the trend going toward.

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Jonathan Nguyen (11:21)
you go into a market where you're going to be competing with the 800 pound gorilla like Asia Miles?

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David B. Wang (11:27)
That's a great question. And it comes back down to customer choice, right? So of course, in Hong Kong, the preferred airline of choice, of course, is Cathay Pacific, then ergo, Asia Miles. In other markets, that could be Chris Flyer in Singapore, right, with Singapore Airlines. But fundamentally, the question comes down to what does the customer want, right? Just because there is one airline does not mean customers only want one single choice. And so when you look at it from the customer's perspective, choice is always preferred.

choice is always something that customers demand. From a travel proposition standpoint, what you see is travellers wanting to fly on different airlines. There's a lot of factors that come into play that sort of informs the customer to make a different choice from, let's say, the single airline choice that they might be oriented towards in a certain market. But the challenge again for the brands is, if that's what the customers want, are you able to deliver that? Or are you able to deliver that at scale? So that you're able to address the customer's needs. The short answer to that is, is it's challenging, right? So the beauty of what we've built at MaxMiles is that we are currently offering transfer from MaxMiles into 30 plus airline and hotel programs. And that's the kind of scale that is very, difficult to match. I mean, we are currently live with Qatar Airways, with Ethiopian Airlines, with AirAsia, and certainly many, many more to come. And so it offers customers just more choice and optionality around, you know, how they want to engage with different brands, right? When you are a single airline at a single market, the demand for your currency can be much higher and Ergo drives the price up, right? So there's also some commercial considerations here as well, but ultimately it comes from the customer's mindset that optionality is always preferred.

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Jonathan Nguyen (13:10)
You know, two sided platform, three sided platform actually, because you've got the merchants, then you've got the people who are providing the miles behind the scenes, being airlines. What do call them? Your partners?

David B. Wang (13:24)
Maybe let me just give some context to this. So at HeyMax, we fundamentally believe that merchants are best suited to directly engage with the customers. We don't want to get in the way of that. The max miles that are offered to our customers are predominantly merchant funded. We want to increase the efficiency of marketing spend. And so every dollar the brands and businesses put into to engage with their customers, we would ideally want that to be directly given to the customer. What we are working with the airlines and hotels on is actually enabling that realisation of MaxMiles value. We work with airlines hotels for you to enable that to be transferred into different loyalty programs so that then you can make use of MaxMiles in a variety of different settings, whether that be flying with a different carrier or staying in a new hotel chain. We also have a very unique feature called Fly Anywhere, which enables customers to directly redeem MaxMiles for flights that they book by themselves with cash. So if you've booked a flight, let's say on trip.com or on GoTo or any OTA platforms, or if you booked it on a direct flight channel, you can essentially send us that receipt and go through a reimbursement process where as long as you have the MaxMiles balance, we actually refund you the ticket in cash. Again, creating more value creation from the ecosystem and allowing people to realise the value of the MaxMiles, which are funded by the brands in the first place.

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Jonathan Nguyen (14:49)
Let's say I go to a local coffee shop. Can a local coffee shop sign up to be a Max Miles merchant?

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David B. Wang (14:56)
There is two parts to the HeyMax ecosystem on the earn side right now. The first part is the online part of the platform, which is essentially the affiliate marketing model. So we work with a lot of digital and online brands where we help them funnel traffic into their shop essentially. And we service their advertising funnel to get more transaction volume. And so for those merchants, it's a relatively straightforward setup. The interesting growth element here is really around the offline channel piece. If you ran a coffee shop, right, how can we help funnel traffic to you? In Singapore, Chocolate Finance, a local wallet, has issued a Visa debit card that allows you to earn max miles on your native spend, which means for every transaction you're spending with the Visa card, you're actually earning max miles. So therefore, any merchant that accepts Visa or accepts the Chocolate Finance card would be able to benefit from the max miles currency.

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Jonathan Nguyen (15:51)
Flying all the time on Cathay. They've got me locked in on a points ladder. That means that I have to fly one world if I want special treatment and I get loads of free flights out of it. That's a very high bar to break. How are you guys thinking about tackling that from a behavioural standpoint?

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David B. Wang (16:10)
We're not really looking to compete with them, actually. We see ourselves as a complementary partner to a lot of these programs. And when you think about these airline programs, one of the critical challenges is actually how can they drive more spend outside of flights? How can they engage you as a customer on a daily basis? The way we see ourselves is that we are essentially a partner to a lot of these programs to enable their mileage currency to be fully engaged with our customers on a daily basis through the daily spend offering that we give. And of course, the loyalty program themselves has to sell itself, right? You can choose to transfer MaxMiles into Azure Miles or other programs.

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Jonathan Nguyen (16:49)
A lot of this would probably be powered by AI nowadays. Do you guys see yourself as a technology platform or how do you describe yourselves?

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David B. Wang (16:59)
100%. I mean, AI technology has been deeply adopted across all facets of the business. So certainly for one, understanding each customer's needs, understanding their preferences and helping them to identify even better ways to spend to earn more miles is certainly at the core and the forefront of that enablement.

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Jonathan Nguyen (17:19)
When you first started on the Krip journey, was this where you thought things would end up?

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David B. Wang (17:25)
I think it would be naive as an entrepreneur to set a concrete target as sort of the exit poll, if you will. The way that startups go, it's a very, very unpredictable journey. There's a lot of ups and downs. To your point, the very start of this podcast, know, the days are like, I should have listened to my Asian parents and stayed in that job that pays me a good salary, right? But there are certainly days where you feel like you're making a huge impact.

And so it does come and go. And of course, as a business grows, that volatility comes down somewhat. But it would be naive to say, I insist on a certain outcome because there's a lot of factors at play that may or may not be outside of your control. For example, right, I'll give you a very concrete example in this case. At Crypt, we took a very conscious decision to launch after COVID lockdown was over in Hong Kong, right? So once we launched the market, there was an expectation that the retail economy would pick up and get back to pre-COVID levels. That expectation, unfortunately, did not materialise. And even to this day, we see a lot of that spending go towards overseas destinations, whether that be in Shenzhen and Greater Bay Area or in overseas destinations when people fly out. I would say that the travel economy is certainly booming and very, very strong. are seeing a lot of strong demand. But the local economy, objectively speaking, has not picked up and has not recovered to COVID days. And that was a factor that was very much beyond my own control, certainly, and certainly beyond the control of Krip. And so understanding where the market is shifting and understanding how you can extend your journey as an entrepreneur is very much part of the spirit of being an entrepreneur, which is being able to pivot, being able to adapt. So the short answer to your question is no, but you learn to adapt and survive and to see in what every capacity you can to realise on your vision. And I think it comes that fundamentally to a very core question. Why did you do this startup? What made you start? Personally, for me, it was that vision and the fact that I can continue to see through that vision at HeyMax, but to do so in a way that responds to the current market dynamic and where I see the market going towards, again, being the travel economy, then it makes a lot of sense. And it's a very, very happy outcome that I'm very excited about going forward.

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Jonathan Nguyen (19:47)
When I talked to a lot of founders, they say it's actually quite lonely sometimes because, you know, sometimes the founders have bet the house have bet their personal wealth, have bet their reputation on building something because they believe in it. There are just some days where you just get kicked in the nuts so many times that, you know, you want to talk to someone about it, but it's difficult because you, you know, you can't talk to your team. Probably can't talk to your spouse who's in kind of the boat with you because you've bet the house. How did you on those days just keep going? Because, you know, some of those days are pretty shitty.

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David B. Wang (20:24)
Well, you definitely hit the sore spot. I think as an entrepreneur, it is a very lonely job. lot of folks may not be able to fully relate to the trials and tribulations that you have to go through. And certainly, like I mentioned, it's a very much a roller coaster ride. When the days are good, you think you're top of the world, right? You're really being, you're like the next Elon Musk. But on a tough day, you're really questioning not just your idea, but yourself, your life sometimes. So it can put you in a very dark place. So one thing I've come to learn is you have to be able to manage your emotional and mental state. You have to keep yourself in a sort of balanced condition where the good news doesn't get you too excited and the bad news doesn't bring you too down. Because if you let the emotions drag you around, you're not going to be able to run a business. But I think fundamentally how or what gets you through it comes back down to that very central question why did you do this in the first place? So if you're not mission driven, you're not truly 100 % sort of as you say, you know, literally soldier house and all in on this idea and this vision, this mission, then it will be very tough. It will be very tough.

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Jonathan Nguyen (21:39)
Gone from running your own show for quite a number of years. How is the transition? I'm sure a lot of founders are going to be like, you know, an exit, an M&A, this is something that they aspire to. How's the change been for you?

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David B. Wang (21:53)
I actually don't feel like there has been much of a transition, if I could put it that way, because it has been very organic from day one. None of it was forced. It was very much a natural conversation that started as a potential partnership discussion that slowly merged into an &A and now I'm here. It's actually a reflection of the alignment of interest and passion because it's really an extension of what I built Krip for and HeyMax embodies that and then some.

And so that alignment of interest allows me to gel with the team almost from day one because we share that vision. I'm more than happy to admit at Krip, one of our shortcomings was the technical execution standpoint. We are definitely a little bit more commercial and business minded team. And the HeyMax team is absolutely exceptional from a technical standpoint. Again, the resume sell themselves, right? You four founders who are all ex-meta engineers. I actually see myself being able to do more to deal around that mission. You know, I can offer more products, I can offer more features, and I can have the full trust and confidence that the HeyMax Execution Team will be able to deliver. Maybe just one sort of off-the-shelf advice I would give to other founders is if you're thinking about building a business that will at one point be sold, then make sure that you're aligned on what, and you're aligned and also be very, very focused on delivering on that vision that you have.

And one day when the relevant partner comes through and they share that same vision, it will make for a very, very easy, well, I say very easy, but it will certainly make it for a much more seamless conversation.

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Jonathan Nguyen (23:26)
Yeah, I remember when I was at WPP Ogilvy, once you kind of reach like a certain level of seniority, it doesn't hurt you if you're identifying &A like targets, then they give you the whole training on like how to start that conversation, how to identify and then, you know, what that journey's normally like. And to their credit, it's quite a what's and all kind of training. They show you the good stories and then they show you the bad stories.

And they have a lot of these like founders whose companies have been acquired. They actually interview them and a lot of times they interview them on video to kind of debrief. And so they show you some of the videos where, yeah, there's fantastic alignment. It all works out really well, but a large proportion of them don't work out well. And so I always say to founders,

It may sound good, your due diligence, make sure you really, really like these people because you're going to be married to them in a lot of ways. And that mission alignment and values alignment, I think, is a really another really important thing. Because if the values are different, the decision making process is different. And often that kind of creates a lot of the friction and the deals go south.

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David B. Wang (24:42)
Yeah, 100%. And I think you actually touched on a very valid point around value alignment as well. It's really no different than getting married, right? It's a professional marriage of two companies of sorts. You don't go into marriage lightly, and you certainly want to establish some foundational trust, value alignment, mission alignment. The simple analogy here is let's say if your partner doesn't want kids and you want kids, that's a misalignment, right? And if you have two businesses that are not even aligned on simple things like that, then it will make for a very, very broken process. There's obviously a technicality of all the due diligence and all of that stuff, but fundamentally it's about meeting the team, getting to know each other, really understanding at a very honest level, are we looking to accomplish the same things and are we aligned in how we're going to do it? And a very bare minimum established level of trust. Now, certainly, you can't build trust in a very short amount of time. So there does need to be an element of leap of faith, but that's a judgment call that every individual needs to make for themselves. But what I'm very excited by is the fact that I've always been very, very open and transparent with the HeyMax team and they have been with me and that allows for much more honest questions and conversations and that allowed us to build that foundational piece relatively easier and that led to this sort of good outcome, I think, for both parties. So, I agree with you. It's definitely not an easy process, but I would say just to all other founders who are thinking about an exit to put in a bit of effort, right? To understand who you're working with, who you're going to be aligned with. Essentially, you are going to get married, and so make sure you're married to the right person.

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Jonathan Nguyen (26:21)
Switching speeds a little bit. Being a founder, you have a lot of balls in the air at any given time. And every time I talk to founders, I ask them, hey, what productivity tools do you use? Are you a things app guy? Are you a to-do as the guy? Or do you go off a completely paper-based system? What's your kind of productivity or tech stack?

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David B. Wang (26:42)
Well, I'm not the most technical founder, so I'll give you maybe a less techie answer, but I do have two hacks. So one element of that is how I manage my inbox. think most of us probably have a pretty crazy inbox that sees hundreds, if not thousands of emails on a weekly or monthly basis. I admit, I do have a bit of an OCD, to be quite honest. So I have a relatively clean inbox, but the way I set it up is such that everything has their own relevant folders and anything that's still left unattended or yet to be addressed sits in my primary inbox. So essentially, when I open up my inbox, what I see is essentially my to-do list. And any follow-ups. I am inbox zero guy, but the emails that are still sitting in my primary inbox are all the things that are still on my to-do. And actually, when you get into a habit of it, when that inbox gets very long, then you know, hey, it's time to get some work done. So that's been my productivity hack for the last.

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Jonathan Nguyen (27:20)
You're GTD Inbox Zero guy.

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David B. Wang (27:40)
good number of years actually, and that's actually kept me afloat in terms of making sure I don't overlook important messages, emails, and conversations with partners, investors, and that alike. And the other hack, this may be a little bit more nuanced, is how I think about the use of business cards in conferences actually. So I've been to my fair share of conferences around the world, and obviously different cultures practice different types of relationship.

Exchange, right? In a lot of different places you're seeing an exchange of LinkedIn. Some of them have those sort of, I forget exactly what the tech is, but you can essentially scan their card and save down their contacts.

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Jonathan Nguyen (28:20)
Oh like the NFC like cards or the QR code cards.

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David B. Wang (28:23)
Yeah, exactly. But what I found to be consistently the most trusted way of doing things is handing somebody a business card. It doesn't matter if they give one back to you. It sits in their wallets. And generally there's element of respect that they're not going to throw this in the trash can, at least on the day. So it will sit somewhere. And if you don't manage to follow up or if you follow it up, they forget to reply. One day they'll see that business card and they will, I met David somewhere. Let's have a conversation, right, more often than not. that's also a little bit of a hack that I have. Doesn't cost them armament alike to print a bunch of business cards, but I think it has outsized returns in terms of, you know, and partnership discussions.

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Jonathan Nguyen (29:02)
Yeah, I tend to agree. Business cards are a funny thing. Like I went to an environmental sustainability conference and I, and this was right after COVID. I had these beautiful cards printed, triple layer, laminated, debossed. They were beautiful. And I was like, you know what? We haven't met each other in years, literally like two years, three years. We haven't been able to get together and exchange cards. I'm going to make some nice cards. Anyway, second or third conference, go to this environmental conference and I get the sideye because I've basically used like the thickest fattest most expensive like cards, I we were FSC and all that kind of stuff, but People were like, you know, you should just be using digital cards nowadays so I went and got digital cards and Then I find them so clumsy like every time you go to these conferences. Everyone's like Oh, do you have a card? I'm like, I don't get these digital cards now because you know people were all environmental and

There are some benefits like the digital cards, you can have them scan and it goes straight into your CRM. It's useful, but I still have business cards to your point sitting on my desk over there from conferences that I went to two years ago because I feel guilty throwing them away. And you know, the second thing is you can't just throw them away. You got to shred them like personally identifiable information, including mobile numbers, right? So if they just sit there until I can shred them.

Yeah, you're right. They do stick around. It's good insight.

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David B. Wang (30:36)
Exactly. And for you to be on the receiving end of it, if you're the one that's trying to reach out to people, I've also found that it's just an easier way to manage your contacts, right? So if you manage to get a stack of cards from a certain conference, that stack of cards you can label as, you know, that environmental conference.

And then when you follow up, it's like, Hey, remember if we met at conference, has to follow up. Yeah. Yeah. I just find that it makes for an easier way to engage people. again, sort of going back to my earlier point about finding some common ground with people, right? You know, every common ground will help. So that's, that's my little productivity hack. Although to be very frank in some markets where conferences, cards are not the default option and people generally do other digital means like LinkedIn. When I whip out a card, it's almost as if I whipped out a check book. People are like, Jesus Christ, I haven't seen this in decades. I was like well now you got a piece of antique to keep in your in your memory box so makes it even more important.

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Jonathan Nguyen (31:32)
What's the future hold? If you look at it five to 10 years from now, where is all of this kind of loyalty stuff going? Does it increase? Does the data element of it get too dangerous, get too toxic? What happens? What's the next 10 years hold?

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David B. Wang (31:47)
I do fundamentally believe that we are very keenly working towards a world where open loyalty becomes the loyalty of choice. So as we move towards that open loyalty, we see a stronger engagement between brands and customers on a direct basis. And then we also see the same between customers and their travel ecosystem of airlines and hotel partners as well. And so in the next five to 10 years, I actively see much more budgeting and marketing spend.

to be put towards an open loyalty setup and see that marketing spend being directly correlated with A ROI, but B also the incentive that's given to the customer. So it's a very direct relationship in driving that engagement. do fundamentally believe that, you know, as we progress in this era of data, that customers and general public will be inundated with more and more information. And when there's more information, it actually puts the power in the hands of the customers. So.

And an open loyalty set up customer is number one and the customer will be the core audience that everybody is trying to address and bring value to. And that's the benefit of open loyalty, right? I think HeyMax is very well positioned to, to bring that to market. We've certainly done that in Singapore. I'm expected to bring a lot of noise in Hong Kong with HeyMax launching very, very shortly, but we think that the potential here is actually much greater than just these two markets. You know, it's across Asia and also rest of the world.

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Jonathan Nguyen (33:14)
We're gonna finish with a lightning round. Are you ready? What book are you reading right now?

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David B. Wang (33:18)
Unfortunately, I haven't actually had the time to pick up a book in the last couple of months. That's the honest answer. I was actually reading a book written by one of the government bodies about the financial crisis back in 2008. But that's been a long time since I've... Yeah, I have struggled to pick that up actually, to be very honest, because it's just been so busy. I should.

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Jonathan Nguyen (33:42)
Favourite podcast, aside from ours, of course.

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David B. Wang (33:48)
That you can't expect a different answer here is the Unsensible Podcast.

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Jonathan Nguyen (33:53)
What else are you listening to?

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David B. Wang (33:55)
Okay, so this is probably a little bit too personal, but I do like my cold crime pocket. I do enjoy that. My girlfriend does as well. So we sometimes enjoy listening on some of those, but I also do enjoy the diaries of the CEO. think that's always very eye opening to hear different perspectives from different business leaders. So that's another one that I think is worthwhile too.

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Jonathan Nguyen (34:02)
So ... The cold crime was more interesting. What artist do you have on high rotation right now? Gotta be careful of the CEO, brother.

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David B. Wang (34:24)
I'm very loyal to my girlfriend. That's number one. But I also took her to our first Coldplay concert when they were in Hong Kong. It was actually very memorable because it was the first time I've seen Coldplay. I've heard a lot of good things about them. Separately, was also the first time that Hong Kong's brand new stadium, Tak Stadium, was actually open for concerts and Coldplay was the first global headline band to perform there. That was something that was very near and dear to me as someone who grew up in Hong Kong to be able to see that kind of energy come back to Hong Kong post-COVID was very good to see. So yeah, all in all, there was a lot of good memories. And just on a personal note, a lot of the Coldplay songs got me through some of those dark times as a founder. So there was an added element to sort of hear that live and be in that moment that made a lot of those moments feel much more bearable now.

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Jonathan Nguyen (35:13)
That's a great note to end the podcast on. David, thank you so much for joining us.

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David B. Wang (35:17)
Thank you for having me john that really appreciate it

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Jonathan Nguyen (35:19)
We're going to get you back on the show in a year from now and we'll see how you've done with growing the Hong Kong business.

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David B. Wang (35:27)
Yep i'm sure it'll be doing very well hopefully i'll be able to grow out of beard as our CEO has. Still struggle with that. Thank you so much for having me appreciate it

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Jonathan Nguyen (35:36)
Alright, dude, that's awesome.