“Wouldn’t you want to know at any given moment how much you have spent on your credit card and when it starts reaching its financial limit, or even to get a reminder when you have to reimburse your card?”

These were some of the questions that Supichaya Surapunthu, a young female entrepreneur from Thailand, asked when developing her business four years ago.

With a real passion for fintech, Supichaya discovered a niche in the market when she saw so many people struggling with the management of their credit cards.

As society becomes more and more cashless, there is a sharp increase in the use of plastic payment cards. And this requires a mindset change in the way people manage their budget and consumption patterns.

“Access to payment solutions, such as credit cards, are more developed than their tracking systems,” says Supichaya and explains: “My team and I, therefore, came up with the vision that people should manage their money in the same easy way as they can use it”.

And this is where Piggipo entered the market, as Thailand’s first fintech start-up.

Supichaya and her team designed a playful mobile application that allows you to have real-time data access to your credit cards.

With a wish to further learn from a major fintech player, such as Ant Financial, she successfully applied for the eFounders Fellowship Programme in November 2018.

This allowed her to visit Alibaba’s headquarters for ten days and learn about their e-commerce ecosystem and China’s development in this domain over the last twenty years.

Though she had already been conscious of the growing importance of data management prior to going to China, she was dazzled to see how exponential this growth could be when properly used.

She also discovered another important thing that would help her further develop her business, namely, to have a strong business culture, which has now been adopted by the whole team.

So, on her return to Thailand, Supichaya and her team sat down and finetuned the vision, mission, and values of the business to ensure the customer comes first.

They also introduced a new element in their service offering, which was the education of customers, to build trust in using data-related applications. For this, she is aware of the challenges that any start-up faces, as well as the significance of partnering, another takeaway from her visit to Hangzhou.

Through Piggipo, she has been able to find a way to help the Thai population become acquainted with the management of their credit card expenditures. Looking at the future, she intends to further expand her services in areas of credit scoring and lending to consumers, areas where access to optimized use of data are key.

eFounders Fellowship Programme

UNCTAD’s smart partnership with the Alibaba Business School aims to bridge the digital divide in Africa and Asia and empower young e-founders in developing countries to become champions for the new economy.

The partnership is the brainchild of UNCTAD Secretary-General Dr. Mukhisa Kituyi and Jack Ma, founder and executive chairman of Alibaba Group, who served as a special advisor to UNCTAD on young entrepreneurs and small business.