Caecilia Chu Outlines What’s Next for YouTrip

What does it take to become Tech Leader of the Year?

CAECILIA CHU

Member, SCS Tech Leader of the Year, Tech Leader Awards 2022 CEO and Co-founder, YouTrip Earliest Tech Experience: Tech investments at Citi Currently Reading: Re-reading Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore App You Can’t Live Without: YouTrip Pet Topic of the Moment: Post-pandemic travel adventures Favourite Way to Relax: Ski trip to Niseko

The pandemic literally brought the travel industry to a standstill. It is natural to assume that a FinTech business which launched Singapore’s first multicurrency travel wallet would be hard hit. However, newly crowned Tech Leader of the Year 2022 Caecilia Chu, CEO and co-founder of YouTrip, proved otherwise. The IT Society speaks to Caecilia Chu to find out how she not only saw YouTrip through the pandemic, she also grew YouTrip to become the Best Multi-Currency Mobile Wallet Provider1, ASEAN’s Best Startup of the Year and Best Fintech Startup2 .

Q: Question, CC: Caecilia Chu

Q: Congratulations on winning Tech Leader of the Year. What’s Caecilia like as a leader?

CC: I’m an incredibly direct person. I believe in radical honesty, so that it’s always the best ideas that win in the organisation, rather than the person with the highest title. I also have incredibly high standards for myself and everyone on the team, and I don’t hide it. If I see something that is not up to par, I will be honest about it. In a startup environment where one is looking to do good and impactful work, brutal honesty is important for progress and should be expected.

Q: Who inspires and shapes your leadership style today?

CC: It is hard to pinpoint one particular person because at every turn of my journey, I meet different people and they offer different inspiration and advice. However, I will say that my parents are my lifelong role models.

I came from a humble background. Growing up, money wasn’t always abundant. Tough as it was, I learnt valuable lessons that continue to serve me well today. Firstly, life can be very simple – I don’t need that much money. The next is the value of being hardworking and resilient. My parents didn’t have much education or training but they worked hard to provide for me. They taught me that if I work hard, I can succeed. With their support, I went to some of the best business schools on scholarships and worked in companies with great training programmes. I am fortunate to have much more than my parents, but I always remind myself: Who am I if I don’t do anything with what I have?

Q: What made you take the plunge to become an entrepreneur?

CC: Becoming an entrepreneur is a deeply personal choice. For me, I believe my entrepreneurial spirit was sparked by my father. He was a chartered accountant who – despite lack of education and capital – persevered and started his own business. He showed me that I too could achieve something with the resources I have been given. So I decided to take control of my own destiny and started my own company.

Q: How was it like transitioning from working in a large organisation to becoming a cofounder?

CC: When I worked at Citi or McKinsey, it was easy to have meetings arranged and information readily available. But when I first co-founded YouTrip, nobody knew us. It was like I became nobody overnight. That was a sobering moment, but it also drove home the realisation that it all came down to the value that I bring to the table – to every conversation and every person I meet – and the meaning in what we do as a business.

Q: Was it challenging to steer YouTrip through the pandemic?

CC: It was definitely challenging, to say the least. We launched in late 2018, grew quickly and expanded to Thailand in November 2019. Then in January 2020 COVID hit. The world came to a complete stop – meaning zero travel – and we had a major loss in business overnight.

Rather than sit around and hope for the market to recover, we chose to focus on what we can control – the tactical steps we can take and how to keep going. The first thing we did was to look at what our customers were doing. With the lockdown and working from home, people were experiencing the world differently. Instead of physical experiences, they were looking for rich digital experiences – shopping, gaming and learning online. Hence, to capture that opportunity, we focused on users’ online spending with our strengths of offering the best exchange rates and no fees. Eventually, we managed to grow our business volumes to pre-pandemic levels.

Looking back, the pandemic has been a blessing in disguise. It brought out our determination to be an all-weather company. From our initial focus on consumer payments, we’ve diversified into areas like corporate payments and insurance, and today we no longer rely on just travel to be successful.

Q: What’s next for you and YouTrip?

CC: We are at an inflection point this year – coming out of the pandemic is an extremely exciting time for us. We recently launched YouBiz3, and the early market feedback and adoption have been great. New features such as travel insurance are also in the pipeline, and these are all products that we have been building and planning for during the pandemic. Coupled with the fact that travel is picking up, this year will be a flagship one for us.

As for myself, I live and breathe the business. But I think if we can bring the company to a good place, I might give myself a holiday. So if you see me taking a trip to Niseko, that means we are hitting some really good milestones.

“I’ve always believed in one thing – to be a good leader of an ambitious startup, I have to go through a few near-death experiences. I just didn’t expect it to happen so early – we were only on the market for one year when the pandemic hit. Nonetheless, although the crisis came sooner than I hoped for, we didn’t just rise above it, but emerged stronger.”

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