Nurdianah Md Nur Thu, Jun 23, 2022
Singapore-based digital wealth advisor Endowus is using Twilio to scale its services to cope with the rapid growth in client numbers.
Endowus provides personalised financial advice and solutions at low fees across private wealth and public pension (CPF & SRS) savings. Clients can conveniently make and manage their investments through the firm’s online portal or mobile app without being charged sales or transaction fees.
As the company grew, Endowus needed to expand its communication services and provide more personalised customer engagement while ensuring its SMS messages were delivered to the right customers. It required a reliable and cost-effective method to ensure its platform was communicating with an authorised account user whenever new transactions or decisions were made.
This also applied to its email programme. With thousands of emails moving between clients and the accounts team, they often struggled to deliver personalised messages efficiently at scale.
“Adding a personal touch to a transactional email seemed like a behemoth task as we had to make changes to the HTML code manually. It was time-consuming for the entire company as we had to involve our software engineers and Quality Assurance (QA) team in the process as well,” says Junxu (Jx) Lye, Endowus’s chief product officer.
Moreover, Endowus’s fast growth made it challenging to address client questions and issues quickly. Support agents needed to access client records in seconds to deliver personalised engagement.
To overcome those challenges, Endowus uses Twilio Verify’s flexible and secure user verification application programming interface (API) to simplify user authentication with auto-generated, one-time password messages.
The company also leverages Twilio SendGrid to gain better control over its email programme. “Anyone with an idea can now go onto the SendGrid platform, suggest a change, and get it out within minutes [if approved]. We do not have to go through the entire software development lifecycle process and involve our engineering and QA teams. The system allowed for easy personalisation,” says Lye.
He continues: “[Since it] doesn’t require specialised, our team can go in and make a change, visualise it, test it and then send it out – which increases our productivity”.
With these capabilities, Endowus can now also ensure its text messages are more contextualised and fit the specific scenarios a client needs to establish their journey with the company.
The company was also able to effectively deal with a surge in customer inquiries during the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“During those first, intense months of the pandemic, the financial markets were in disarray, and people were scared of the market volatility. We had many more inquiries over a short period of time as clients sought information and investment advice. Twilio’s easy scalability allowed us to respond swiftly without compromising on customer experience,” says Lye.