Executive Interview
Executive Interviews
An Interview with
Thomas Lee
AsiaTop Loyalty Limited
COO & Co-founder
AsiaTop FinTech startups and the only open loop loyalty platform in Greater Bay Area focusing on loyalty points exchange, e-voucher, digital marketing and O2O by using latest technologies such as blockchain, AI and AR. AsiaTop Loyalty leverages technologies to connect and integrate multiple loyalty programs, allowing fragmented reward points to be converted into a universal unit - AT Points, allowing users to redeem coupons or exchange points from a wide variety of merchants in real-time on a single platform.
Publish Date:
30 December 2020
Hong Kong
Location:
Tell us about your background, and how you came to found your company?
Thomas has been working in IT&T industry for more than 23 years and throughout his career, Thomas has advised and assist enterprises in different industries on M&A initiatives, implementing latest technologies and refining business processes. Thomas also specialize on business transformation, system integration, cyber/technology risk consulting and solutions and ITO/BPO.
Thomas holds an Executive Master's Degree in Business Administration from Chinese University of Hong Kong and a Master's Degree in Information Security from University of London.
Thomas met the other 2 co-founders of AsiaTop Loyalty Andy and KS via EMBA course in CUHK. They shared the same view on the pain-points of merchants & consumers in the loyalty industry and the opportunities towards the Greater Bay Area in China. With different expertise and experience in varies sectors, they decided to found AsiaTop to disrupt the loyalty industry by using latest technologies.
What is most important to you and your organization – mission, vision, or core values? Why?
The most important element to Asiatop is core values. Company core values can help us to shape our culture, strategies and differentiate ourself from our competitors and attract talents. We have a vision to disrupt the loyalty industry but without our core values, all visions will be just a dream.
Talents is everything to me because I believe good staff will not only accelerate company’s growth but also help to promote our vision to our business partners and users, which will create the best reward to AsiaTop and our shareholders.
Can you explain briefly how your service(s)/product(s) works?
AsiaTop's open-loop platform focus in Greater Bay Area aims to provide Merchants an ecosystem and consumers with the ability for instant redemption, manage multiple loyalty programs and exchange points freely on a single platform. Our unique B2B2C platform is among the first to focus on merchant side and provides ease to use, operate and maintain environment for business without technology skillset.
AsiaTop’s online loyalty points platform allows consumers to make use of their idle bonus points and redeem or exchange their reward points and acquire coupons directly. Consumers and merchants will only need one App/Wechat to manage all loyalty programs within the Greater Bay Area.
How has the industry been changing in recent years?
The loyalty industry has been changing rapidly in the past few years. From a large enterprise to a small coffee shop around the corner, every business would like to make use of loyalty program to retain existing customers and attract the new ones. Loyalty programs are flooded, and the utilization of loyalty points is very low.
Businesses find it very hard to justify the existence of the loyalty program and the liability they are bearing is increasing. For consumers, it is getting harder and harder to get their attentions and they are also demand for more services and benefits.
However, due to the pandemic, the situation has been changed and the consumers started to look into their idle loyalty points and look for ways to make it useful and save money. Loyalty program become a hot topic again in a lot of countries and industries.
What makes you different from what’s currently available in the market?
In the loyalty industry, a traditional loyalty program is a marketing strategy for a business to retain customers and attract new customers by offering rewards, discounts or other special incentives and to build brand loyalty. However, this close loop program will only dictate the consumers how and when they make use of the loyalty points.
In AsiaTop Loyalty, we are the only open loop platform in Greater Bay Area which welcome all loyalty programs to join and together we create an eco-system allowing fragmented reward points to be converted into a universal unit - AT Points, allowing users to redeem coupons or exchange points from a wide variety of merchants in real-time on a single platform.
What does the future hold for your company?
As a young fin-tech startup with an open loop loyalty platform within Greater Bay Area (GBA), we have achieved quite a lot in the past few years: launched our platform version 2.0, completed series A fund raising, introduced new services to merchants, etc. However, there is always room to improve and push ourselves to the next level. With the 70 millions populations in GBA, we are still chasing after more loyalty programs, merchants and users to join our platform. If resources allow, we will develop our business beyond GBA to the whole mainland China & Asia and continue to disrupt the loyalty industry by using latest technologies.