Portrait of Trusting Social – a rare partner on the podium at Masan’s General Meeting of Shareholders: Holding AI technology to score credit of 1 billion people, increasing the success rate of new openings for WinMart from 60% to 90%
On the morning of April 28, Masan held the 2022 Annual General Meeting of Shareholders. One of the notable highlights in this monumental event was the announcement of a strategic partnership with Trusting Social.
Accordingly, Masan Group Joint Stock Company (HOSE: MSN, “Masan”) announced the completion of an investment agreement of 65 million USD to buy 25% of the shares of Trusting Social Joint Stock Company, a subsidiary in Vietnam of the company. Trust IQ Pte. Ltd. (“Trusting Social”) is headquartered in Singapore.
Masan said that the cooperation agreement with Trusting Social will contribute to accelerating Masan’s transformation into a consumer ecosystem – integrated technology from offline to online (“O2”). Thereby providing AI and fintech application solutions in retail and consumption, delivering superior customer experience.
This is also a rare enterprise that cooperates with Masan to have its own presentation at the AGM of this Group. It can be seen partly the importance of Trusting Social in Masan’s development roadmap as well as the “blockbuster” scale of this cooperation.
Who is Trusting Social?
Dr. Nguyen An Nguyen – Founder of Trusting Social
Trusting Social was founded by data scientist, Dr. Nguyen An Nguyen. Dr. Nguyen An Nguyen studied in the US and worked for a time in New York City. In 2013, he founded Trusting Social – a startup in the Fintech field, with the goal of giving credit scores to 1 billion people, helping them get loans.
TrustingSocial is a prominent company that is taking advantage of big data and machine learning to help improve financial access for people with no credit history, or simply use technology. to help the poor get loans. After funding rounds totaling more than $25 million from investors such as Kima Ventures, Sequoia Capital, 500 Startups and BeeNext, Nguyen said the company has cooperated with carriers with a total subscriber base of about 500 million. in Vietnam, India, and Indonesia markets.
By 2019, his company Trusting Social achieved its goal of becoming the first application in the world to score credit for 1 billion people.
Masan’s new ambition extension arm
Standing in front of Masan’s management and shareholders, Mr. Nguyen An Nguyen – Founder and General Director of Trusting Social gave a presentation of more than 20 minutes, to share about the company’s participation in the transformation process. , developing Masan’s machine learning and artificial intelligence technology in the near future.
According to Mr. Nguyen An Nguyen, there are currently 2 credit scoring companies in the world for 1 billion people: one is a 50-year-old UK company, the other is Trusting Social. However, Trusting Social took just over 7 years, with 100 employees, scoring credit for 1 billion people using artificial intelligence (AI) technology and big data.
“To Masan, we bring with us our understanding of Vietnamese consumers, or rather the 80 million Vietnamese who have been assessed by us for credit risk. We also offer the ability to create AI-based products.
The philosophy of AI-driven product design is that we start from a disruptive vision to create groundbreaking products. We have done this for the budget segment in Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Philippines markets. We hope to expand our knowledge in retail through cooperation with Masan. On the contrary, we also see Masan as the leading brand that has served 98% of Vietnamese families and is the leading offline and later online distribution system in Vietnam. The combination of new technology with consumer confidence and a large distribution network leads to a new product, which we call O2.” Dr. Nguyen An Nguyen shared.
The O2 platform has 2 pillars, including Retail AI and Consumer AI.
Mr. Nguyen An Nguyen presented a small example in the Retail AI pillar that Trusting Retail has “silently worked with Masan for the past year”, before the cooperation was announced.
CEO Trusting Social displays a map of the purchasing power of Binh Thanh district (HCMC). To create such maps, Trusting Social divides Vietnam into 33 million small squares with an area of 100mx100m, calculating the income and purchasing power of each plot. Using such graphs, Masan and Trusting Social are able to tailor items to the demographics of each very small region.
“We have covered the whole of Vietnam with basins of purchasing power like this, with a radius of 500m. From the second half of this year, Trusting Social and Masan will put this model into operation. We are confident that we can raise the success rate of new store opening from 60% to 90% and higher. This means we can accelerate our strategy of covering 10,000 stores across Vietnam. Second, we can choose the locations that will give the highest rate of return. At each point we calculated a retail equation to tell us how much rent it would take, how much money would be gained from sales, how much profit would be made.”
Mr. Nguyen An Nguyen could not share the specific formula for the “retail equation”, but affirmed that this will be a powerful weapon in Masan’s upcoming development journey.
The founder of Trusting Socail said that the first platform that the company will build with Masan is a hyper-personalized platform, Know exactly what customers are going to buy before they even think about it. This happened in the US, when the seller sent the goods to the consumer. If the customer does not want to buy, they have the right to return. However, due to the good predictability, the return rate is very low.
The second platform is customer loyalty. The third platform that Masan and Trusting Social will launch is a financial access platform for consumers by issuing credit cards to everyone (common customers) EVO without proof of income.
Trusting Social and Masan also set a goal by 2022 to open 1 million new 3in1 cards: both a credit card, a loyalty card, and a card that opens up a future for Masan ecosystem members.
Also in the AGM 2022, Masan also introduced the concept of “Consumer of Things”. Thereby, Masan also redefines its scope of activities, not stopping at a company that only sells soy sauce and fish sauce, no longer ordinary physical products but will serve all consumer needs. of consumers from birth to adulthood, adulthood and old age (lifetime consumption).
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