“They had us at the hypothesis”

My introduction to Trusting Social happened back in 2015 through one of our existing FinTech co- investors from London. He just had one thing to say – “Dirk, there is a guy with an interesting hypothesis on using telcos data to build people’s credit score; you need to speak to him.” Back then Vietnam and much of South East Asia consisted of a huge unbanked population with a digital footprint but very little credit history. FinTech is a primary focus for us at BEENEXT and this was an opportunity we had to seize.

Few email exchanges, couple of detailed conversations and one plane ride later, I met Nguyen Nguyen, Founder & CEO, of Trusting Social in Hanoi. The first thing that struck me about Nguyen was his in-depth domain knowledge and academic expertise. We, at BEENEXT, always put the founder first and are strongly influenced by their vision and the ability to deliver on it. Therefore, when Nguyen mentioned about them bagging a deal with Vietnam’s biggest telcos company based on a beta product, I loved it.

From late-night discussions on FinTech, data and AI to debates over which beer is the best, I can confidently say that our relationship with Trusting Social is beyond a traditional founder-investor one.

Five years into our partnership and we have seen Trusting Social rapidly grow their revenue from zero to tenths of millions. Through their focused efforts, now over half a billion users can be scored in a GDRB compliant fashion on a real time basis. This partnership marked our maiden entry into Vietnam and our journey with them has been extremely rewarding. Our biggest learning from this partnership was the important realisation of backing independent founders with a creative vision to make a difference.

Trusting Social are well on their way to reach over 1 billion people.