Cross-border collections for small wholesalers selling into ASEAN.
The founders had a licensed payments partner and a waiting list of merchants: provision shops, seafood wholesalers and F&B suppliers who sell into Johor, Batam and Manila. What they didn’t have was a product. Their merchants were chasing payments over WhatsApp, waiting a week for telegraphic transfers and losing 3–4% on FX.
The brief was a merchant dashboard and mobile app that an uncle running a provision shop could use without training, on top of a payments API that changed weekly during the build.
Our approach
- Five days of shop visitsWe sat with eight merchants in Pasir Panjang and Geylang to watch how they actually invoice. Most of them never open a laptop, so we designed the mobile app first.
- One action per screenRequesting a payment is a single screen: amount in the customer’s currency, a live SGD estimate, and a share button that drops the link straight into WhatsApp.
- Corridor-aware statusEach corridor settles differently (DuitNow, QRIS, InstaPay, NAPAS). We turned their quirks into four plain statuses merchants could trust.
- Shipped in slicesMalaysia went live in week 7 with 40 pilot merchants. Indonesia and the Philippines followed within three weeks, and Vietnam came last, in week 13.
AI in the test suite
We used AI tooling to generate test suites against the partner’s sandbox, covering more than 40 currency and rounding edge cases, and to keep the API client in sync as the spec changed. Every generated test was reviewed, and several caught real bugs in the partner’s staging environment.
- About 1,900 generated test cases, each reviewed before merge
- API client regenerated from the spec in minutes rather than days
- The time saved went into reconciliation logic
What we’d do differently
Vietnam took twice as long as planned. We assumed NAPAS would behave like the other corridors and only tested it properly in week 10, when two settlement edge cases pushed its launch from week 11 to week 13. We now prototype every rail against the sandbox in discovery.
“They understood our merchants better than we did after the first week. The app feels like it was designed by someone who has stood behind a provision shop counter.”
Services on this project: Product strategy, UI/UX design, SaaS, Mobile app.