Financial literacy is a challenge everywhere, but it’s particularly acute in Latin America, where less than half of people aged 14 and older have a bank account. Gabriel Roizner, a technology entrepreneur who often received questions from friends and family about how to manage their finances, recognized this as a problem. He wanted to find a way to improve financial education in the region - he says the more money literate people are, the better off they’ll be later in life - and settled on helping kids improve their spending and savings habits.
Connectly is honored to have been named one of the 18 most promising companies as part of the 4th edition of the ScaleUp Program, intended to accelerate support for the most promising tech entrepreneurs globally as released by Endeavor Greece, the Greek arm of international innovation ecosystem-driving Endeavor.
The WhatsApp Business Platform is an incredibly effective tool for building engaging, authentic marketing campaigns on the WhatsApp API - something only a WhatsApp Business Solutions Provider like Connectly can provide access to - and the better you structure your campaigns, the better they will perform. In fact, the businesses we work with see 10x higher click through rates than SMS campaigns, and 30% higher click through rates than traditional WhatsApp messages. But how do you know your campaign is set up to achieve these metrics?
In Latin America, an estimated 50 million microenterprises—businesses with 10 employees or fewer—represent about a third of the region’s total gross domestic product (GDP).The vast majority of these small businesses are nondigital, with 90% still tracking their sales and expenses the old-fashioned way: in ink. For Treinta, a biz-tech startup based in Bogotá, Colombia, this presents an opportunity.“Our mission is to include and educate [microenterprises] on how digitizing their accounts, and leaving the pen and paper on the side, will help them grow their businesses and understand and make use of their data,” says Marcela Porcell, growth strategist at Treinta. “It's a really big market that’s never been … given these tools.”
If Covid-19 leaves one lasting legacy for the business world, it's that online shopping reigns supreme. Juniper Research reported $4.9 trillion in global e-commerce for 2021, with that figure expected to rise to $7.5 trillion by 2026. How people shop and interact with businesses though, will continue to evolve. It's no longer good enough to put a few product photos on a website and have the customer pick the item up in store, which is what many small and midsize businesses did in the early days of the pandemic. Consumers want their favorite brands to know who they are, provide personalized offers and incentives, and be easily accessible on the same channels they use to communicate with friends and family.
Healthcare is an intensely personal business. For innovators to succeed, they must seek out efficiencies without compromising the human touch.ISA Lab, founded in São Paulo, Brazil during the pandemic, is one such innovator. Describing itself as a “100% digital lab,” ISA provides on-demand, home-based healthcare services, such as Covid-19 tests and vaccinations. This saves time and trouble for patients, while also reducing the strain on Brazil’s hospitals and other inpatient facilities.
We talked with Stefanos Loukakos, cofounder and CEO of Connectly, and Yandong Liu, Connectly’s other cofounder and its CTO. They explained that messaging has four core competitive advantages over other communication channels.
Did you know we recently became a designated WhatsApp Business Solutions Provider? This means it’s easier for us to help businesses communicate with their customers on WhatsApp, particularly when it comes to customer support and the delivery of time-sensitive, personalized notifications.
As a WhatsApp BSP, Connectly is able to expand its product offering to include a suite of WhatsApp-specific tools that provide SMBs with direct, expedited access to the WhatsApp Business API and remove the friction from message-driven sales. Businesses will also be able to activate automated alerts and notifications via WhatsApp, keeping customers updated on order status, appointment reminders and more while achieving 100% delivery rate for a fraction of traditional messaging costs.
Ever wonder how we got started? Our CEO and co-founder, Stefanos Loukakos, spent 5 years at Facebook leading the Messenger business, and he saw a huge opportunity to create a set of products to help businesses navigate the plethora of messages they were receiving daily across so many different platforms. Meanwhile, our CTO and co-founder, Yandong Liu - who was most recently CTO at popular fitness app Strava - had a similar vision.
On October 7th, Forbes hosted their annual Small Business Summit to equip America’s 30M+ SMBs with the guidance and tools needed to persevere during one of the most unpredictable times in recent history.
CommerceNext IRL returned in a hybrid model on September 28th and 29th, live-streaming in-person content from New York City to virtual viewers around the world. Over 600 attendees had the opportunity to hear from retail executives - including Coach, Wayfair, JustFab, Everlane, E.L.F. Beauty, Patagonia and Clorox - about the future of customer engagement and commerce.
Last week, the US Small Business Association (SBA) hosted the annual National Small Business Week (NSBW), an event that has taken place every year since 1963 in an effort to recognize the contributions of America’s entrepreneurs and small business owners.
Messaging is an intimate medium for sharing private views and sentiments. It is a cocktail-party whisper in digital form, as one user of WhatsApp, a service owned by Facebook, put it. Now some of the world’s biggest brands are venturing into this personal realm.
Among the many disruptions caused by the global pandemic that largely defined the year 2020 was the increased importance of excelling at delivering great experiences to customers — not just sometimes, but all the time and in real time.
Over the last few years, we have seen a significant shift to using messaging to get information and engage with businesses across the world. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic has only further truly highlighted the urgency for digitization as business messaging platforms and apps have become a lifeline for people and businesses to connect when there is no other alternative.
