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Building borderless businesses is today's new normal. In our current landscape and the rate of how fast things are changing, it’s essential for modern businesses to tap into digital solutions to stay relevant and keep up with today’s trends.
From cashless payments, seamless overseas transfers, and the rise of payment service providers, conducting business operations from one country to another has never been easier.
Established in 2018, Thuocsi, also known as BuyMed, is a pharmaceutical distribution company based in Vietnam. They work mainly in the B2B space, acting as the middleman between local pharmaceutical companies and medicinal drug manufacturers.
“We noticed that in countries like Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines, local pharmacies are unable to reach out to large manufacturing companies'', Ted, Head of Finance at Thuocsi, explains.
In order to combat this barrier, Thuocsi took it upon themselves to connect smaller pharmacies with manufacturers for their pharmaceutical supplies.
Today, the startup has 700 verified suppliers, manufacturers, and distributors on their platform, and serves over 7,000 healthcare providers.
Why Thuocsi chose Aspire
The partnership between BuyMed and Aspire, is quite unique in the country, the first payment service provider (Fintech startup) to corporate with another MedTech startup to serve themselves and their hundreds of merchants in Vietnam.
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1. Receiving funds in a digital business account from anywhere in the world
Although Thuocsi conducts its operations in Vietnam, their holding company is based in Singapore due to its strategic location and ease of business. Despite this, Ted and his team still faced certain issues when receiving funds from overseas.
“With our business operating in Vietnam, we didn’t want to set up an entire finance team in Singapore from scratch just for the sake of receiving funds”.
By simply setting up their holding company in Singapore and opening a business account with Aspire, the Thuocsi finance team is able to manage their finances in one place all the way from Vietnam. Aspire prides itself for making business finance easy for startup owners and entrepreneurs, and Thuocsi is certainly not a stranger to this. Within the same day, they were able to set up their business account with us in no time—all it took was 5 minutes. Â
2. Easy access to working capital
Most startups aspire to initially succeed within their borders, but ultimately expand beyond them. Doing this requires hard work, but also a massive amount of working capital. The problem is, this is often off-limits for startups.
“The concept of financial loans for startups here in Vietnam is still very new and banks don’t just provide loans to very new companies without any profit yet”.
Ted explains that getting access to loans for startups is still relatively difficult in countries like Vietnam as startup culture is not as prevalent as it is here in Singapore. However, Ted and his team have benefited greatly from Aspire’s Credit Line in Singapore in such a short period of time.
Through Aspire’s low-interest and flexible line of credit, startups just like Thuocsi are able to receive additional funds to invest in marketing efforts to boost sales, support their current operations, and fund future expansions into other countries, making their service more readily available to communities outside of their own. Moving forward, Thuocsi hopes to expand their services across countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Myanmar, and the Philippines, and hopefully to the rest of Southeast Asia.
3. Low & transparent FX fees for cross border payments
Another one of Thuocsi’s biggest challenges is finding a reliable partner with the lowest FX rates. As most traditional banks have high foreign exchange rates, this becomes a serious financial strain for many startups as funds  could be better utilised to invest into more key areas such as operational and marketing costs.
“When we had to transfer money from Singapore to Vietnam, it was crazy expensive. Now, transferring money with TransferWise within the Aspire platform is still the most competitive and is much easier to use compared to others”.
Our partnership with TransferWise allows business owners to make fast, inexpensive and convenient international money transfers in the same way it has enabled Thuocsi to disburse money from Singapore to other local banks in Vietnam without  hassle. Instead of setting up a whole finance team in Singapore just for the sake of transferring funds, the task of making cross-border transfers has been made easier for them.
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Get the Support You Need For Your Business With Aspire
From business account matters, credit lines for start-up needs, all the way to FX support, Aspire is here to support you at every stage of your business growth. We support 7,000 customers everyday and are committed to doing the same for you and your business. In the case of Thuocsi, there is no doubt that the Aspire FX solution powered by Transferwise was a major factor in their success today.
To find out how to make the most out of the lowest FX rates in the market for your business, check out our pricing page.
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