How KeaBabies leveraged Aspire’s competitive FX and cashback to save over $62,000 per year

The Company: Amazon top-seller and multi-award-winning baby and maternity brand 

KeaBabies is one of the top-selling baby and maternity brands in the global online marketplace, featuring prominently on Amazon, Target, Walmart, Macy’s, Faire, and other platforms in North America and Europe. Founded in 2017 by first-time entrepreneurs and parents Ivan Ong and Jane Neo, KeaBabies has helped simplify the lives of over 6.5 million happy parents in 13 countries. As a fully bootstrapped company, KeaBabies has achieved remarkable growth, recording nearly US$60 million in annual revenue in 2023. Their internationally certified baby and maternity products continue to garner recognition for quality excellence, winning Mom’s Choice Awards, National Parenting Product Awards (NAPPA), and others.

The Challenges: Finance was overstretched with manual expense management

As a leading e-commerce retailer, KeaBabies needs fast and seamless accounts payables operations to pay vendors, suppliers, and employees on time. It was a challenge to coordinate payroll for international employees across the region with their current service provider, which required tradeoffs in either speed or cost. With KeaBabies launching successive marketing campaigns throughout the year, the finance team also sought a more secure and elegant solution that could track, approve, and ensure that company spend was aligned with their budgets.

#1 Frustratingly manual and costly payroll 

Thanks to their teams in the Philippines, KeaBabies continues to consistently deliver outstanding customer service that complements their range of award-winning products. Before Aspire, KeaBabies relied on PayPal to pay their employees in USD. While this helped KeaBabies avoid transaction fees, the finance team had to pay each employee individually. This was too time-consuming and also forced employees to incur FX and Paypal transaction fees when converting their payouts to local currency.‍

# 2 Tedious expense management requires finance to oversee all company spend

Unlike other startups, KeaBabies did not fundraise, prioritising organic growth. This made expense management and oversight particularly essential to achieving their financial goals. There was a lack of real-time visibility as payments would only appear on their accounts a few days after transactions. As a result, the finance team was constantly stretched from tracking expenses like marketing, advertising, subscriptions, and others across different teams and departments. KeaBabies wanted an easier way to ensure they could execute their marketing campaigns while staying within the allocated advertising budget.

#3 Uncompetitive FX rates and lack of incentives

With the office operations centered in Singapore, KeaBabies aims to take advantage of any incentives, such as favorable foreign currency exchange rates or reduced fees for converting foreign currencies, to cover operational costs in SGD. Unfortunately, many of their service providers did not offer appealing incentives or competitive rates. Rather than using different vendors for their financial operations, KeaBabies sought to transition to a consolidated platform that could provide benefits like economies of scale and cost savings.

The Solution: Aspire Corporate Cards for fast payments and seamless expense tracking

Eager to find a more comprehensive financial platform for their hypergrowth business, KeaBabies switched to Aspire. With batch payments and instant issue Aspire Corporate cards, KeaBabies could monitor all levels of company spending, and streamline their financial operations in the process. Furthermore, KeaBabies could manage payables, invoices, and claims on a single platform through Aspire, resolving financial bottlenecks while earning rebates on their monthly spend.

#1 Scheduled mass payouts in one click

Using Aspire, KeaBabies’ finance team can easily batch pay their employees in the Philippines, automatically converting their salary from USD to Pesos. By leveraging Aspire’s competitive FX rate offerings which are better than local banks, KeaBabies could also save costs while helping employees to avoid hefty exchange and transaction fees.

#2 Instant issue Aspire virtual corporate cards for easy payment and expense tracking

KeaBabies issued Aspire’s virtual corporate cards to employees and departments. Now, instead of finance having to authorise bank transfers for monthly digital subscriptions, employees could pay instantly and have their monthly expenditures immediately visible on the platform. With Aspire, KeaBabies could set budget limits beforehand and charge their advertising campaign costs to the Aspire corporate card, without having to worry about overruns.

#3 Enjoy upsized rebates on advertising spend and dedicated customer support

While some service providers like AMEX offered rebates, a lower credit limit reduced the amount of potential savings. Due to their high volume of marketing and advertising expenditure, KeaBabies could take full advantage of Aspire’s cashback on selected digital spending and earn significantly more rebates. With a dedicated account manager and excellent customer support, Aspire is also helping KeaBabies to explore multi-currency options like CAD, EUR, AUD, and GBP, and scale their payment capabilities with their expansion in North America and Europe.