How KPI Media Guarantees Conversions For Paid Media Campaigns, Supported by Aspire’s Expense Solution

The Company: Performance Marketing Agency That Promises To Over-deliver Results 

KPI Media is a performance marketing agency which turned heads due to their unwavering commitment to a single goal: over-deliver on KPIs. Founded amid the height of the pandemic back in 2020, the agency has worked with over 50 venture-backed startups to help them achieve their business goals with paid advertising and data analytics.

To date, they are the only performance agency in APAC to guarantee conversions for their clients paid media campaigns.

The Challenges: What pain points were KPI Media looking to solve? 

#1 Traditional corporate card was not SME-friendly

Today, the fully-remote KPI Media team has over 20 employees based in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, India and the Philippines. To ensure their employees feel a strong sense of belonging, KPI Media prides itself on providing solutions that make remote work comfortable. This means empowering employees to make day-to-day business expenses eg. Facebook, Google, LinkedIn ad spends as well as taxi rides with Grab, food and more.

This was almost impossible with a conventional, traditional bank. Transaction fees, long processing time and lack of real-time spend tracking were just some of the hiccups faced. At the same time, it was challenging to sign up for multiple cards due to the tedious paperwork and additional fees that came with it.

#2 Incurred charges for multi-currency accounts 

Over the span of 2 years, Singapore-headquartered KPI Media established operations in Indonesia and the Philippines. This came with its fair share of challenges. The biggest challenge being that they needed to open an IDR account to facilitate transfers in that currency. However, they were hampered by the rigid nature of their corporate account that required them to pay extra charges to open an IDR account.

It was clear that they needed a more cutting edge finance solutions that would support and scale with them, no matter where they set up camp next. After all, the sky’s the limit for the KPI Media team.

#3 Disconnected payment apps

The strong demand for KPI Media’s results-driven marketing expertise also meant that they needed more regional talent to join their team. This came with more unforeseen complications for the finance team. Team members based in Indonesia would need to be paid in IDR. In the past, when it came to making timely transfers to their respective overseas bank accounts, the finance team would have to use multiple solutions to make sure the manually configured transaction went through.

#4 Difficult to keep track of client’s ad payments

For fast-paced performance marketing agencies like KPI Media, ad spend is a major cost. One that needs to be controlled. Facebook and Google Invoices are generated as soon as the spend limit for billing has been reached. Based on the monthly ad budget, and spend threshold, this could be once a week, or multiple times a day. Invoices are paid via corporate cards. Many times, one card was used across multiple clients. As a result, much time was dedicated to tracking and organizing ad spends manually, impacting their momentum as a rapidly growing agency.

Considering the profitability of the agency depends upon delivering results within the stipulated time and budget, it was of utmost importance to build a smarter way to track ad spends, as well as restrict it once the limit had been reached.

KPI Media’s manual processes were in need of an automation boost. Luckily, Aspire came to the rescue.

The Solution: Aspire’s all-in-one solution with flexibility to manage expenses remotely and hold multiple currencies

The whizzes at KPI Media knew they needed to emphasize on automation to streamline their business finance and ensure their team had more time to do what they do best一cutting edge performance marketing.

They became loyal users of Aspire’s suite of solutions. Designed with modern businesses such as KPI Media in mind, Aspire allowed the team to issue unlimited cards, manage expenses, open a multi-currency account and pay employees based in other locations too.

#1 Employees assigned individual Aspire cards for day-to-day expenses

With Aspire, virtual cards were issued in an instant and were ready to be used for day-to-day expenses. Aspire cards grew to be so pivotal in their culture that for every new employee joining the company, the Admin will issue an Aspire card with an assigned limit for their personal or business expenses as an employee benefit. From then on, employees could spend it without needing an approval. They would still, however, require approval for any purchases that exceed the limit.

Remote employees could now experience the advantages of spending autonomy and having ownership over their expenses. On the other hand, Admins as well as department heads feel reassured that controls are in place to ensure that there was no risk of overspending.

#2 Opened multi-currency accounts with Aspire in IDR

For countries with entities in more than one country, opening a multi-currency account is a lifesaver. There's nothing like doing it all with Aspire. It saves them the trouble of having to deal with multiple incumbent banks, and provide a barrage of paperwork. All to be charged more for each account they open. This wasn’t a sustainable option for KPI Media.

Instead, they turned to Aspire to open an IDR account to facilitate transactions for their Indonesia-based team members. The experience was unlike traditional banking. They were able to use the account in a matter of minutes. With both SGD and IDR found in one place, the finance team had an all-in-one view of both entities through a single log in. Keeping tabs of multiple accounts have never been easier.

#3 Aspire’s transparent FX transfer to pay regional employees

One login could open a world of powerful finance solutions一that is, if you’re an Aspire user. 

This was the case for KPI Media, when they wholly embraced Aspire’s transparent FX transfers for salary payments to their employees based overseas. Not only did employee morale hit a new high as salaries are consistently paid on-time, the end-to-end process was smooth, fast and automated via Aspire. Moreover, the team was able to leverage Aspire’s competitive forex rates, enabling them to pocket higher savings than before.

#4 Take control of client’s ad payments with Aspire cards

With the power of Aspire cards, making payments for paid ads was no longer a painstaking task. The team was able to issue as many cards as required - per client, project and ad network. Thus allowing them to track every aspect of their client’s billing, and stay one step ahead. For example, they were able to create budgets at a client level, and then create corporate cards for each ad network under that budget.

By using merchant locks, they were able to restrict spends to those networks alone, thus avoiding misuse. By using the spend limits feature, they were also able to restrict spending on different ad networks to a certain amount. Budget managers were even informed when the budget was about to reach its limit, so they could always be one step ahead, and plan accordingly.

It was also easier to create cost reports, since each card was mapped to a separate client and ad network. Intelligence from these cost reports was helpful for the KPI media team to calculate profitability, as well as create more compelling, insightful quotes for future clients.