$1 Club, page-25372

APT started in 2014 and didn't get their first customer until 2015. The first time they raised capital it was only $8m. That's less than IOU has in the bank right now. APT was growing steadily with repeated equity raisings until their real breakthrough moment when Kim Kardashian tweeted about the company after adding it to her store. She had 60m followers at the time. That didn't happen until the end of 2018. That's four years after they started.

My business worked with APT and Z1P two years ago and one thing I noted was how terrible their processes are. For Fintech companies, the tech side of things wasn't great. I have no idea how things are now. I find it difficult to understand how they were able to grow at the rate that they did with the way they operated.

I also note reading a few articles about Hoolah and seeing how manual their sign up process is as well. The problem with a lot of these companies imo is that they don't get the processes right at the beginning and then they get stuck growing off the back of half baked systems. This kind of technical debt is difficult to fix when a company gets big.

Given that IOU is built on top of existing systems that have been in use for a number of years, most of the platform is mature. I don't see an issue with the company running myIOU localized to Malaysia for 6-8 months before pushing for expansion into new regions. If you look at the app reviews, there's still work to be done on improving the front end features.

Until the company releases an announcement stating that they are becoming a digital bank I'm not going to buy into rumors. IOU is a digital payments provider. I'd rather see IOU partnering with banks for a BNPL service off the back of existing relationships rather than trying to compete with them.