Non-executive workers account for more than 70% of Southeast Asia’s workforce. The recent economic disruptions from pandemic recovery, high inflation and a looming global recession are driving massive changes in the workforce. On the demand side, companies increasingly look for ‘on-demand’ staffing arrangements that offer greater flexibility to handle the peaks and troughs of their businesses. On the supply side, non-executive workers seek opportunities for additional and temporary employment that match their skill set. However, ‘on-demand’ staff enjoy few of the benefits of full-time permanent employees with little or no access to financial products such as loans, health or life insurance due to the lack of a consistent income from a single employer.
What’s the problem?
Job portals and digital employment agencies in Southeast Asia have long been building products and services that cater to executive and permanent contract jobs. On the other hand, non-executive workers still frequently rely on traditional word-of-mouth channels to find work that is of a Manual, Service, or Semi-Skilled (“MSS”) nature. MSS workers are often met with two problems:
- They lack access to digital portals and tools that are relevant to their skills and experiences resulting in missed job-matching opportunities;
- MSS workers often have issues with access to financial services such as loans & insurance due to inconsistent income and frequent changes in employment history.
On the demand side, employers recruiting MSS workers are still mainly relying on recruitment channels that are often inflexible and slow to react to manage the peaks and troughs in their demand for MSS workers. Sourcing and screening talent for MSS roles can also be resource-intensive and overwhelm in-house HR teams, resulting in costly mistakes from mis-hiring or under-hiring.
A better solution for employers and jobseekers alike is a platform that allows MSS workers to flexibly find employment opportunities that match their skillset, and that helps employers to adjust their workforce capacity efficiently. For the 280 million MSS workers in Southeast Asia, such a solution is urgently necessary for promoting better livelihoods and economic growth in the region.
Why FastCo?
We invested in FastCo to tackle the issues facing both the informal workers and their employers. FastCo has two business lines:
FastJobs is one of Southeast Asia’s first tech-enabled marketplaces dedicated to MSS jobs. The company has grown rapidly since 2016 and now handles more than 500,000 job applications per month in Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines. It solves the problem of a lack of digital access to MSS jobs for workers and helps employers screen and match the right workers with the right skill sets to available positions.
FastGig is a staffing-as-a-service solution that provides on-demand and managed staffing services for employers. Employers can entrust FastGig to handle everything from recruiting, to worker management, to salary issuance. Besides the primary staffing function, the platform also automates timesheets and payment processing, which helps employers cut administrative costs. FastGig allows employers to rapidly scale up their workforce while enabling workers to have consistent income across several employers. To date, FastGig has helped dozens of brands fulfil tens of thousands of hours per month.
As workers complete jobs on the platform and maintain a more stable and consistent income, FastCo will offer relevant financial services, such as insurance, loans, and earned wage access, to serve their unmet financial needs.
FastCo’s business model is multi-faceted, incorporating elements of a classic marketplace, an operationally complex employer-of-record, and nuanced financial services distribution. The team behind FastCo brings together just the right combination of skills and experiences to tackle this challenge. Founder and CEO, Julian Tan was previously the CEO at 701 Search, Southeast Asia’s largest classifieds exit to date. David Cheng, CFO, was the former VP of Group finance at Carousell, a Singaporean unicorn as well as the former CFO/COO of Mudah, part of 701 Search. Lim Huishan, GM of Singapore, brings extensive experience in the recruitment sector while Joelle Pang, GM of FastGig MY, brings deep experience in launching multiple companies and brands across SE Asia. We were deeply impressed with their experience from day one and the insights that they bring to this next-generation digital employment platform.