Misfit Technologies Ltd, which is rapidly emerging as a tech solutions leader in Asia, began its journey in 2017. The company develops solutions for some of the biggest brands of Telecoms, FMCGs, E-commerces, Hospitality & Tourism and B2C’s locally and in the Asia Pacific region. Headquartered in Singapore, the company has operations in Myanmar, Bangladesh and Nepal. One of their areas of specialization is enhancing customer relations through their Natural Language Processing (NLP) solutions that can be integrated in a variety of social media channels and text platforms such as Facebook, Messenger, Viber, Whatsapp, websites and apps, to name a few. The tech company may be relatively new in the region, but with the astute leadership of its CEO, Munimul Islam, a Myanmar-based Bangladeshi who has previously worked for Robi Axiata and Rocket Internet ventures, Misfit is taking giant strides and gradually establishing itself as a key regional tech player. Misfit’s client portfolio is an intimidating accumulation of Fortune 500 companies like Unilever, Nestle, British American Tobacco and Telenor to name a few.
Munimul Islam remarks,
“We have a wide range of solutions that cater to the large global names, as well as tailored solutions that are geared towards clients like startups, e-commerce, and fashion labels. A diverse portfolio of tech products and clients enabled us to maintain steady business growth even during the challenging times of a global pandemic.”
RESOLVING CRITICAL ISSUES FOR MYANMAR’S TELCO INDUSTRY
In Bangladesh we have our NID which was used to create a centralized database using the Election Commission. In Myanamar, however, the NID is a handwritten document in Burmese. This year, the Myanmar Government announced that all SIMs must be re-registered, prompting Myanmar Telecoms to re-register all SIMs they have ever issued in the middle of a pandemic.
Misfit Technologies developed and offered OCR technology that can read handwritten Myanmar NRIC. It also possesses the technology to filter out junk non-NRIC images, making it very easy to filter spam submissions. In addition, in accordance with the government’s regulations, the solution was further enhanced to filter out black and white photocopied NRIC with over 95% accuracy.
Munim shares,
“That’s when we came up with the EKYC solution which understands the Burmese characters. It has OCR capabilities and can extract text from handwritten documents and then translate them to English. Previously, it took half an hour to an hour, but the EKYC enables SIM re-registration to be completed in a matter of a minute.”
This came as a blessing to the majority of the telecomm companies as most of their existing databases do not support Burmese language as input. Misfit also provided online channels for SIM registration via Facebook Messenger and Viber through Alice, their omni-channel social media CRM platform from its sister company Alice Labs. This allowed users to upload images of their NRIC on Messenger and Viber to get their SIMs registered. Currently, Misfit deployed its EKYC and Alice solutions for MyTel, Telenor and Ooreedoo, three out of four of the biggest telecommunication providers in Myanmar.
THE JOYS OF JUALO
Jualo, Indonesia’s fastest-growing C2C e-commerce platform, with a core focus on trading second-hand goods within a short distance, was one of Misfit’s early stage clients. Having started its operations in 2014, Jualo is a full-stack hybrid, e-classified marketplace. The business is specifically tailored towards serving the Indonesian population in the best way possible while tackling the country’s main industry issues at the same time. After careful assessment of the technical challenges faced by Jualo, Misfit Technologies Ltd. provided tech solutions and consultancy services to Jualo for almost 2 years, allowing Jualo to recover from the technical obstacles, which helped pave the way for its expansion to scale and solid growth beyond Indonesia.
Munim explains,
“We built, managed and deployed the tech team from our office in Bangladesh. We helped them during the transition when they were bought by a larger player Carro and subsequently added value through our tech. Our technology brings value to this kind of platform’s product diversification.”
Misfit provided a cutting-edge web application development service to Jualo as well as contributed to modernization and scaling of the web application using Ruby on Rails. Misfit collaborated and developed the software architecture, microservices, and UX design with multiple teams on board. Jualo underwent rapid growth, raising significant awareness, with 4 million monthly active users and $1 billion in facilitated transactions in 2018.
SMOOTH SAILING FOR SWEDISH E-COMMERCE PROFFSMAGASINET
“Technology is diverse and it creates the space to serve clients worldwide, while having technical team in Bangladesh,”
Munim said while detailing Misfit Tech’s work with Sweden’s Proffsmagasinet – a leading e-commerce company in the Nordic region that operates in e-commerce landscape of Sweden, Norway, and Finland with about 50 employees.
As Proffsmagasinet paved its way for an expansion phase, this fast-growing business needed a strong team to work on their platform that would not only allow them to expand but also keep up with the increasing needs and demands of their business ambition and sales strategies. Misfit Technologies has been able to add value to their technical team and be a part of this successful initiative of remote and offshore team expansion, as Proffsmagasinet aimed at increasing their customer value and organic growth in Sweden.
Munim explains,
“We have a dedicated team of developers that works from Bangladesh for this Swedish client. The team focuses on building, enhancing and managing the platform.”
MILES TO GO FOR THE MISFITS
In three short years, a group of talented misfits from diverse backgrounds, came together to conceive a tech company that has gone to become a regional player, while competing for RFPs with big players in the arena. Munim explains,
“It was a risk that we took, but when I and my partners took the risk, our mindset was to make sure that we succeed. It was not a trial and error approach. Our strategy, from the very beginning was not just to establish Misfit but also to ensure that the business sustains growth.”
The company has made a marked and notable impact in the South Asian and South East Asian markets, and has their sights set to be the leading regional player in tech solutions in the next two years. Moving forward, the dynamic tech company is looking to explore the MENA region.
“We are definitely ambitious and strategic about it. In the future, we plan to work towards becoming a global player,”
Munim concludes optimistically.
