Playing the piano is more than just a hobby for Maxwell Meyer. It was his first source of income, his first shot at fame, it helped get him through college, and it was how he managed to attract the attention of the woman who recently became his wife.
"I would sneak out of the house and go play music in bars so that I could put a tip jar on the piano and make money. That was when I was ten years old," the co-founder of the Bangkok-based financial portal Masii recalls of his playing days in Spearfish, South Dakota.
"Eventually my parents, of course, came with me and they would sit there and I would play for hours."
From practising classical music with his teacher and playing jazz piano in bars, the young prodigy went on to win America's Most Talented Kids in 2005 when he was 14. The son of a pair of insurance brokers, he used the money from the tip jars to record his first CD, followed by two more that ultimately helped fund his college studies.
"I made enough money from those to put a chunk in my college tuition and I was going to go to a music school, but I decided to go to Harvard instead," he tells Asia Focus. "So music has always been a big part of my life."
Before he made his way to Thailand, Mr Meyer worked at McKinsey and Company, but a keyboard was never far from his side on his travels.
"I still have a piano sitting in Düsseldorf in Germany that I was never able to collect because of its size!" he says with laughter.
How did a kid from the US Midwest end up in Asia? That comes down largely to a choice he made in high school, at Phillips Academy Andover in Massachusetts.
"I was studying Spanish like everybody else for years and then there was a close group of friends of mine who were from China and I had never been exposed to anything like that before," he says.
That growing fascination led him to visit Asia for the first time during his junior year. He stayed in Yunnan for two weeks, describing the experience as "cathartic".
"People there were so kind to me and I will never forget that, so I went back and said, 'I want to study an Asian language'," he says. "It would be a better story if I said I wanted to study Chinese but it was Japanese."
The trouble was, there was a scheduling conflict at the school between Japanese and jazz. Because of his love for the latter, he chose to rock the keys and study Chinese for his language requirement instead.
That decision turned out to be crucial at Harvard when he began to focus heavily on Mandarin while studying economics and East Asian studies at the Ivy League school.
"In some cases [Thailand] is the biggest market in Southeast Asia with an attractive concentration of people in two to three key cities, which means it is very dense and you can reach these people
"I’ve always had great mentors, people who are older than me who steer me in one way or the other
Maxwell Meyer, co-founder and CEO,
Masii SUPPLIED
TRAVEL OPPORTUNITY
Three weeks out of college, Mr Meyer had his choice of lucrative job offers in the United States, but he decided to join McKinsey as a consultant in Beijing because he wanted to experience life in China.
"I was paying rent for an apartment (in the Chinese capital) where I spent 30 days a year while the rest of the time I was travelling," he says.
Most of his time was spent in Shanghai and Shenzhen where most of the tech companies in China are located. "It was a critical time for Shenzhen because you started having the emergence of these big social media companies and the big search engines and I was there for that."
Working with McKinsey, he says, was a "great joy" because of all the opportunities to travel, which included some time in Europe and South America. One of the destinations he visited along the way was Bangkok, where the 29-year-old executive now lives and works.
"I had spent some time in Malaysia, in Thailand and Singapore for a tech-related project and I kind of knew that this is the place that I wanted to eventually end up," he says. "One of the reasons is the working culture here, where the people that I have worked with are completely competent and incredibly nice. It was just a great place to live … because I am always influenced by people."
McKinsey is also where he met one of his mentors. "I've always had great mentors, people who are older than me who steer me in one way or the other," he says. "One is Dr Ingo von Morgenstern who was one of the top directors of McKinsey and Company worldwide at the time."
Dr von Morgenstern, currently chairman of the Harbour.Space University in Barcelona, was overseeing Asia for McKinsey Digital Labs when he called Mr Meyer into his office one day to discuss a new career opportunity in Bangkok.
At the time, the Thailand-based conglomerate B.Grimm was interested in pursuing a technology venture, and it was Dr von Morgenstern who introduced Mr Meyer to B.Grimm chairman Harald Link.
B.Grimm, along with BvM Holdings and Santo Venture Capital, later funded Masii.com, the fintech startup that Mr Meyer and his business partner Matthias Jurgens were working on. More importantly, Dr Link also became a valued mentor.
"Dr Link and Prof Dr von Morgenstern have had an enormous impact on my life," he says. "They've been patient with me as I've made mistakes, and encouraged me as we've built and scaled our business together. I couldn't ask for better mentors and friends than these two, and they've made this whole journey an absolute joy.
"There are many innovations that B.Grimm has championed. It is part of their corporate culture to say, 'Let's be at the forefront of technology', and bring in new ideas from around the world and for them, that time it was tech," he says. "So, I turned in my two weeks' notice to McKinsey and moved to Bangkok four years ago."
The decision has turned out to be a good one. Masii.com, the only Thai startup on KPMG's list of the world's top 100 fintech companies in 2019, now has more than 10 million customers nationwide.
TRANSPARENCY CHALLENGE
Mr Meyer and Mr Jurgens, a mobile tech and cloud computing expert who had worked with Deutsche Telekom, set out to make a difference in the financial services sector in Thailand, where they believed transparency was a big challenge for consumers.
In the local credit card market, fees, interest rates and rewards vary widely and it's hard for the average consumer to know which card is best for her. Insurance is similar. Thai people compare up to a dozen different prices before buying car insurance and credit cards, research done by Masii has found. The need for an easy-to-navigate and unbiased price-comparison site was clear.
Around 40 million Thais live in households with income under US$1,000 per month and this group also highly vulnerable to internet scams and predatory practices of loan sharks. Masii set out to show them that there are better alternatives.
"We wanted to do something purely tech and online-focused and we agreed on car insurance which is why the very first iteration of Masii was selling car insurance online," Mr Meyer recalls. "However, we were not super successful at doing that, especially at the beginning. That is why we started adding different products to the site."
When he was at McKinsey, he says, he was interested in "true fintech", a way to transform financial services by bringing all offline activity that all of us do online.
"It's about making them (financial services) more efficient, cutting transaction costs to the customer, and especially saving time," he adds.
From ditching predatory lenders for that first sustainable credit source, to insuring a first car and the people inside, Masii is now helping clients make the best possible financial decisions. It does this by helping people obtain personal loans and credit cards along with health coverage, car insurance and even drone insurance.
"We started with personal car insurance but then we put credit cards and personal loans on the site and it really blew up," says Mr Meyer. "It was not something that we had planned for but they started to really taking off and that's now the key engine of our company, which is anything touching your wallet from credit cards and loans and soon, an e-wallet."
When comes to financial technology, he says, investors from major financial hubs in Asia such as from Hong Kong and Singapore have been looking mainly at Indonesia and Vietnam for opportunities. But Thailand has now started to appear on their radar.
"Three or four years ago, the focus was on Indonesia because there are 260 million people there but Indonesia is complicated in a way that Thailand is not in terms of the geography," he says.
"People (in Indonesia) are distributed all over the country and there's water in between so anything that has to deal with logistics, which is most businesses, you have to see the customer at some point and that becomes very, very complicated."
Mr Meyer says that Thailand is the biggest insurance market in all of Southeast Asia and that is "fascinating" since there are fewer people here when compared to Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia.
"The pie is bigger and there are fewer slices of the pie so that is interesting," he says. "The financial services market, especially the loan market; in 2018, about $21 billion worth of [personal] loans were taken out in Thailand."
HUGE GREY MARKET
That is what is on the record, but there is also a huge grey market that is off the books, despite the best efforts of the Bank of Thailand and others to control it. The government last year helped nearly 17,000 people claim back more than 42,000 rai of land that had been pledged with loan sharks in return for funds carrying outrageous interest rates.
The central bank has also been working to reduce household indebtedness, starting from tightening regulations for credit cards and personal loans in 2017, and following up with stricter loan-to-value rules for home mortgages last year. Now it is tightening overstay of car-title loans, another booming business in the local credit space.
Thailand has one of the highest household debt loads in Asia. The figure reached 78.7% of GDP in the second quarter of last year, compared with 53.5% a decade earlier.
Mr Meyer says the unfortunate thing is that a lot of these debtors are taking on credit at "unbelievable" rates that can reach 20% per day. Those who resort to loan sharks tend to be among the most vulnerable consumers in the population. A financial portal that can show them a better way to manage their money could be a major force for good.
"For me, I saw a very big market. In some cases it's the biggest market in Southeast Asia with an attractive concentration of people in two to three key cities, which means it is very dense and you can reach these people," he observes.
"I also saw a country and people that I love very much, and the problem that I want to address which is helping Thais better understand their credit decisions and make better financial decisions for themselves."
Masii is now connecting people who were mostly denied access to finance before to financial institutions for personal and home loans along with credit cards. It helps them apply by producing a digital credit score based on the information they provide. At the same time, it helps them understand what they are getting themselves into.
It also provides educational materials on the website with over 5,000 original articles, videos and resources for customers to weigh the pros and cons of credit and insurance products in the market. All are in Thai and are updated daily.
Masii earns either a flat fee or a percentage, depending on the bank or insurance partner, when a user makes a purchase via its site. The company plans to expand to the rest of Southeast Asia, though there's no definite timeline yet. But in any case the co-founder is expected to be busy in Thailand for a long time to come.
The business is doing well, and now Mr Meyer has a new life partner to share his dreams and successes with. He married Dr Helen Xiao Yang, whom he met at Harvard, on Koh Naka Yai off the coast of Phuket in November. Meanwhile, you might still catch him playing jazz piano at bars in the City of Angels as well. Just a hint.
