Entering three ASEAN markets in 11 months
A licensing-first entry sequence that got a European payments firm live in Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam.
- Markets live
- 3
- Time to first market
- 5 months
- Under revised budget
- 23%
- Subsequent reuse
- 2 markets
The challenge
Tessera had strong product-market fit in Europe and board approval to enter Southeast Asia, but their entry model assumed a single regional platform and a 6-month timeline. Data residency rules, per-market licensing regimes and settlement infrastructure differences made that plan undeliverable — a fact nobody had costed.
Our solution
We sized demand by market and segment, then built the regulatory pathway and cost-to-operate model for each. That analysis reordered the entry sequence entirely: Singapore first for licensing leverage, Malaysia second via partnership rather than direct entry, Vietnam third with a local entity. In parallel our engineering team re-architected the platform for per-market data residency and pluggable settlement rails, which was the actual blocker.
The results
Live in all three markets in 11 months against a re-baselined 14-month plan. Entry cost came in 23% under the revised business case, largely because the Malaysian partnership avoided a direct licensing programme. The residency architecture has since been reused for two further market entries without re-platforming.
Other engagements
- InsuranceCutting claims cycle time by 41% at a regional insurerA 90-year-old claims operation replaced its mainframe workflow without a single day of processing downtime.
- ManufacturingRecovering 6.2 points of gross margin across 14 plantsProcess mining across four ERPs found $31m of recoverable margin that plant-level reporting had been netting out.
Could this be your programme?
We will tell you where the analogy holds and where it does not — before you spend anything.
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