Chief Product Officer · Singapore / Southeast Asia
Dispatch 01 / Singapore / Southeast Asia
AI in small-business software5 min read
Shop software that works within local constraints
Small-business software is being sold on automation rates. For an owner whose name is on the tax return, a system that shows its confidence and asks before it posts is worth more than one that is right slightly more often and never says when it is guessing.
Read this dispatch ↗Liyana HalimSingapore / Southeast Asia English · Malay · Indonesian
Per-user pricing was designed for offices. For a warung, a sari-sari store or a family contractor, the right unit is the business and its month, priced in local currency and paid in the way the owner already pays for everything else.
Software companies expanding across Southeast Asia still treat localisation as language plus currency. For products that touch invoices, tax and payments, the real work is country rules, and it needs owners with the authority to stop a release.
A leadership conviction
A small business forgives software that is plain. It does not forgive software that loses an invoice, misreads a tax rule or pretends to be sure.
Paying small businesses, June 2026
412,000
Across Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Singapore
Company revenue, calendar 2025
US$126m
Three-quarters from subscriptions priced in local currency
Invoice sessions abandoned outside major cities
9%
Down from 38 per cent before the offline-first rebuild
Software for a small shop has to survive a weak signal, follow its country's tax rules and admit what it does not know.
I am the chief product officer of Rimbunara Technologies, a fictional Singapore-based company whose software helps small businesses invoice, keep their books, submit e-invoices and get paid. In June 2026 we served 412,000 paying businesses: hawker stalls and hardware shops in Malaysia, warung owners and textile traders in Indonesia, sari-sari stores and contractors in the Philippines, and professional firms in Singapore. Revenue in 2025 was US$126 million, three-quarters of it from subscriptions priced in local currency.
I did not come to product through strategy. I began in 2003 as a software engineer at a Kuala Lumpur point-of-sale maker, spent four years in Jakarta designing SMS commands for airtime kiosks, then worked on merchant payments in Singapore and identity verification in Kuala Lumpur before joining Rimbunara in December 2019. Each job put me in front of people for whom a failed transaction was money they could not spare.
My organisation of 236 product managers, designers, researchers, data scientists and localisation specialists works on three questions that never close: how one product can follow four countries' rules without splitting into four, what a business earning a few hundred dollars a month can sensibly pay, and how a feature built on machine learning should behave when it is wrong. I report to our co-founder and chief executive and answer to the board's Audit and Risk Committee for trust and safety.
E-invoicing in every Malaysian plan
We built submission to the Inland Revenue Board of Malaysia's MyInvois system into every plan, free included, and declined a paid add-on forecast at US$6.2 million a year. Monthly churn fell from 2.3 to 1.6 per cent, and paying Malaysian businesses grew from 121,000 to 168,000 between December 2023 and June 2026.
An app that keeps working on a weak signal
Rebuilding invoicing, receipt capture and stock counts to work offline cut the Android download from 61 MB to 17 MB, and abandoned invoice sessions outside metropolitan Indonesia and the Philippines from 38 per cent to 9 per cent.
A plan priced for the smallest shops
Per-business pricing and a Mikro plan at Rp 49,000 or ₱199 a month took paying Indonesian businesses from 58,000 in mid-2023 to 131,000 in June 2026, while average revenue per business there fell by about a quarter.
Fraud cut without closing the door
After a fake-invoice ring drew about US$660,000 from our partner lenders in 2025, we paused instant financing for six weeks and added buyer confirmation. Partner fraud losses fell from 0.9 to 0.08 per cent of advanced value; volumes are back to 92 per cent.
Current focus
I am preparing our board's decision on whether the bookkeeping assistant should go beyond explaining a business's figures to drafting its periodic tax summaries, which I will recommend only with an accountant's review built in. My teams are also readying the Philippine product for the day the tax bureau's electronic invoicing programme reaches small businesses.
Conversations I welcome
I am not looking to leave Rimbunara. I would consider one independent non-executive directorship at a company listed in Singapore or Malaysia whose customers, suppliers or distributors include many small businesses, serving on its risk or technology committee. I can give about twenty-five days a year, if Rimbunara's board agrees and a conflicts check comes back clean. I also take a handful of speaking invitations each year.
Beyond the page
The record behind the perspective.
In the boardroom
Rimbunara Payments Pte. Ltd.Director of the wholly owned collections subsidiary, in an executive capacity · 2022–present
Langkah Usaha FoundationNon-executive board member of a small-business training charity · 2022–present
Formation
Bachelor of Computer Science (Honours)Tasikmas University of Technology · 2003
Master of Business Administration, part-timeSelatara School of Management · 2014
Liyana's board papers open with the number I would rather not see. When she argued for putting e-invoicing into the free plan, she showed us the revenue we were declining before the churn she expected to save, and then reported both to us every quarter.
Darius Seow Keng HweeFictional co-founder and chief executive, Rimbunara Technologies Pte. Ltd.The full record ↗
Contact
I am not looking to leave Rimbunara. I would consider one independent non-executive directorship at a company listed in Singapore or Malaysia whose customers, suppliers or distributors include many small businesses, serving on its risk or technology committee. I can give about twenty-five days a year, if Rimbunara's board agrees and a conflicts check comes back clean. I also take a handful of speaking invitations each year.
