In a world where billions remain underbanked, ADVANCE.AI is leveraging HubSpot’s CRM platform to scale their AI solutions for digital KYC onboarding as well as risk and fraud management solutions across Asia.
Founded after firsthand experience of how a lack of credit history prevents access to financial services, ADVANCE.AI has built a comprehensive ecosystem powered by AI.
Since then, the Singapore-based company has evolved into one of Southeast Asia’s leading provider of digital identity verification, onboarding, and credit information solutions, and has expanded across three continents, achieving profitability while scaling across nine markets.
DigiconAsia finds out more from Agnes Yap, Head of Commercial Operations, ADVANCE.AI.
What were some key challenges ADVANCE.AI faced in the Southeast Asia market?
Yap: As we expanded across Southeast Asia’s dynamic and diverse markets, ensuring our customer relationship management scaled effectively with our growth became a key focus. Despite geographical proximity, the region comprises highly fragmented markets, each with its own language, regulatory frameworks, and financial maturity, among others.
Reaching and engaging customers and prospects requires more than a broad regional strategy. It demands local precision, strong partnerships, and sensitivity to the unique dynamics of each market.
Another key challenge was maintaining a unified view of our customer data across different markets. As our customer base grew, fragmented systems created operational silos, making it difficult to align sales and marketing efforts, manage leads efficiently, or automate follow-ups. In the identity verification and fraud detection industry, maintaining compliance and customer trust is non-negotiable, so we needed digital solutions that could uphold security and reliability across multiple markets.
To continue growing at our desired pace, we knew we needed a platform that could unify our data, support localization, and help us operate smarter without slowing us down.
Why did ADVANCE.AI choose HubSpot? What solutions helped to address the aforementioned challenges?
Yap: As an AI-first fintech company operating in complex, regulated markets, we were looking for a CRM that could adapt to our evolving workflows, regional nuances, and customer journeys without adding friction.
HubSpot stood out for its intuitive interface, modular structure, and scalability. Adoption across teams was seamless, which allowed us to stay focused on driving outcomes rather than managing a lengthy rollout. The platform was flexible enough to customize for each market, yet unified enough to maintain operational consistency across the region.
Features like pipeline automation and real-time analytics were especially impactful. Real-time dashboards and reporting give us the insights necessary to prioritize opportunities and respond quickly to market changes. HubSpot also enabled us to centralize our customer data while retaining the flexibility to localize campaigns for different markets. That combination of standardization with adaptability has been key to our success.
Lead management tools and workflow automation have helped us streamline internal processes, especially across our matrixed teams. This has driven stronger alignment between sales and marketing, and allowed for more tailored engagement with our 500+ enterprise clients, many of whom have long, complex sales cycles. With better visibility into customer preferences and past interactions, our teams are able to build trust faster and drive deeper relationships.
How did ADVANCE.AI benefit from the solutions? What were some key advantages reaped?
Yap: HubSpot has brought measurable improvements to how we operate, and those benefits have directly contributed to our growth. One of the most significant milestones we achieved was reaching profitability across group operations — driven by stronger collaboration between our sales and marketing teams, supported by greater efficiency in how they work together.
With HubSpot’s centralized CRM, we were able to manage separate sales pipelines and workflows for markets like Singapore, the Philippines, and Indonesia, while maintaining a consistent and uncompromised operational backbone. This regional agility has been beneficial to our rapid expansion since 2022, and also improved execution at scale.
Another key benefit has been moving from fragmented, offline analytics to a full-funnel view of the customer journey. Real-time visibility into campaign performance and attribution has allowed us to double down on what works and adjust quickly when needed.
Our sales team, in particular, saw major gains in deal visibility and forecasting accuracy. We increased visibility into sales data by over 80%, and standardized fields and customizable modules have made it easier to create relevant dashboards, access real-time reports, track deal health, and uncover upsell opportunities. This level of insight and automation allows us to focus more on our customers and accelerate product development, while still scaling efficiently across our global presence.
These outcomes support our larger mission of helping Southeast Asia’s estimated 160 million underbanked individuals gain access to essential financial services. With better data, stronger processes, and aligned teams, we’re better equipped to scale our impact across the region.
What are ADVANCE.AI’s future plans for leveraging digital technology (AI, real-time analytics, blockchain etc.) in the Southeast Asia market?
Yap: Our long-term vision is to integrate generative AI more deeply across our platforms, particularly to drive financial inclusion and improve access to digital credit and banking services in Southeast Asia.
We’re already using AI to support business development and content creation, but we see even greater potential in leveraging first-party data to deliver hyper-personalized financial experiences. That includes smarter credit underwriting, personalized product recommendations, and faster, AI-driven support.
Sustainability and responsible AI are central to our approach. Ethical AI in credit scoring and fraud detection ensures that while we scale, we maintain fairness, transparency, and trust across all our markets.
HubSpot will continue to play a critical role in this AI-first vision by helping us manage customer engagement at scale. The platform enables us to automate and personalize our marketing, sales, and support across different countries, all while keeping our customer data unified.
As we explore new markets and refine our go-to-market strategies, HubSpot’s flexibility allows us to test, localize, and optimize quickly. That agility is key in a region as fast-moving and diverse as Southeast Asia — and is the same agility we aim to deliver to our clients through our AI-powered financial services infrastructure.
