Antock, where I work, is preparing to enter the ASEAN (ASEAN) market and participated in the 2024 Singapore Fintech Festival held last week. The event is the world's largest fintech exhibition organized by the Singapore Monetary Authority, with 700 companies from around 150 countries and more than 60,000 participants. There are plenty of attractions such as corporate nationality, business models, and technology, and participants do their best to promote and interact to maximize business opportunities for a limited period of time. I also decided to participate with the attitude of “heading to the ground” to discover local customers and partner organizations. We worked tirelessly to promote the excellence of our financial big data AI (artificial intelligence) technology to foreign visitors who are constantly flocking to the exhibition booth. This is the first global challenge focusing on the one-dimensional purpose of local commercialization and market development, but while talking with countless potential customers, investment institutions, and partners, I realized that while these global events are an excellent marketing window, there are various other strategic uses. First of all, a global exhibition is a great place to capture future technology trends at a glance. There are many booths, but I don't get bored of seeing toxic people flock to fintech companies related to specific technologies or themes. I was able to experience firsthand what areas the market's concerns are focused on. We often identify technology trends afterward through research reports or white papers, and international fairs are a medium for proactively checking technical trends and initial demand before they are statistically compiled. Furthermore, it is possible to measure the company's competitiveness and differentiation on the international stage by checking the technological progress of companies in other countries carrying out similar businesses. Even if it is the same business item, it is not a direct competitive relationship within a country, so most companies share their current business status and future direction with an open mind. One-on-one performance comparisons may be difficult due to differences in national contexts, but it is possible to fully estimate the company's level by comparing technical approaches. Finally, by participating in conventions, you can obtain practical advice from various angles to reduce trial and error in national expansion and commercialization. Local stakeholders who visited the booth for my GTM (Go-To-Market) strategy in Singapore spared no heartfelt advice in their respective fields of expertise. Every moment was like a one-point lesson because it was an opinion presented by entrepreneurs who had already entered the country based on their personal experiences. We were able to secure key risk factors and target points based on legal regulations, industry characteristics, and government policies in a short period of time. What I felt through the Singapore Fintech Festival is that the global exhibition is not a place to unilaterally promote the company to an unspecified number of people. The company's services and technology are explained first, but it is possible to gather meaningful information for overseas expansion based on feedback from visitors. It would be correct to understand it as a place of two-way communication where information is constantly exchanged and received between stakeholders participating in the event. I was also able to obtain a wealth of valuable insights from market research over the past year in a short 3-day schedule. The global expansion of innovative venture startups is a hot topic. Although it's an exciting topic, it's true that it's too difficult to challenge. This is because domestic success can never guarantee results in overseas markets. I think a global exhibition is a litmus test that can somewhat mitigate this uncertainty. It is expected that it will be possible to improve the possibility of a soft landing if “service compliance” verification in the target country is carried out by participating in a global event and corrective work is carried out based on on-site response before going through full-scale entry procedures.[MoneyToday startup media platform 'Unicorn Factory']Park Jae-joon, CEO of Antock
