What it is

SmartLend is a Singapore-based platform connecting small and medium businesses with financing options and financial education. Smart Towkay Ventures, the company behind it, operates in a space where the knowledge gap between what a business owner thinks they know about credit and what they actually need to understand is wide enough to cause real damage. The editorial work exists to close that gap at scale.

What I built

The role started as Financial Writer and moved to Editor-in-Chief. Over three years that means 200+ data-informed articles, weekly business guides, and a newsletter serving Singapore's SME community. The biggest operational shift was rebuilding the newsletter and EDM pipeline from scratch on beehiiv. Combined with applying AI to segment client datasets inside SmartLend's CRM, click-through rates went up 20% and subscriber engagement went up 25%. Neither number came from sending more emails. Both came from sending the right content to the right segment at the right cadence. Content-performance analysis ran through Frase and SEMrush throughout. Organic traffic grew 35% within 2024. That growth was built at the brief stage, not after the fact. Keyword strategy was decided before writing started, not retrofitted once articles were live. The scope also covered supporting the launch of SmartLend.com and producing branded financial content in partnership with OCBC and the Singapore Business Federation, including a guide to start-up business loans that had to be accurate for compliance and readable for an audience with limited time and no patience for financial jargon.

The beehiiv publication

The SmartLend newsletter is where the editorial voice gets the most room. Business news and SME finance explainers written for owners who are managing payroll, suppliers, and cash flow simultaneously. They read what is useful and close what is not. Designing the issues, writing the lead stories, and handling image production for each edition all sit in the same scope. Volume without quality degrades audience trust faster than silence does. That principle runs everything here.