thecontentguy
October 1, 2022
Fintech & SME Finance

SmartLend

Kaung Ye Marn
SmartLend

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 250+ 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. Some of it was not editorial at all. SmartLend's invoice management automation needed training data before anyone could trust what it produced, and preparing that data was part of my scope: assembling the examples, labelling them, and checking what the system did with the cases that did not fit the pattern. That automation is in place in the platform now. 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, published at smartlend.beehiiv.com, 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 producing the visuals all sit in the same scope. The visuals are not only the newsletter's: every blog article and every issue published to date carries artwork made here, and that has stayed in scope rather than moving to a designer. Volume without quality degrades audience trust faster than silence does. That principle runs everything here.

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