Hello everyone! Good morning. My name is Wan Ling and I am the CEO of Caregiver Asia. With me today is my team, we have Wendy who is my Marketing Chief helping out with my slides. Over there we have Joyce who takes care of our Finance and Admin matters. My Chairman is sitting down quietly there taking notes of our performance today… Dominic with whom many of you have met, is our Legal Counsel and Editor. Ann over there is our Business Development Head, Jason, our Sales Head, Wend, our Recruitment Head. Daniel who is the one busy behind the camera is our Technology Chief. Say Cheese everyone!
The care journey is a very personal one, well, at least, it is a very personal journal for me and my team. And that is why I am so happy that all of you made it for the launch of our portal. Thank you very much for making it here today. We have friends here who started with us, right from our drawing board days, like our founding shareholders and our board of advisors who come from far and wide. We have old friends here who believed in our vision from a year back, and were there to support us every step of the way. And we have here too, new friends who were excited about the possibilities of working with us on our journey, and WOW! Are we excited on what the future is like for Caregiver Asia!
As you all have heard from us at Team Caregiver Asia, we are launching our first online Care product today. At Caregiver Asia, we are committed to building Care solutions that are relevant to our lives, that are socially responsible, and most importantly, solutions that touch and change the lives of the people around us. We build solutions that Motivate, Empower and Mobilise People and Communities to Care about the People Around them.
When we first started dreaming about our first Care product, we actually took inspiration from people around us, people like you and me, real people with real life concerns and real people with real loved ones they cared and worried about everyday. And it became very clear to us that there is today, not just in Singapore, but in many cities across Asia Pacific, a gap in the delivery of Care for the Elderly and At-Home Care for people who are unable to care for themselves easily while they are recuperating at home. In short, we felt that there was a need to transform the way Care is delivered today.
I think many of you here in audience today, can relate to what I am saying. Personally, for me, just within the last 4 months, I had 2 occasions where I had a Care Emergency. The first one was when my grandma caught a very bad cold, and had to be warded in the hospital when she became progressively weaker. Stressful as it may with grandma being in the hospital, but the real stress and heartache started when my mother, my uncles and aunts struggled to look for a good Caregiver to take care of my grandma at home after she was discharged. After a good 2 weeks of calling contacts, both distant and near for referrals, we finally managed to get hold of a few registered nurses who were willing to help us take care of grandma. It took us another several weeks of trial and error, checks and counter checks before we could finally secure a regular nurse. Suffice to say, the whole experience was very draining on the family, and we felt terrible that we could not give grandmother a stable environment for her to recover. In case you are wondering, grandma is well on her way to recovery, but as a granddaughter, I wished that I had on hand, the information and resources to make much better decisions for her Care needs.
The second occasion was when I myself, went in for a very common heard surgery. I removed fibroids from my womb. Like grandma, I am fine now, but oh wow, I was in terrible pain and was bed ridden for two weeks or so. I felt terrible that my mother, who is BTW, a Pioneer Generation card holder, had to take care of my daily needs for that 2 whole weeks. If only I had easy access to a trusted Caregiver then. A Caregiver who could come in just 2 hours a day, a Caregiver I could book at short notice, and one whose fees don’t cost an arm and a leg. Afterall, I wasn’t critically ill, I was just inconvenienced.
It is because of stories like mine that inspired us to build our first online product. This portal, which Wendy, our Marketing Chief will demo later, is an online matching platform that allows Careseekers to search and instantaneously book for Caregivers to come to their homes.
There are 3 main features of this portal that I am particularly proud of.
Firstly, the portal is simple and clean, and organized with the end user’s needs in mind. Our Care services are very comprehensive and are organized by everyday Care needs. These categories include elderly, special needs, rehab, pregnancy and step down care amongst many others. Our Caregivers have either the necessary accreditations, or experience to carry out their Caregiving duties and Careseekers are able to access their comprehensive biodatas online, and also to review an open review system.
In addition to the more well known Caregiving specialties, we also believe in the transformative power of art in human lives, and would like to promote the use of art therapy – visual, performing, music – as a form of caregiving and therapy. As such, CGA has partnered with 10Square @ Central managed by The Rice Company to offer to all art therapists, dance therapists and music therapists, free life subscriptions to our new portal as part of our efforts to promote this form of caregiving. We really hope that through this small boost, Careseekers can find more options for their care needs.
Secondly, the portal has a rather unique internal flow that allows Careseekers to book and confirm instantaneously a Caregiver’s available time. You can do this 24 hours a day, seven days a week! Imagine the panic you feel when it is 1am and you suddenly realized you forgot to get a Caregiver to come in to babysit tomorrow morning. And imagine the immediate relief you get, when at 1.10am you are instantly able to book for a quality Caregiver to come to your home within a 6 hour notice period. Life is good. All is at peace.
The third feature of the portal that I am particularly excited about is that the portal provides for an alternative channel for enterprising Caregivers to set up their own Care practices. On our portal, Caregivers have full control of their working schedule as well as their terms of service. They can customize the length of their sessions, their resting periods, and even state their fees. I believe that this will be a very empowering and enabling tool for Care practitioners who wish to re enter the workforce, but are unable to take on full time or shift work.
We are very happy that Silver Spring is our partner. Silver Spring is a social enterprise that helps mid-career professionals find meaningful second careers, and we hope that through our platform, more people will be able to start caring for people around them, and at the same time, to be embark on a meaningful and stable career.
As a Care database, we have access to 8000 accredited, registered or certified Caregivers and Healthcare Practitioners across Asia Pacific and we are happy to say that we will be in 10 Asian Cities by the end of the Year. Currently, we have a JV partner for Malaysia (David Fu, where are you?], and we will have JVs set up in HongKong/ Macau, Indonesia and South Korea by the end of this Quarter. We hope to have 1m Caregivers by the end of 2016, across key cities in Asia Pacific. We will keep you updated.
Well, this takes me to the end of my speech and the beginning of our demo. I just want to leave you with this message that at Caregiver Asia, we understand, and we want to be your daily Care partner.