On April 10th 2022, WisePass has quietly launched Nong Trai Khoai in Pham Viet Chanh with the beer brand Beck’s Ice. There wouldn’t be exciting news except WisePass that Beck’s Ice belongs to the ABInBev portfolio, the biggest beer company in the world.

To give a little bit of context, WisePass has started working with a beer brand named Singha during the year 2019. During that time, it was pretty new and interesting for both sides to try a new model by introducing a lower tier price. The result was simply astonishing.

Bottom line, the market reacted pretty positively and drove over 4 digits monthly redemptions within less than 90 days. In other words, it scaled pretty quickly until the pandemic happened…

The new normal

As WisePass resumed since January 2022 in Ho Chi Minh City, there are 3 things that will come to the market with WisePass focusing on building up the drinking platform back to pre-covid years.

First thing, meeting the demand from subscribers

Event after event, we meet thirsty subscribers looking for a couple things, more selection and more locations on WisePass. At the moment, what WisePass is to grow quickly the venues available in Ho Chi Minh City at a rate of a new venue weekly.

The selection is handled through the partnership with established groups like AB Inbev offering a wide selection across South East Asia. That enables WisePass to scale quickly after setting up a city. Indeed, with a portfolio of over 200 beer brands like Budweiser, Corona, Leffe, Stella Artois, Hoegaarden or Beck’s Ice, WisePass can offer its subscribers well established brands for our subscribers to enjoy a fresh drink after work and relax.

At the current rate, offering a larger selection of drinks in more and more venues simply makes the value proposition better for our subscribers and we will keep on driving up the numbers.

Second thing, a more consistent model with brands

With the former model we used to build with Singha, there was a couple serious flaw we had to fix. It was based on sponsorship. The problem with sponsorship is that you can’t grow indefinitely to millions of subscribers.

That’s why we switch the model to purchasing and we now purchase from brands first. That fix helps to ensure consistency in the offering and cater the needs to a larger subscriber base across multiple markets.

We always welcome sponsorships through events but we focus mostly now on purchasing for our subscribers as WisePass has two different use cases. Use case 1 is to access events where brands can sponsor. Use case 2 is the everyday redemption where our subscribers would simply come to the bar, restaurant or hotels and redeem a redeem a drink.

Third thing, a stronger cost management system

As explained in some earlier articles, WisePass has shifted from 1 scan per day to the PASS system. What it does is simple, it sets a point system called PASS for each item. For example, to redeem a beer you would need 3 PASS. The amount of PASS you get per day depends on the plan you picked when you subscribed.

As each item has a different cost and WisePass now sets a target profit margin per subscriber, the PASS system allows to change the required PASS for each item accordingly based for each user. What that means is that we automated through the system an access management control to ensure consistency in serving our subscribers over time at scale.

To put it simply, the PASS required to get a beer may change based on our system that manages the finance and the supply chain of the network.

Making 2022 a great year for WisePass

The year 2022 seems to be on track to be a recovery year for many players in the F&B industry in Vietnam. WisePass will be looking to grow stronger with a larger network and reach 100 venues by the middle of 2023 and grow across South East Asia rapidly with over 1,000 subscribers redeeming more than 10 times a month.