We briefly caught up with Reap to discuss their experience running a digital payment company headquartered in Hong Kong, most notably covering the tech under the hood and the team needed to run such a cutting-edge digital platform.
Tell us a bit about Reap. How can you explain it to our readers as if they were 5 years old?
Reap allows people to pay anyone and anything from a credit card. The person getting paid would get cash immediately. The person making the payment would only pay back the cash to the credit card in 30-60 days.
OK, that’s the simple part. Now what sort of technology is this platform running on?
- React for frontend
- Python for the backend
- My SQL for database
- Hosted on AWS
3. As a tech focused company, what are your plans for building your tech team as you scale?
As a tech focused company, what are your plans for building your tech team as you scale?
Based in Hong Kong, Reap is strengthening its existence in other Asian markets. It is currently hiring software engineers, business development specialist and UI/UX designer. Fancy a career in Reap? Here's what they are looking for:
- People first; we look for technically-minded people who are great at problem solving, communicating and eager to learn. The technology and coding language we believe can be adapted if there is some foundational understanding of coding and technology.
- Product-minded; we believe that while it’s important to listen to customers for product decisions, it’s equally that the tech team understands what they can and should build. Given that they're the closest to knowing what the technology is capable of, they should use that to drive innovation from the product side.
- Looking for people who are multiplicative instead of additive; Ideally the people we bring on has something complementary that can augment the output of the whole tech team, instead of simply adding code as a standalone unit.
Do you believe that Hong Kong currently has the talent necessary to contribute to your platform?
The demand outweighs the supply. Though the supply of talent is growing.
It’s not just because the “talent” isn’t there, rather it’s that the “talent” isn’t refined. Though most people here are highly educated, Hong Kong continues to focus on its four pillar industries with a specific emphasis in commerce and finance. It is a rather traditional and conservative society when compared to Europe or the States. Despite being labelled as agile in decision making, Hong Kong is often quite slow in responding to new big trends.
Things are changing. The government also set up the Innovation and Technology Bureau in 2015 to support the creative and tech industry. But still, it is not easy to change people’s mindset in one day. Compared to computer engineering or programming, people tend to favour professions such as accountants, lawyers or doctors as their default, conventional career path.
Frankly speaking, the standard education system does not give students sufficient room to explore new things beyond the curriculum. It would be great if students can have early exposure to the latest technology trends and related career in their secondary school studies.
What would you say are the skills most relevant to your company? (Tech and beyond)
Effective communication; to be a multiplicative team member instead of an additive team member, we look for people that can communicate questions and ideas to the whole team.
Ownership; for our team, tech or otherwise, to make effective product decisions, we need them to feel that they can own their work and be responsible for features that are user-facing.
Self-awareness; we appreciate when our team knows what they don’t know. This leads to a cycle of continuous learning and collaboration with the rest of the team.
What did you think about the student projects? Did anyone in particular stand out?
What did you think about the student projects? Did anyone in particular stand out?
Loved all the projects that the students made; really good combination of their existing experience combined with the technical skills they learned. For example; the matching platform for kindergartens and schools here in HK. This really showed that they were not simply just coding, but also thinking about product, design; what kind of problems that is real to them, which they can solve using the technical skills they have.
Are you looking to hire tech talent within Hong Kong? Take a look at our hiring page and see how we can help to match you with fresh, hungry developers and data scientists.
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