About La Cosecha
“Wine is for everyone.”
In the heart of a teeming community in Woodlands, Singapore, lies a wine retailer with an aspiration to bring their passion for wine to every table, no matter the occasion.
Founder and Managing Director of La Cosecha, Steven Chan said: “Officially, La Cosecha, in Spanish, translates to ‘the harvest’. But for us, it symbolises the fruits of lifelong bonds and relationships built over our common love for wine.”
This local wine shop is one of the few retailers in the country that specialise in Spanish wines extensively. They work directly with the wineries (family style, artisanal boutique wineries, one particular winery that has over 600 years of winemaking history) and represent the brands exclusively. On top of this, Steven, alongside a team of professional wine tasters, hand–picks each bottle to ensure a personal yet first-class service to their customers while offering excellent value for the price.
How La Cosecha leverages Wallex’s global payment solution
As a small business with limited resources, La Cosecha has to optimise every aspect of its operations. Here’s how Wallex has improved the company’s internal processes and opened the doors to the potential for international expansion.
Using an international payment system to improve cash flow
Due to agricultural reasons and the terroir of growing conditions, La Cosecha works with Spanish vineyards to supply its selection of wineries. This naturally involves frequent cross-border transactions from Singapore Dollars (SGD) to Euros (EUR), and along with it, a fee for each transaction.
Prior to Wallex, this fee came in the form of a markup on the exchange rate, which often lacked the transparency that allows businesses to plan their expenses. Plus, this fee added up over an extended period and ate into the business’ funds.
“At that time, we needed a payment provider that we could rely on to provide us with the best possible rate when we need to make a payment. That’s all. And Wallex did that for us, so it’s become the only platform we use now,” Steven says.
Since integrating Wallex into its operations, La Cosecha has saved over 40% of its international payment transaction costs. “From a business perspective, every dollar saved is a dollar earned,” Steven added. This further permitted the company extra wiggle room to focus its capital where it’s most needed.
Finding reliability through consistency
While the speed of fund transfer and the costs associated are the must-haves for La Cosecha, the consistency and reliability of the platform are the very-nice-to-haves. With Wallex, the wine retailer can make payments to their suppliers in a day instead of the previous week-long settlement periods. This is especially important during the invoicing/billing periods.
“We can’t really quantify it, but having almost-instant settlements is one of those things that help make our relationship with our partners better and allow both parties to be more productive,” Steven says.
Not just that, the ease of use and the safety guardrails of the platform also provided La Cosecha with the confidence to make international transactions without any disruptions.
“Our partners have never once come back to say they have not received our payments. This dependency is very important.” — Steven Chan, Founder and Managing Director of La Cosecha
The human customer support round-the-clock
While a large portion of the tech scene is pushing the capabilities of AI technology like ChatGPT and leveraging its scalability potential, La Cosecha puts its faith in human connections.
“A major reason why we chose to switch from our previous international payment service provider is the outstanding service by Samantha (Wallex Corporate Account Manager). If not for her, I wouldn’t be as confident or as comfortable switching over in such a short span of time.”
From reducing the cost of overseas payments to improving internal processes, Wallex has become an integral tool of La Cosecha’s business-as-usual (BAU) activities. It’s also equally paramount to the company’s mission to bring the love of wine to the local community.
For La Cosecha and its suppliers, being able to depend on a global payment solution that consistently delivers exceptional service is not only an optimisation strategy, it is also a competitive advantage through optimisation.
