Match Group Asia CEO Heads Office in Singapore, with Focus on AI and Japan

Image: Match Group

Match Group has appointed former Plenty of Fish CEO Malgosia Green as CEO of Match Group Asia, who will now be based in Singapore. The company has said it will be targeting the growing Asian market in the coming months as well as focusing on AI development, and a huge step forward is having an executive in the region.

Green was appointed by Match Group CEO Bernard Kim, who has been under fire from shareholders about the fourth quarter revenue decline because of poor product rollouts from Tinder. He has named four main points of growth for the company, one of which is focusing on the Asian market.

In an interview with Fast Company, Green said: “Given the huge potential of the region, and how large it is . . . it made a lot more sense to have someone specifically dedicated to Asia itself, and to be based in the region.”

According to Fast Company, Green will be overseeing two dating app brands including Hinge, but she will focus primarily on Hyperconnect, the South Korean social platform the company bought in order to harness its AI technology across its brands. Match Group already uses AI tools, but she says there is still a lot of “untapped opportunity,” so likely the company will be testing new AI-based features in the coming months. She will have a staff of over 400 across the region.

“A lot of my focus with Hyperconnect is to figure out how do we unleash a lot of that creativity and innovation and that amazing AI team . . . and let them look at quickly ideating, coming up with creative new solutions, bringing them to market, and testing them and seeing which ones take off,” Green told Fast Company.

Another big focus for Green is Japan, which is currently Match’s second largest market outside the U.S., but singles in the country aren’t using dating apps. The challenge according to Green is that very few people in Japan are dating in real life, let alone joining a dating app, even though half of Japanese singles expressed that they wanted a partner. Match Group’s Pairs app is the most popular in Japan right now, which is for more serious daters who are looking for long-term partners.

In a recent survey from the Japanese Gender Equality Bureau, 25 percent of singles in their thirties are unwilling to get married because they are concerned about a loss of freedom and having to take over the bulk of the housework, which has also contributed to the lackluster dating scene. Green hopes to tap this market and encourage people to give dating apps a try.