What The FinTech #119 - 13 Nov 2022
Happy Sunday & Welcome back to What The FinTech, your regular FinTech & Innovation Newsletter focusing on Hong Kong & Asia!
To stay fully updated with all the latest HK & Asia FinTech & banking news, insights & intelligence impacting the sector - click on the button "subscribe" next to the Title.
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Substack Newsletter
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What The FinTech Video & Podcast - Episode 45
Last Wednesday, I was joined by Daren Guo, CEO of Reap, for an enthralling interview about their corporate payment solutions to improve the way small businesses operate today and prepare them for the challenges of tomorrow. Reap's online payments platform enables small businesses to pay expenses and collect revenue – to and from anyone, anywhere – entirely via credit card.
Check out the previous videos here: on What The FinTech, Instagram or Youtube.
The previous interviews are available on podcast: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts.
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What The FinTech - Episode 46
On Wednesday, I'll be in an interesting interview with Theodora Lau from Unconventional Ventures.
Please join us and let me know if you have any questions.
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What was the FinTech this week in: 📰
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HONG KONG
HashKey secures virtual asset trading license in Hong Kong
Hong Kong wants to add insurance products to ‘Connect’ menu to deepen cross-border links
Ant rolls out BNPL product in Hong Kong
HashKey secures virtual asset trading license in Hong Kong
Hash Blockchain, a company under financial services firm HashKey Group, has received a full license to operate a virtual asset trading platform in Hong Kong. With the Securities and Futures Commission of Hong Kong’s (SFC) approval, the company said it has become the first firm to have virtual asset licenses to operate in Hong Kong and Japan, as well as a capital market services license in Singapore. Hash Blockchain is the entity behind HashKey Pro, an institutional-grade virtual asset trading platform that offers automated trading services for cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin and Ether. One of HashKey Blockchain’s focuses right now is the tokenization of non-traditional assets. It will also work on linking crypto projects to financial institutions and corporations through its ecosystem.
Hong Kong wants to add insurance products to ‘Connect’ menu to deepen cross-border links
Hong Kong’s government is exploring ways to expand and deepen its financial links with mainland China by adding insurance products to an array of cross-border investment platforms for stocks, bonds and wealth management instruments. The move has been earmarked for the next phase of development when current efforts to establish after-sales service centres take root in the near future. It could be integrated as part of the Wealth Management Connect scheme launched in 2021, or as a stand-alone Insurance Connect scheme to allow cross-border sale of policies within the 11 cities covering the bay area.
Ant rolls out BNPL product in Hong Kong
Ant Group continues to expand its product range in Asia, rolling out a BNPL offering in Hong Kong and small business loans in Singapore. The Chinese giant's Ant Bank (Hong Kong) and AlipayHK units are rolling out Ant Bank PayLater in AlipayHK ahead of the Double 11 (China's equivalent of Black Friday) and Christmas shopping sprees. Users will be able to pay in installments when shopping on AlipayHK's network of merchants as well as on the e-commerce platform Taobao. Separately, Ant Group's recently launched Singaporean digital wholesale bank, Anext, is to start offering loans to SMEs. Small firms can apply for loans of between S$5000 and S$100,000 via partners IN Financial Technologies and Bizmann System.
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SINGAPORE
Huawei, IMDA Launch Spark Incubator for Fintech, Metaverse and SaaS Startups in Singapore
Crypto.com to issue credit cards with crypto capabilities in Singapore
Temasek debt financing platform EvolutionX debt capital makes maiden investment in India’s API
Huawei, IMDA Launch Spark Incubator for Fintech, Metaverse and SaaS Startups in Singapore
Huawei has partnered with the Infocomm Media Development Authority’s (IMDA) PIXEL Innovation Hub to launch the inaugural Spark Incubator programme in Singapore. The programme aims to support pre-seed and seed stage fintech, metaverse, and software as a service (SaaS) startups by providing access to resources and expertise from Huawei and IMDA. Startups are expected to receive third-party financing of over S$250,000, increase their valuation by at least 20%, or cross S$250,000 in annual revenue post-program. The programme will incubate up to 12 startups per cohort for a period of five months, and will be run twice each year.
Crypto.com to issue credit cards with crypto capabilities in Singapore
Crypto.com is now a Visa associate programme member in Singapore, enabling the company to initiate self-issuance of the Crypto.com Visa card in the country. The Crypto.com Visa Card comes with a cryptocurrency capability and is accepted by more than 80 million Visa merchants, providing cardholders with a variety of benefits across various card tier levels.
Temasek debt financing platform EvolutionX debt capital makes maiden investment in India’s API
EvolutionX Debt Capital, the growth-stage debt financing platform launched by DBS and Temasek, has made its maiden investment in India’s largest digital healthcare platform, API Holdings. The investment marks thefirst of a sequence of planned capital raises, and will be followed by equity infusion. EvolutionX has expanded to Mumbai and plans to establish a presence in China next year. Its goal is to support the growth of Asian technology startups by providing an alternative source of debt financing. Growth debt bridges and extends the cash runway for startups until the next financing round or exit event, while also helping founders and investors minimise dilution of shareholding. It aims to build a pipeline of investment opportunities and provide amortising term debt facilities with ticket sizes of US$20 million to US$50 million over the next few years in a wide array of sectors in the Indian, Chinese, and South-east Asian markets.
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CHINA
ZA International to Tokenise Its Loyalty Programme
Jack Ma's Ant Financial wants to become leading global payments aggregator; clocks 1B users
BigPay launches Crypto top-up feature powered by TripleA
ZA International to Tokenise Its Loyalty Programme
Digital insurer ZA International has unveiled plans to tokenise its ZA Coin loyalty programme to create more applications for the coin within the platform’s ecosystem. Examples of extended applications of ZA Coin post tokenisation include payments for goods and services, investments, token redemption through interactions with other ZA Coin users.
Jack Ma's Ant Financial wants to become leading global payments aggregator; clocks 1B users
Jack Ma co-founded Alibaba Group Holding Limited fintech affiliate Ant Group has found a way to scale up its QR code-enabled payments solution overseas.Ant has been quietly forming partnerships with local payment providers in Asia. Ant built something akin to the Mastercard Inc or Visa Inc network for digital payments. It allows consumers to travel with their mobile wallet from home. Ant dubs the payments processing network Alipay+ to distinguish it from Alipay, its consumer-facing wallet that has become ubiquitous in China. Alipay+ has integratedwith 15 payment methods, allowing its partnered merchants to reach more than one billion consumers, Angel Zhao, president of international business at Ant Group, said during the Singapore Fintech Festival. To create a network effect, Alipay+ has been busyonboarding merchants. It supports over 2.5 million businesses around the world. Filipino tourist visiting Japan, for instance, can pull up their GCash wallet and pay at a store that supports Alipay+ by scanning a QR code; they can also display their wallet's QR code for the cashier to scan. Similarly, a traveler from South Korea can pay at the store with Kakao Pay, and so can a Malaysian tourist with Touch' n Go. All the while, Alipay+ has automatically calculated and done the currency conversion part. Alipay+ charges enterprise software fees as a cross-border payment and merchant marketing solution provider. On the landing page of GCash, users can find an entry to a list of merchant deals provided that they pay with Alipay+. The appeal of Alipay+ for merchants, on the other hand, is that one billion consumers can conveniently pay at their stores. Interestingly, Zhao stressed at the event that Alipay+ served as an infrastructure layer for other consumer-oriented wallets.
BigPay launches Crypto top-up feature powered by TripleA
Jack Ma co-founded Alibaba Group Holding Limited fintech affiliate Ant Group has found a way to scale up its QR code-enabled payments solution overseas.TripleA facilitates the acceptance of cryptocurrencies by monitoring, validating, and confirming client transactions on each blockchain. On the merchant side, TripleA allows clients to settle in cryptocurrency with easy setup, instant confirmation, locked-in exchange rate, real-time fiat conversion, and no chargeback crypto payment solution. As such, it removes the volatility risk by converting in real time the crypto to local currency. TripleA’s offering meets the needs of many businesses including e-commerce merchants, retailers, game providers, PSPs, fintech, marketplaces, and tech companies. The company is licensed by MAS, the Monetary Authority of Singapore, allowing partners to operate in a compliant and regulated environment The collaboration enables BigPay’s merchants to accept crypto payments in Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), USD Coin (USDC), and Tether (USDT), with plans to expand the accepted currencies in the near future. This will let the challenger bank’s users send and receive crypto payments around the world without incurring special handling fees.
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ASIA
Softbank’s LINE launches global NFT marketplace
Bank of Korea finds performance issues with CBDC blockchain tech
Japan’s NTT Docomo partners Accenture, will invest $4 billion in web3, use DAOs
Nearly all APAC financial firms suffering from data silos
Softbank’s LINE launches global NFT marketplace
LINE NEXT, the NFT arm of Japan’s biggest social media app, LINE, has officially launched its DOSI NFT marketplace. The beta version of DOSI has been in operation since September this year and has since issued 100,000 DOSI wallets and 170,000 membership NFTs with customers spanning 149 countries. The platform currently supports Ethereum. Despite being known for its Japanese chat app, Japan is not the primary target of this initiative. LINE NEXT was established in December 2021 to launch a global NFT ecosystem. Korean-based LINE NEXT Corporation focuses on NFT platform strategy and planning, and US-based LINE NEXT Inc. develops and operates the NFT platform.
Bank of Korea finds performance issues with CBDC blockchain tech
The Bank of Korea completed the second phase of its retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) simulations in late June and shared the results today. While it was happy with some aspects of its digital won simulations, such as using CBDC for offline payments and cross border remittances, the central bank highlighted performance issues with the blockchain technology. Specifically, it found the overall performance of the Ethereum-based blockchain insufficient, including the scaling solutions and privacy technology that was tested.
Japan’s NTT Docomo partners Accenture, will invest $4 billion in web3, use DAOs
Japan’s largest mobile telecoms operator NTT DOCOMO announced a major web3 initiative partnering with Accenture. It also committed to investing 500 to 600 billion Yen ($3.4 bn to $4.1bn) in the web3 sector and will incorporate a subsidiary next year. It intends to use the Astar Network, a multichain smart contract platform that is one of the Polkadot blockchain’s parachains. The financial investment will come over a period of five to six years. DOCOMO plans to engage a variety of industries by using decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), an alternative to a corporate entity that aims to democratize the management of blockchain protocols. DOCOMO positions itself as a web enabler and identified four aspects where it plans to be active, starting with security, a blockchain wallet and crypto asset exchange and progressing into token issuance and other web3 activities. DOCOMO’s partnership with Accenture will focus on using blockchain and web3 to address social issues including ESG, blockchain safety, and developing web3 talent.
Nearly all APAC financial firms suffering from data silos
Despite broader technological developments, 98% of financial firms in Asia Pacific are still struggling from data and application silos, according to a report by US-based InterSystems. This has undoubtedly contributed to the 87 percent of respondents in the region who said they were frustrated from trying to use data to drive decision-making. Amongst the top challenges, most were related to data accessibility with 36 percent of respondents not able to report on all relevant data, 35 percent unable to obtain data from all required sources and 34 percent suffering from delayed data access. The challenges largely stem from overly complex data infrastructures, implemented with a disjointed set of technologies and applications. This leads to silos that make it difficult to obtain information and insights in a timely manner, and in a way that is easy to interpret and share.
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BLOCKCHAIN - CRYPTO - DIGITAL ASSETS - DE FI
IMF proposes DLT, DeFi-inspired alternative to cross border CBDC
UBS Issues World's First Publicly Traded Digital Bond
Goldman Sachs Introduces Crypto Asset Classification System Datonomy
MSCI Launches First Suite of Digital Assets Indexes
Asian companies are expected to lead the Global Web3 innovation trend –Huoda And C² Ventures held Web3 training salon in Singapore
IMF proposes DLT, DeFi-inspired alternative to cross border CBDC
IMF has published a paper on X-C, a platform for cross border payments, co-authored by the IMF and members of MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative. The solution proposes a global centralized ledger for cross border payments in which central banks, banks and payment providers participate. An X-C platform would not just centralize payments and settlement, but also provide a foreign exchange (FX) market, hedging and compliance. At a technical level, X-C can either use a centralized database or distributed ledger (DLT), but regardless, it relies on smart contracts to automate significant amounts of functionality and encryption for privacy.
UBS Issues World's First Publicly Traded Digital Bond
UBS is issuing a digital bond for the first time. With a volume of more than 375 million Swiss francs ($371 million), the security can be traded on both traditional exchanges and as a digital bond on the blockchain exchange SDX. The digital bond has the same structure, legal status, and rating as a traditional UBS unsubordinated unsecured bond. However, it is the first digital bond from a banking institution in the world to be listed, traded, and settled on a regulated digital exchange. Investors can invest in a digital bond regardless of whether they have blockchain infrastructure themselves, removing a hurdle on the way to introducing new disruptive technologies that can make bond issuance faster, more efficient, and easier.
Goldman Sachs Introduces Crypto Asset Classification System Datonomy
Goldman Sachs has partnered with cryptocurrency financial data company Coin Metrics and investment group MSCI to launch datonomy, a data service that classifies crypto coins and tokens based on how they are used. With Goldman Sachs’ new datonomy classification system, the investment giant aims to reach that large demographic of crypto investors and offer them a new and more efficient way to manage crypto investments. In an effort to make this new crypto classification tool accessible to the most users possible, datonomy can be accessed as a direct data subscription feed from all three collaborator.
MSCI Launches First Suite of Digital Assets Indexes
Financial data provider MSCI launched the first suite of digital-asset indexes, offering a way to help investors evaluate sources of risk and return opportunities across the global digital-assets ecosystem. These digital-asset indexes seek to track the performance of the largest digital assets by market capitalization; digital assets that utilize ex-proof-of-work blockchain consensus mechanisms; and digital assets associated with technology platforms supporting smart-contracts. The new indexes will leverage insights based on collaboration with Menai Financial Group, a provider of institutional-grade digital-asset investment products and trading services. The indexes will consist of a blend of single-digital-asset indexes designed and published by Compass Financial Technologies, a service provider on digital asset.
The Web3 Training Salon, jointly organized by Huoda Education and C² Ventures—a chain-agnostic Web3 venture capital firm, was successfully held in Singapore. Dr. Jianing Yu, President of Huoda Education and Chairman of the Metaverse Committee of the Asian Blockchain Industry Institute, and Ciara Sun, Founder and Managing Partner of C² Ventures delivered the opening speeches.The salon invited top entrepreneurs and investors in Web3, including Calvin Cheng, former Singapore MP and founder of XelebX—a Web3 membership-based celebrity fan club, GM, partner at Dragonfly—a Web3 venture capital fund, Shunyet Jan—Asia-Pacific head of Tower Research Capital and Dujun, co-founder and managing partner of Huobi and ABCDE Capital, among others. In addition, there were representatives from industry leading companies such as Avalanche, ChainUp, Amber Group, and a series of Web3 projects including E2M, Avocado DAO, ERA7.io, Outland, etc.
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