What The FinTech #85: 20 Feb 2022
Happy Sunday, welcome back to What The FinTech, your regular FinTech & Innovation Newsletter focusing on Hong Kong & Asia ! Here are the selection and the top headlines for this week.
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What was the FinTech this week in: 📰
BLOCKCHAIN - CRYPTO - DIGITAL ASSETS - DE FI
In short, here are the links of this week:
Singapore’s DBS Bank, which opened an institutional digital assets trading desk in early 2021, is planning on expanding its digital assets trading offerings to retail investors by the end of the year. CEO Piyush Gupta said the bank will take the first half of the year to focus on making access to the digital assets trading desk more convenient for its existing customers. Currently, users need to call a banker to place an order for crypto over the phone. The plan, is to make it online and self-service. DBS has yet to announce additional details about the platform, such as if you’d be able to transfer digital assets purchased on it to other providers or wallets.
Having opened a lounge in Decentraland, J.P. Morgan is the first lender to arrive in the metaverse, CoinDesk reported Tuesday (Feb.15). Decentraland is a virtual world based on blockchain technology. The Onyx lounge was released alongside a J.P. Morgan white paper explaining how businesses could find new opportunities in the virtual world. J.P. Morgan reportedly justified its new metaverse-related actions through the prices — the average price of a parcel of virtual land had doubled in the last half of 2021, going from $6,000 in June to $12,000 by December. Decentraland has also seen a new virtual store from Samsung, a replication of its New York location. Before that, Barbados made a version of its embassy within the metaverse, per the report and Chinese tech companies are also starting to get into the metaverse, with companies like Tencent, Alibaba, NetEase and TikTok owner ByteDance exploring the space.
The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) is stepping into the non-fungible tokens (NFT) market with plans to do for digital assets what it does for stocks. The NYSE said in a regulatory filing with the US Patent and Trademark Office that it wants to be a financial exchange for cryptocurrencies and NFTs that would compete with the likes of OpenSea and Rarible. The filing indicated plans for a NYSE-branded cryptocurrency and a marketplace to buy, sell and trade NFTs. The exchange last year minted its first NFTs, memorialising noteworthy initial public offerings including that of Spotify Technology, Snowflake, Unity Software and Roblox.
Coinbase launches remittances programme to take on Western Union with cryptocurrencies => here
McDonald's has filed a trademark for a restaurant in the metaverse that will deliver food to your home => here
More banks join blockchain-based carbon marketplace => here
SingularityDAO’s AI-powered tokens are outperforming crypto markets => here
Gartner predicts 25% of people will spend at least one hour per day in the metaverse by 2026 => here
HONG KONG
Livi Bank secure license to expand business with insurance offerings
DBS HK’s Proposed Use Case for Multiple Central Bank Digital Currencies (mCBDC): Cross-Boundary Insurance Payments Between Mainland China and Hong Kong
Livi Bank secure license to expand business with insurance offerings
Livi bank, one of Hong Kong’s eight virtual banks, has been granted an insurance agency license from the Hong Kong Insurance Authority. This paves the way for the bank to introduce a range of insurance products within the livi app. Livi will initially partner with life insurance provider, BOC Group Life Assurance, one of its shareholder’s subsidiaries. BOC Life offers a comprehensive range of services in life insurance, wealth management and retirement protection. The bank said that it will be tailoring a range of products specifically to meet the needs of its customers by providing them with seamless access to reliable life and health insurance products.
Last year, DBS Bank (Hong Kong) Limited — along with other participating banks in Hong Kong — was invited by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) to provide potential use cases for its multiple CBDC (mCBDC) platform, Project mBridge. The various use cases included areas such as cross-border settlement, cross-border trade, and securities settlement for its multiple CBDC (mCBDC) platform — Project mBridge. An example our team provided was for cross-boundary insurance payments between Greater Bay Area cities in mainland China and the Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong & Macau. In this blog post, we’ll be sharing more about the use case and how we can leverage the proposed Project mBridge to provide near real-time settlement and exchange for our customers. While this use case is still only on paper currently, it has the potential to transform the end-to-end cross-boundary payment process.
SINGAPORE
DBS digital exchange crosses one billion dollar mark in trading value in first year of operation
MAS proposes to widen regulatory powers over financial services sector with new Bill
bolttech Acquires AVA Insurance to Accelerate Its Growth in Singapore
Fintech company Wise plans to add 150 roles in Singapore
DBS digital exchange crosses one billion dollar mark in trading value in first year of operation
DBS reported strong traction for the first full year of operations of its digital asset ecosystem, anchored by its members-only DBS Digital Exchange (DDEx), one of the world’s first bank-backed digital exchanges. In FY2021, DDEx recorded over SGD 1.1 billion in trading value. Momentum picked up significantly after DDEx went operational 24/7 in August 2021, with trading values in the fourth quarter coming in at close to SGD 800 million - five times higher than that in the previous quarter. In another indicator of strong momentum, DBS’ digital assets under custody as at 31 December 2021 was more than SGD 800 million, which was four times higher than the amount recorded at the end of the third quarter. DDEx, a members-only exchange, has provided corporate and institutional investors, accredited investors, and family offices who bank with DBS, a robust and regulated platform to tap into the growing digital asset economy. DDEx has set itself apart from the competition with its membership-only business model, where it provides other brokerages and asset houses with a safe and secure solution to access the cryptocurrency and digital payment tokens market.
MAS proposes to widen regulatory powers over financial services sector with new Bill
Singapore has introduced an omnibus Bill that consolidates the financial watchdog's key supervisory powers and, among other things, enhances regulation of virtual asset service providers. The Financial Services and Markets Bill introduced in Parliament on Monday (Feb 14) will align the scope of digital token services in line with the enhanced standards set by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), an inter-governmental organisation founded to combat money laundering. If passed, the Bill will let the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) regulate virtual asset service providers (VASPs) primarily for money laundering and terrorism financing risks as MAS considers all transactions relating to digital token services to carry higher risks due to their anonymity and speed. The Bill will introduce general powers over these entities, including licensing requirements and powers to conduct anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing inspections.
bolttech Acquires AVA Insurance to Accelerate Its Growth in Singapore
Singaporean insurtech unicorn bolttech has completed the acquisition of AVA Insurance Brokers and AVA Insurance Agency, a Singapore-based insurance intermediary and specialist broker. The acquisition of AVA will accelerate the deployment of bolttech’s insurance exchange in Singapore, connecting insurers, distributors and customers, making it easier and more efficient to buy and sell insurance. The acquisition follows bolttech’s completion of its US$247 million Series A last year, with strategic investors including Singapore’s EDBI. Based in Singapore, bolttech has grown its global footprint to 30 markets since its inception in 2020.
Fintech company Wise plans to add 150 roles in Singapore
Fintech company Wise is planning to hire 150 roles in Singapore this year, almost doubling its current headcount here. Currently, Wise has over 200 employees in the Singapore office, which recently moved into a larger space, and is the company's Asia-Pacific hub. Hires will be made across a number of departments including engineering, product development, design, analytics, compliance and payments. The hires will help to drive product development and expansion in the APAC region and the world.
CHINA
China’s top metaverse app removes itself from app stores, citing online attacks
CBDC Trumps Visa for Payment at the Winter Olympics in China
China’s top metaverse app removes itself from app stores, citing online attacks
Jelly, which became China’s most popular free iOS app three weeks after launch, says it has been experiencing malicious rumours and system crashes. Jelly, which was developed by Beijing-based mobile news aggregator Yidian Shuyu, lets users share snippets of their daily lives using images of their avatars. Some users claim they have run into data leaks after signing up for the app, such as receiving spam messages and calls from third parties – allegations that Jelly has denied. Others accused Jelly of copying outfits of Chinese celebrities and international brands in designing the clothes of the app’s avatars.
CBDC Trumps Visa for Payment at the Winter Olympics in China
With the Winter Olympics underway in the capital city of China, a relatively unexpected development has come across concerning the use of currency. Unlike previous years where Visa was the only dominating payment method due to Olympic’s contractual exclusivity, this year a new form of payment is HODLing the line. Means of transaction around the Olympic games have observed a shift with China’s CBDC taking the lead. The country has been pushing its central bank digital currency towards the citizens of the country in order to expand its reach. Up until the beginning of this month, over 261 million individuals had signed up for digital yuan wallets. The wallet was launched earlier in January for Android and Apple app stores has managed to onboard about one-fifth of the entire population of China in less than a month.
ASIA
Korean fintech WireBarley collaborates with Tencent on payments to China
UnionBank joins sandbox for digital currency use
EMQ delivers real-time payments across South Asia
Việt Nam’s banking sector named among fastest growing in the world
Korean fintech WireBarley collaborates with Tencent on payments to China
Korean money transfer service WireBarley formed a partnership with Tencent Financial Technology for overseas remittances. The collaboration makes WireBarley the first Korean FinTech company to work with Tencent Financial Technology on inbound remittance service into China through Weixin, the Chinese version of Tencent’s WeChat. The partnership between the two tech companies is expected to enhance the overall user convenience enabling user to sends money to China and its recipient receive the money through Weixin. Weixin will become an available option between payment corridors from WireBarley's 11 sending countries — which include Korea, the U.S. and Canada — to China. Founded in 2016, WireBarley offers 520 corridors for personal remittance and recently began offering B2B remittance and eWallet services.
UnionBank joins sandbox for digital currency use
Union Bank of the Philippines (UnionBank) has become the first commercial bank in the country to be part of the global R3 Sandbox for Digital Currencies. The sandbox brings together commercial banks, central banks, and payment providers and exchanges to collaborate with one another in a “ready-made payments ecosystem” to evaluate central bank digital currency (CBDC) use cases, as well as learn, transact, and test roll-out strategies and designs, the bank said in a press release. Participants including UnionBank can experiment with different models, see the flow of funds and how this operates in a controlled environment, develop CBDCs frameworks and best practices, and ultimately co-create game-changing use cases that will be part of the blueprint for the future of banking in the token economy.
EMQ delivers real-time payments across South Asia
Global payments network EMQ has significantly augmented its real-time cross-border payments across South Asia, including direct access to Nepal and India’s Immediate Payment Service (IMPS), with Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and additional markets in the pipeline. These major enhancements provide a more transparent and cost-efficient payments solution for our customers worldwide, while enabling them to capture new opportunities across the emerging markets. Powered by EMQ’s real-time payments network, our enhanced payment capabilities to Nepal and India are now available across all EMQ’s global markets.
Việt Nam’s banking sector named among fastest growing in the world
With an overall brand value growth of 49 per cent, Việt Nam’s banking sector is one of the fastest growing in the world. Brand Finance's list of the 500 banks with the largest brand value globally in 2022 released recently has the presence of 11 Vietnamese banks, including two new faces compared to 2021: HD Bank and SHB. The nine banks that continue to be in the rankings are Vietcombank, BIDV, VietinBank, VPBank, Agribank, Techcombank, MBBank, ACB and Sacombank. It has been a very fruitful year for Vietnamese banks, which have observed continuous growth in their balance sheets and income statements, with both deposits and loans issued growing. This has been bolstered by the nation’s recovery from the pandemic, which was well-managed by the Government, resulting in strong economic growth. Among the brands, MBBank is one of the fastest-growing in the Brand Finance Banking 500 2022 ranking, up by a staggering 113 per cent to US$642 million.
FUNDRAISING & PARTNERSHIP IN APAC
Siam Commercial Bank invests $100 million in Indonesian BNPL player Akulaku => here
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