c2c #43: Conferences, crypto winter, congratulations, Covid

I’m the author of Cowries to Crypto about the history of money, and the c2c newsletter is my personal take on innovation in finance and capital. In here you will find:

1.???Work from the Week: highlights from my day job covering fintech

2.???Talk of the Town: internet hot takes on tech and finance

3.???c2c: thoughts on innovation and related topics

Subscribe and share this newsletter with a friend!

1. Work from the Week: Stories from DigFin: Conferences, crypto winter, congratulations

Finoverse takes Hong Kong connectivity worldwide: This past week was a big conference week, with both the Hong Kong Fintech Week and the Singapore Fintech Festival taking place. The company behind HKFW, Finnovasia, has rebranded into Finoverse. It’s an interesting proxy for where fintech is today. Antony Sar, the co-founder of Finoverse, is a shrewd entrepreneur with a nose for trends.

I’m less sure that fintech is really going to be all about “Web3”. But maybe the companies that sponsor events are going to be Web3-type companies. Bread-and-butter fintech like payments and regtech, the stuff that incumbents actually use, is too boring or doesn’t’ get big VC attention, so, no marketing budgets. Greentech is massive but not in Asia. So I hesitate to agree that Web3 is the future of fintech, but I can believe that Web3 is the future of fintech discussions. Crypto’s more fun to talk about. Speaking of which…

Winter? What crypto winter? ask institutional investors: State Street Digital’s Irfan Ahmad explains why big firms are still investing into blockchain-based infrastructure, despite the downturn in crypto markets.

I think this side of blockchain is durable. Tokenization would represent a meaningful advancement for the industry, just as dematerialization of securities represented a jump step in scale and efficiency two or three decades ago. The tricky bit is that while a single market could shift from paper securities to electronic ones, blockchain finance requires cross-border integrations - but the software bridges used to make different blockchains "interoperable" are also cyber vulnerabilities.

So it's going to take a while. But that isn't stopping more investment, as I saw with...

Announcing the winners of our Innovation Awards 2022: Crypto was the big theme in our awards. The DigFinnies are arranged around financial verticals, not specific technologies. Nonetheless probably two-thirds of the winners were either in the blockchain business or embedding crypto elements into what they do. Flavor of the year? Or a deeply fundamental shift? Or it’s just that companies in this space are the ones most interested in competing for an award?

Some of these categories were very competitive, so congratulations to the winners and thank-you to the judges who provided their time and input.

2. Talk of the Town

Adverse market conditions are upending venture capital and investing into startups. But it's not all bad. On the contrary, for VCs or startups that have recently secured funding, the next year or two is full of opportunity.

Look at the comments in Kate Clark's post. It's a wonderful peek at where VC-backed innovation is headed next.

But some people warn that generative AI is going to just be another over-hyped distraction. Another very interesting thread.

Will Manidis concludes: "ignore the hype cycle, build boring businesses", and he outlines what some of those will be. Again, good stuff especially in the comments.

Some gen-AI proponents out there too! I think this stuff is way cooler, and far more useful, than anything "metaverse".

Here's a live demo of what AI can do for people writing fact-based articles, from Adam Ryan who is a budding B2B media mogul in the US. Imagine how people will soon use it to write emails, pitches, analyses. Maybe even DigFin stories!

Meanwhile in the metaverse...Couldn't resist adding this one:

OK, so he's mean. But I think you get my drift: the fintech community has been so fixated on crypto and Web3 that it's missing the real story, which is artificial intelligence. And to be fair, that goes for me and my reporting, because crypto is fun to talk about and AI does mostly boring things. But if you are allocating capital and resources while the world's markets are going crazy, what do you do?

Of course, there are other ways to think about what the next year will bring.

3. Weekly c2c: Covid contortions

As I’m sure you are aware, it's been a busy week in Hong Kong: we had the spectacle of an international banker’s summit at the Four Seasons Hotel in concord with the Hong Kong Fintech Week and, now this weekend, the Rugby Sevens.

The government curiously ignored the HKFW; none of the top officials showed up, despite tech, innovation and related talent being supposed priorities. I guess mixing with the plebs isn’t their style. But chief executive John Lee spoke at the banker summit, as did Paul Chan, the finance secretary. Meanwhile, TV cameras showed everyone having a good time, the foreign guests not wearing facemasks, wandering as they pleased without using our LeaveHomeSafe app, and enjoying access to outside venues despite having only been in the city less than three days.

Hongkongers found this quite amazing! At HKFW, masks were strictly required. You could not eat or drink in the venue. You were forbidden a bottle of water on stage. Everyone had to use our LeaveHomeSafe app to check in and out of the venue, associated eateries, etc. And if you did eat somewhere, your table was blighted by a defensive sheet of plastic.

Anyone who troubled themselves to visit Hong Kong for this event would be barred from entry if they had recently tested positive and still had residual Covid viruses spotted by a PCR test. And while most people are given the all-clear, the LeaveHomeSafe will still prevent them from entering restaurants, gyms and public venues for three days. Somehow Secretary Chan, despite having caught Covid on a foreign trip a few days before, managed to get the all-clear to re-enter Hong Kong, enter the Four Seasons, and give a speech (sans mask).

The government insisted to reporters that the Secretary adhered to all of the Covid requirements. I'm sure they're right! But what we saw on television did not conform to the reality Hongkongers experience on a daily basis.

The local administration will use this event to proclaim "Hong Kong is back". Maybe the global CEOs will buy that. They too live in a bubble.

I was told by a friend at one of the big US banks that their visiting CEO did a town hall afterwards with the staff. He took off his mask and urged everyone else to do so, and all of these people obeyed – whether they think it is safe or not, or legal or not, I don’t know. But arrogant global bank CEOs might just think, to hell with this, I’m a global bank CEO and there shall be no masks in my presence.

And then they’ll leave and won’t think about it, or us, again. As soon as the employees shuffled out of that town hall, you can bet they all put their masks back on, whether they like it or not. But no one in New York will care. Back to business.

Here’s the catch. Hong Kong’s status as a global financial center rests on the rule of law. How much trust do you place in a jurisdiction that erects a Potemkin's village for global CEOs?

See you next week

If you liked this content, be sure to subscribe, and share this newsletter with a friend!

Cowries2Crypto will be back next week!

About Jame

Jame DiBiasio is a book author, financial journalist, media entrepreneur, and a speaker/moderator. In 2015 he launched DigFin, an online media covering digital finance that is part of the digital arm of Hong Kong-based financial group AMTD. Jame is also a member of the board of the Hong Kong Fintech Association.

He is author of “Block Kong” (co-authored with Charles D’Haussy) profiling 21 blockchain entrepreneurs in Hong Kong; and “Cowries to Crypto: The History of Money, Currency and Wealth”. He is currently working on a book about the venture capital industry.

Jame has also written books about Asian history, including “Who Killed the King of Bagan?” and “The Story of Angkor”. He writes thrillers too. You can find all of Jame’s published books on Amazon.

A native of the United States, Jame has been based in Hong Kong since 1997. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.