What The FinTech #125 - 15 Jan 2023
Medhy Souidi
?? AI, FinTech & Digital Banking Strategist | Gen AI, Payments & Web3 Innovation | Ecosystem & Partnerships Leader | ??? Industry Speaker & Podcast Host
Happy Sunday & Welcome back to?What The FinTech,?your regular FinTech & Innovation?Newsletter?focusing on Hong Kong & Asia!
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What The FinTech Episode 49
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What was the FinTech this week in:???
HONG KONG
The myWealth service is Standard Chartered’s latest digital wealth management tool that provides clients with features including an overall view of their portfolio, updates on the latest market trends, and access to a myriad of investment funds from major fund houses. Rather than customers needing to contact their relationship manager, they can easily tap into investment services by using the myWealth platform at their convenience. This allows them to review their portfolio while on the go and quickly respond to market opportunities when they arise with only a few simple clicks of their smartphone. Customers are also able to combine the tool with advice from their relationship manager. With myWealth, investors can take advantage of personalised buy-and-sell investment ideas that are customised to their specific goals and requirements. These insights are generated from the client’s perspective. Using a four-step proprietary process, myWealth’s sophisticated algorithms analyse a client’s holdings with the bank and categorises them based on underlying asset classes. Factoring in the individual’s risk profile, the platform compares the client’s current asset allocation against the bank’s model portfolio, which is designed by experts who balance potential risks and returns among all asset classes with the latest market findings. It then rates the investment ideas delivered to the client into a number of intuitive categories –including “Strong Buy”, “Buy”, “Strong Sell” and “Sell” –based on the gap in the suggested asset class. Users can benefit from the bank’s data-driven solution and team of investment experts, who digest massive amounts of market data from various information sources to provide clients with distilled, relevant, and actionable investment ideas that they can act on in a timely fashion.
HSBC plans to transform Hong Kong from a bustling financial centre into an open canvas through immersive art experiences and a metaverse gallery. The global financial brand has collaborated with new media creator Henry Chu to create an immersive 3D digital billboard in Hong Kong’s busy Tsim Sha Tsui Star Ferry Pier. Chu, whose work has been exhibited in some of the world’s most prestigious museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Hong Kong Museum of Art and M+ Museum in Hong Kong, will form part of a rotation of artists' work on the site. HSBC will also drive people to its metaverse Gallery, which serves as a site for local artists to showcase their work and includes creations by Flyingpig, Wong Ping and Yeung Hok Tak. The ‘Open to Art’ metaverse initiative also transforms traditional art into immersive experiences. The campaign was created by HSBC’s agency MSL Hong Kong to modernize people’s access to art and change how people in Hong Kong experience art and culture.
SINGAPORE
In countries like Singapore, regulatory bodies ensure data produced in the country is well-secured and protected. However, close to three in four Singaporean consumers (74%) report that companies rarely educate them about data collection policies or data management options, and more than half (52%) believe data policies are written to protect companies’ legal interests rather than their own. To meet consumer demands for customer-centric data permission models, Visa is collaborating with IMDA to explore the industry-led development of consent standards such as consent purpose and consent flow models to strengthen consumer understanding, control, and comfort with data sharing. Regardless if consumers are shopping online for groceries or completing mobile banking transactions, Kim states that improving the way businesses request for and manage consumer data is critical to providing consumers with frictionless online commerce and payment experiences. Improving how businesses request data might increase consumer trust and make them more likely to grant permission to use their personal data. More than two in three Singapore consumers (67%) believe that all companies should be required to offer standardized requests for collecting personal data, while roughly three in five (64%) say they are more likely to grant permission to companies if standardized requests are offered.
Supermom, a parenting platform with 20 million users in six Southeast Asian countries, offers parents price comparisons, communities and the chance to earn money by completing surveys. For brands, it gives them a way to conduct market research and collect first-party data, which is important as marketers prepare for a post-cookie world. Supermom currently has a presence in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam and Thailand, and plans to expand into more markets. Over 200 consumer brands use Supermom for marketing research, including Kimberly Clark, Procter & Gamble and Philips. Then in 2019, Supermom’s team decided they wanted to scale across Southeast Asia, so they pivoted their focus from community events to digital marketing. Supermom’s market research platform for businesses lets brands perform market testing with very targeted groups of people. In addition to writing reviews or participating in surveys, parents can apply to be brand ambassadors through Supermom, and when they do, brands can see their number of followers on social media and what groups they are in. Surveys can be launched simultaneously in six countries, with specific users invited to take them. To set up a survey, brands select a country, then filter for specific demographics like age of kids. In addition to their own surveys, brands also get information like brand indexing, or a ranking of which brands are most trusted by consumers. That data can be broken down by demographic—for example, researchers can see if a brand is used by 50% of mothers aged over 30 years, and then narrow that down by disposable income level.
The latest research by DBS on digital transformation found widespread enthusiasm among companies to digitalise customer experience and engagement but they faced significant challenges in achieving success. The research revealed that 64% of businesses globally carried out a structured approach to customer-facing digital transformation with a further 33% pursuing ad-hoc upgrades. Nonetheless, just 17% said their activity in this area had been very effective, and about four in 10 (39%) said their transformation efforts had either failed or were underwhelming. Singapore companies (70%) led their global peers in taking a strategic, consistent or radical approach to digitalising customer experience and engagement. Their key priorities for digital transformation were increasing efficiency (47%) and improving collaboration across functions and teams (37%). Shared adoption of a strategic vision was most important (41%) from a corporate culture perspective to support successful digital transformation. Unclear organisational strategy(45%) and gaps in talent (40%) were the top barriers preventing organisations from achieving faster progress in transforming digitally. The respondents cited Cloud (61%), advanced analytics (53%) and real-time payments (41%) as the most important digital and payments technologies for realising digital transformation within treasury and finance.Within the treasury function, they prioritized digitisation in investments (50%), cash and liquidity management (35%), procurement (32%), financial reporting (31%) and corporate finance (23%). In partnering with external companies to develop banking innovation and digital transformation, close to half (40%) preferred partnering with banks, fintechs (23%), and a combination of partnerships with banks, fintechs and consultants (26%).To help businesses achieve commercial goals, supply chain/procurement (34%) was the most urgent area that needed digital transformation, followed closely by sales & marketing (32%) with HR being the least.
SINGAPORE’S main crypto lobby group has pushed back on the central bank’s proposals to bar crypto firms from lending out retail customers’ digital tokens, saying such a measure is “overly restrictive.”The Blockchain Association of Singapore said such a blanket ban could instead push people to seek out unregulated offshore firms to lend their tokens. The document disagreed on areas like offering retail incentives though agreed to suggestions such as barring customers from borrowing to buy crypto tokens and segregation of customer assets from the company’s own. On the issue of lending tokens, the association said this allows customers to earn interest, which is one of the attractions of holding digital payment tokens. Singapore’s central bank has proposed a range of tighter measures to ringfence retail customers from the volatile cryptocurrency market, including restricting firms from lending or staking their coins to generate yields and stopping individuals from borrowing to fund token purchases. The group also disagreed on imposing a complete ban on firms giving incentives to retail customers, calling the proposal “too draconian”. It suggested a more nuanced approach of allowing gifts that are not linked to financial purchases, such as door gifts at roadshows.
CHINA
China has added a new Tap to Pay function to its digital yuan payment app so that mobile phone can still be used to make payments without internet connection or power. Users need to activate the function in the e-yuan app and can choose how many times it can be used and how much can be paid after their phone shuts down. The system is available with Android-based mobile phones and will be available on other handsets in the future. The convenient function has sparked security concerns, particularly about whether other people could spend money using a lost or stolen mobile phone. But a verification code needs to be entered on the device if payment exceeds the code-free quota, and payment will continue only if it passes the system check. Paying offline or without power is a non-mainstream scenario but it can help users without physical cash to pay in some situations.?
Tencent Holdings Ltd.-backed WeDoctor plans to file for an initial public offering by the end of April, the latest sign of increased capital activity from China’s internet companies as regulators soften their stance. The Hangzhou-based firm is preparing to go public in either the US or Hong Kong. WeDoctor, one of the larger startups trying to transform China’s healthcare system with advanced technology, is taking another go at listing after its previous attempts got disrupted. Like many other companies, it’s had to lay off a substantial chunk of its workforce amid a tech-sector downturn and adjust its operations to appease regulators.WeDoctor raised about $163 million at a post-money valuation of more than $7 billion from a single investor backed by the Shandong government in September.
Alipay+, China’s tech giant Ant Group payment solution, has planned to enable greater QR code payments connectivity for Asian tourists in the Chinese mainland. The cross-border digital payment provider is looking to provide cash-free and mobile-friendly travel experiences for all Asian tourists coming to mainland China for shopping or travelling, as it allows its AlipayHK users to pay for their metro rides in Shenzhen using their local app. As the demand for travels between mainland Hong Kong to China remains strong and cross-border activities start to get back to normal, the Chinese tech group expects to see a wider adoption of AlipayHK on the Chinese mainland. The payment solution provider was already adopted by millions of citizens across the continent who are eager to return to their international travels. Powered by Alipay+ solutions, AlipayHK is currently accepted by most of China’s mainland convenient stores, cafes, restaurants, supermarkets, bubble tea shops, hotels, and other tourist spots, allowing customers to scan the same local merchant’s QR code for payment or present their in-app QR code to be scanned by the merchant for payment.
领英推荐
Internet-based platforms have formed a new model to support high-quality employment, which plays an increasingly important role in supporting China's "employment first" strategy. In 2022, Tencent's digital ecosystem had 147 new occupations, mainly in the fields of cloud and smart industry ecology, interactive entertainment and marketing. Among the 74 new occupations released by the country after 2019, new occupations developed by Tencent accounted for about 20 percent, the report said. Tencent's digital ecology is expected to create 31.8 million new jobs in the coming five years, the report predicted. The annual Central Economic Work Conference, held in December in Beijing, said that the government supports platform companies in leading development, creating jobs, and playing their full potential in spearheading international competition. Relying on technological progress, platforms can improve productivity with the help of digitization, networking and intelligence, which will continue to create high-quality jobs, said Zhang Yansheng, chief research fellow with the China Center for International Economic Exchanges.
ASIA
J.P. Morgan has brought its merchant services business to Asia, focused on e-commerce and other businesses that need to accept digital payment methods. Its move is part of a wave of global banks looking to reassert primacy in the merchant acquirer space of payments, with Citi and HSBC among those institutions that had once retreated and are now revitalizing this business. Apart from defending their other business lines, global banks are returning to the fray to take advantage of what they view as newly attractive segments of acquirer business that arose from digital commerce. Local markets, which were once isolated, are now global. This creates an opportunity for acquirers to offer an expanded range of services including real-time payments, cross-border payments and omnichannel merchant services. J.P. Morgan’s merchant services business in Asia will stick to big and fast-growing customers that need a regional solution, rather than go after purely domestic business.?
Spurred by increasing regulation, better technologies, a growing demand among both global and local firms to access local currency instruments – and the COVID-19 pandemic, buy-side fixed income and currency desks in Asia Pacific are fast catching up with other regions and other asset classes in their use of electronic execution when transferring risk. Digital marketplaces such as Tradeweb used this behavioral shift to further expand into the region, both in terms of product coverage and people on the ground. That move supports a growing selection of instruments available for institutional investors to trade electronically, be they hedge funds, long-only funds, or asset owners such as sovereign wealth funds, insurers, and pension funds. More recently, Tradeweb has rolled out its rules-based automated intelligent execution tool, or AiEX, locally to help APAC traders fully automate tickets of varying sizes and complexities. By using automated execution solutions such as AiEX, dealers can initiate trades simply by sending Tradeweb a FIX message instead of manually inputting an order’s specifics. AiEX pulls in multiple sources of historical and live data to provide analytics, such as transaction cost analysis, and complete trades if all pre-programmed parameters are met.?
ATX Fintech Holding SdnBhd has partnered with Mastercard Inc to launch an electronic billing and payment tool called Mastercard Bill Pay in Malaysia, marking the facility’s debut in the Asia-Pacific. The collaboration enables Malaysian consumers to view and consolidate bills from multiple billers on ATX’s digital wallet Gopay or access it via its web-based platform Payhub2u. The bill management tool addresses the existing bill presentment and payment experience problems which tend to be cumbersome where consumers need to remember multiple login credentials to access each of their biller’s websites or apps to view, retrieve, and pay individual statements. The bill management tool will also soon launch new features such as payment scheduling, e-bill viewing, bill analytic dashboards in the Gopay app, and payment instalment options.
Grab Vietnam added e-wallet ZaloPay to its ride-hailing app, marrying two of the Southeast Asian country’s most popular platforms in the latest example of concentration in the fast-growing technology sector. The two startups aim “to gain access to large consumer bases of each other,” said a statement on Monday from VNG, the parent of Zalo and a contender to be Vietnam’s only listed company in the US. Vietnamese are able to pay for Grab rides and delivery with Zalo in an echo of last year’s partnership between Indonesian ride-hailing rival Gojek and Vietnam’s biggest e-wallet, MoMo.As the tech firms jockey for dominance in the communist country of 100 million people, the tie-ups offer a chance to bring more users into their ecosystems. They also raise questions about potential concentration in superapps, with Grab Vietnam—a unit of Singapore-based Grab—leading the ride-hailing market and offering other services like hotel bookings. Zalo’s messenger service is the most popular in Vietnam and is linked to an even bigger range of features, like utility payments, while also enabling food delivery via South Korea’s Baemin.
Hitachi Payment Services, India’s foremost end-to-end payment solutions provider, has received the in-principle authorisation from Reserve Bank of India to act as a payment aggregator.PaymentAggregators (PAs) are entities that facilitate e-commerce sites and merchants to accept various payment instruments from customers for completion of their payment obligations. PAs facilitate merchants to connect with acquirers. Hitachi Payments is a leading digital payment solutions provider and the payment aggregator licence will further augment its digital solutions stack with various online payment solutions such as UPI, Netbanking, Cards and Wallets. This will enable its B2B customers to provide all digital payment products along with value-added services such as EMI, Paylater, BBPS and loyalty solutions to their merchants. Thus, effectively allowing them to offer one-stop digital payment services.
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) may soon allow credit cards issued by Mastercard and Visa to be linked to the nation’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) payments system. At present, only select credit cards issued by RuPay, the card payment scheme launched by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) in 2012, are allowed to be used on the UPI system. Although UPI has been around in India since 2016, it was only recently that the RBI allowed credit cards to be integrated to the increasingly popular payment system. An October 2022 circular issued by India’s central bank allowing certain RuPay credit cards to be linked to UPI system was seen as a move that will deepen the scope of UPI as well as increase credit card penetration in India. In November 2022, fintech company In-Solutions Global Ltd (ISG) stated that the integration of credit card with UPI will result in a 30-fold increase in credit card acceptance. This is because UPI will open up 21 crores UPI QR payment terminals to credit cards in addition to the existing 70 lakh point-of-sale (PoS) terminals where credit cards are accepted. However, the integration of RuPay credit cards with UPI included a provision that transactions above Rs 2000 will attract MDR, as applies to regular credit card transactions. Further, this MDR will also be shared between the credit card issuer, UPI app and other payment providers involved in the transaction and settlement process.
India’s UPI is planning to go global with cross-border payments, and the most anticipated step forward for that is its integration with its equivalent in Singapore called PayNow.The amalgamation set to start anytime soon, will bring remittance for transactions down to 10 per cent. Currently, 1 billion in Singapore Dollars is sent as remittance to India to 200-300 million Singapore Dollars flow out of India. But Singapore is just the beginning of a similar system to be developed between India and UAE as well as other countries. Singapore and Indonesia already enjoy a partnership through PayNow and PromPay. India will also provide UPI technologies and codes for free to countries building infrastructures to facilitate digital payments.
Indonesia-focused embedded fintech and banking solutions provider DigiAsia Bios Pte Ltd announced a business combination agreement with a publicly traded special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) StoneBridge Acquisition Corporation to further strengthen its presence in Southeast Asia. The combined entity, which will be named DigiAsia, will be traded on The Nasdaq Stock Market under the ticker symbol ‘FAAS’. The capital raised via IPO and the subsequent execution will help establish Digi as a clear leader in the white-labeled digital wallets and Banking-as-a-Service verticals in the region. The new combined entity could access as much as $200 million in net cash from the Stonebridge trust account, assuming no redemptions by Stonebridge public shareholders. It has also secured up to $100 million in equity financing from Yorkville Advisors Global, LP, including a pre-paid advance of up to $30 million in three tranches.?
India-based Axis Bank has partnered with digital bank OPEN to offer a fully native digital current account journey for its customers. This partnership offers the larger business community access to Axis Bank’s holistic banking experience coupled with OPEN’s end-to-end financial automation tools for business management including payments, accounting, payroll, compliance, expense management, and several other services. The partnership is one of the first for Axis Bank with a fintech player to launch a fully digital current account. This digital current account product will help customers save time and effort, as the authentication process will be completely digital using PAN and Aadhaar followed by a Video KYC. A contactless account opening process that takes away the hassle of paperwork with a zero document upload feature, makes this current account product different. Using this account, customers can avail 250+ banking services and claim up to 50% cash back through grab-deals. With this partnership, all existing Axis bank account holders also get access to OPEN’s all-in-one digital banking platform that is used by over 3,000,000 businesses currently.
BLOCKCHAIN - CRYPTO - DIGITAL ASSETS - DE FI
Goldman Sachs recently announced that the bank’s new Digital Asset Platform, GS DAPTM, is live– one year into their engagement of Digital Asset. GS DAPTM is developed on top of Digital Asset’s Daml smart contract language and Canton, its privacy-enabled blockchain. Daml-based tokenization platforms, such as GS DAPTM, capture the full complexity of rights, obligations, and cash flows throughout the lifecycles of assets. They can also make the digital representation and workflow accessible and fully automatable across distributed interconnected ecosystems of participants. Additionally, Digital Asset ensures that data is only shared with entitled stakeholders with its privacy protocols while supporting the scalability necessary to connect assets globally. The European Investment Bank is the first to leverage Goldman Sachs’ new Digital Asset Platform, issuing the first fully digital bond on a private blockchain. The bond issuance settlement time for the European Investment Bank was reduced from T+5 to T+0 at a speed of sub-60 seconds with cross-chain atomic Delivery versus Payment (DvP) settlement in this inaugural issuance.?
Milk Partners (CEO Jayden Jo) operating the blockchain-based reward integration platform ‘MiL.k’, has sped up its global expansion in 2023 by joining the Rewards 2 No End campaign by Southeast Asia’s leading full-spectrum fintech player, Boost. In January 9th, Milk Partners announced its first new year co-marketing activity with Boost, the full spectrum fintech arm of Axiata with a holistic fintech ecosystem –one of which is its all-in-one fintech app that has over 10 million users. MiL.k is collaborating with Boost by joining the ‘Boost Rewards 2 No End campaign’ that offers Malaysian users exclusive prizes and offers. Through the campaign, users will receive 1,500 Boost Stars and stand the chance to win much-sought-after exclusive prizes when successfully downloading and registering as a MiL.k user using the referral code “BOOSTNMILK”, then submitting the relevant details to the dedicated event page. The Boost Stars earned can be utilized to redeem even more amazing discounts and rewards, such as ‘Partner Wallet’ credits, ‘Pay With Stars’, ‘Pick & Win’, and more on the Boost app. Through this collaboration, MiL.k is expected to increase its brand awareness and recruit new global users in Malaysia. MiL.k is also expected to generate marketing synergy of global expansion with its first global partnership with AirAsia since MiL.k had partnered with AirAsia in last September and opened the point exchange service on MiL.k app in December 2022. With diverse co-marketing activities with key local partners like Boost and AirAsia, MiL.k will keep developing MiL.k’s global ecosystem along with its global expansion.
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