Neat, a Hong Kong-based financial technology startup, announced its partnership with Snowflake, a cloud data platform. Under the new partnership, Neat will utilise Snowflake’s cloud data platform to integrate their data into a single source for data harmonisation, enabling business teams to leverage data insights. Neat is best known as a payment solutions provider, serves SMEs in Asia and Europe by offering access to financial tools such as foreign exchange, online account opening, and corporate cards for fast and efficient international and multi-currency transactions. To enhance customer experience, and as a digital only company, Neat adopted Snowflake’s cloud data platform to…

A recent report published by consulting firm EPAM Continuum outlined behaviors, expectations and motivations, with key findings suggesting that, despite recent innovations in financial services, the fundamental behavioral drivers of customers remain largely unchanged. The report surveyed 4,500 people across key banking regions including the United Kingdom, the United States, Hong Kong and Singapore. The report said that for any radical change to happen, banks need to become more ubiquitous and have the ability to seamlessly integrate with the platforms and services that make up their customers’ personal digital ecosystem in order to bring banking to them – not the…

The Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute (ASTRI) has partnered with the University of Hong Kong (HKU) to jointly nurture fintech talent in the region. The agreement will see both parties develop the Technology Oriented Practitioner (TOP) programme, a work-study scheme for first-year students enrolled on the MSc programme in FinTech and Data Analytics at HKU. Following that, ASTRI will be providing paid full-time employment for up to 30 students for a nine-month period and assigning them to one of their many ongoing fintech projects. Hugh Chow, Chief Executive Officer of ASTRI, said: “We are fully committed to…

Hong Kong based ZA Bank announced that it has selected Accuity, provider of financial crime screening, payments and counterparty know your customer (KYC) solutions. The virtual bank has implemented Accuity’s screening solution to improve customer experiences, and at the same time, meet domestic and international regulatory requirements. Accuity’s Firco solution operationalises three key steps: automated alert detection, reduction of false positive alerts, and prioritisation of high-risk alerts. This allows ZA Bank to generate an electronic audit trail that acts as retrospective proof of the bank’s compliance policies in action, for sharing with auditors and regulators. Under Hong Kong’s regulatory and…

Livi bank has selected Wolters Kluwer, American Dutch information services company, for its Regulatory Reporting solution to manage the bank’s regulatory reporting obligations. livi had recently launched its virtual banking app to Hong Kong customers. The bank is backed by Bank of China Hong Kong (Holdings), Jingdong Digits Technology and the Jardine Matheson Group. The solution combines bank data into a single source of data to ensure consistency, reconciliation and accuracy, and includes Wolters Kluwer’s Regulatory Update Service. “We are delighted to be working with livi bank as it commences its operations to provide its innovative banking offering. We look…

Hong Kong’s insurance industry worth US$66 billion (HK$552 billion) in the past years has provided a fertile ground for the digitalisation push by innovative insurtech startups in the region.  The current pandemic has created a positive shift to accelerate digital adoption by consumers which can be leveraged by startups looking to enhance customer-centricity in their products and services.  This development has been spurred on by digital tech park Cyberport which houses over 30 insurtech companies seeking to accelerate the industry’s digital transformation.  Among them are Cyberport incubatees PortfoPlus and 10Life, who are on a mission to remove the complexities from…

From September 10 to 12, 2020, Huawei will be hosting its annual developer conference, a multi-day event expected to bring together more than 400 industry veterans and over 500 tech firms to discuss the latest trends and technologies set to transform software and app development. For this year, the Huawei Developer Conference 2020 (Together) will delve into some of the emerging technologies and how companies and developers must prepare for the new era of intelligence and interconnectivity. It will also include an exciting line-up of announcements, with Huawei set to share the latest on HMS Core 5.0, HarmonyOS, and EMUI…

Recent research by gini, shows 66.7% of respondents feel their bank should be doing more to improve online services during the pandemic, with one of the major pain points being the lack of clarity in the way information is displayed on transaction histories. gini describes itself as a data enrichment fintech. The survey showed that 81.7% of respondents have seen transactions they don’t recognise on their statements, and the majority used the words, “worried”, “annoyed” and “frustrated” to describe how this problem makes them feel. While the problem of unrecognised transactions is not a new one, the compounded effect of…

Alibaba’s Ant Group announced that its inaugural INCLUSION Fintech Conference originally scheduled for April 2020, will now take place in September 24-26, 2020, in Shanghai. Organised by Ant Group and Alipay, the conference will feature a combination of online and onsite events to enable a global discussion among the financial and technology communities on how digital technology can help build a more inclusive, green, and sustainable world, especially as economies and businesses continue to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. The INCLUSION Fintech Conference will present over 40 online and offline sessions, with 13,000 square meters in onsite exhibition space. To…

EMQ, a financial settlement network, announced that it has further expanded its real-time international payment capabilities across Vietnam, leveraging National Payments Corporation of Vietnam (NAPAS) – the country’s domestic payment network. This announcement follows their recent fundraising round of US$ 20 million Series B led by WI Harper Group. EMQ was also accepted into Taiwan’s Regulatory Sandbox by the Financial Supervisory Commission in Taiwan. “Southeast Asia is growing at an unprecedented pace with Vietnam as the fastest growing economy, and it is fuelling the demands for a network infrastructure like EMQ that facilitates in minutes cross-border payments across the region,”…

Banks in Hong Kong have been integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into various key functional areas in a bid to reduce costs and improve customer experience, according to an industry-wide survey conducted by Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA). In a report titled Artificial Intelligence in Banking: The Changing Landscape in Compliance and Supervision, the Hong Kong Institute for Monetary and Financial Research (HKIMR), the research arm of the Hong Kong Academy of Finance (AoF), shares findings from a HKMA study as part of a broader research project on the adoption of AI in banking. According to the report, the use of…

In Hong Kong, virtual banking is bringing in new opportunities to serve the financially underserved, a segment new entrants including WeLab Bank, Airstar Bank and Mox by Standard Chartered, are actively pursuing. Despite being a leading financial center, Hong Kong’s brick-and-mortar lenders are primarily focused on richer segments, leaving hundreds of thousands of customers up for grabs. These make up an estimated US$15 billion, or 30% of Hong Kong’s combined retail banking revenue. In a webinar organised by Fintech News Hong Kong, we’ve invited the C-levels of Hong Kong’s virtual banks to discuss how this new breed of banks will…

Changing customer expectations, the rise of big techs, and COVID-19 are accelerating banks’ digital transformation, forcing them to upgrade their infrastructure to meet the requirements of the data-intensive era, experts said. At the Huawei APAC FSI Data Storage Summit virtual event, experts from Huawei and China Construction Bank Asia discussed the need for the financial services industry to respond rapidly to the long-lasting market changes that have been brought in by COVID-19. These not only include rising demand for contactless and remote services, but also includes changing working conditions. During a panel discussion on the future of banking, Johnny Chung, general manager…

Despite the protests and the COVID-19 pandemic, the Hong Kong society has maintained a positive sentiment on the growth prospect of the city’s fintech industry, according to the Hong Kong Fintech Buzz Index (FBI). The Hong Kong FBI, a quarterly index representing a quantified sentiment of the local fintech-related news in local Chinese news media, has remained stable since Q4 2019, hovering between 101.3 in Q4 2019 and 101.6 in Q2 2020, suggesting that despite the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and social unrest, the community’s sentiment towards fintech has remained stable. In particular, subsegments including insurtech, wealthtech, and regtech and cybersecurity…

Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission (SFC), has issued an approval-in-principle for OSL, Asia’s digital asset platform and member of BC Technology Group, to operate a virtual asset trading platform. The platform will be operated under a license for Type 1 (dealing in securities) and Type 7 for automated trading service (ATS) regulated activities under SFC’s virtual asset licensing framework in Hong Kong. Once the conditions for the final approval are satisfied, the license will permit OSL to operate a brokerage and automated trading service for digital assets, including security tokens (STOs). The company is said to be “on track to…

Recently, a security firm looked into the apps available on Google Play Store and the App store stated that over 85% of those apps violates at least one security risk. About half of these applications had insecure data storage or were working with an insecure communication risk. Proper assessments can provide assurance on the security of mobile apps and APIs. By entrusting security concerns to experts, companies can actually save time and focus more on their primary concern which is making a profit. They reduce risks and implement actionable security measures to improve safety as well as meet the mandatory…

Neat, a Hong Kong-based fintech startup, announced that it has raised a US$4 million extension to their US$11 million Series A round which closed in April 2020. The company provides an online company incorporation package and fully-digital multi-currency wallet to fit the needs of international entrepreneurs today. Existing investors MassMutual Ventures, Pacific Century Group, Linear Capital and Robby Hilkowitz as well as new investor Vectr Fintech participated in the Series A extension. Neat’s vision is to enable the entrepreneur economy and support SMEs trading globally. While global travel has come to a standstill, cross-border trade has not. SMEs trading internationally…

BC Technology Group, a digital asset and fintech company as well as the parent company of OSL, announced that it has acquired the core intellectual property assets of blockchain engineering firm Enuma Technologies, and on-boarded the Enuma team, including CEO Antoine Cote. The acquisition includes bridgepoint.io, a software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based digital asset portfolio management system, market data infrastructure, algorithmic pricing and lending platform with blockchain integration, which will supplement BC Group’s OSL platform product offerings to regulated asset managers, and will eventually be integrated into OSL’s deep liquidity pools. BC Group and its OSL platform are focused on servicing the growing…

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) granted eight virtual banking licenses in the first half of 2019, and at the time, the regulator and the operators expected services to commence within the next six to nine months. Now more than a year later, just four out of the eight licensees have launched operation, and with COVID-19, the ensuing economic downturn, and Hong Kong’s social unrest, it is an open question whether the remaining virtual banks will even be able to open by the end of 2020. According to Gary Ng, partner in the risk assurance practice of PwC Hong Kong,…

Hong Kong based Crypto.com announced that it has named Steven Kalifowitz as its Chief Marketing Officer. Kalifowitz was most recently the president of Localize.city, growing it from a seed-stage startup in 2017 to one of the most quoted brands in real estate news, with a global team of 170+ people. From 2010-2017 Steven was based in Singapore, where he led business for R/GA and Twitter across 20 countries throughout APAC and MENA. Steven’s diverse client list included MasterCard, Emirates Airlines, ANZ Bank, Samsung, Johnson & Johnson, American Eagle, UOB Bank, King Fisher, Nokia, and more. His hire comes at a…