Author: Ong Kai Kiat

Blockchain is one of the exciting technology for the financial industry. The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) had partnered with banks and blockchain technology company, R3 to pilot a proof of concept to use blockchain for payments in November 2016. That came hots on the heels of the report that MAS was partnering with banks such as HSBC to come up with trials on blockchain for trade finance in August 2016. The potential of blockchain to simplify complex trade finance process and to provide immutable records for regulatory and financing purposes have been much heralded. However, they have always been…

Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent (BAT) are the three most prominent technology companies from China. The Co-founder of PayPal, Peter Thiel, had famously remarked that Beijing had a startup culture that is second only to Silicon Valley. The rise of the Chinese tech scene is the envy of the world. NTU research fellows Lim Wee Kiat and Jeremy Chen wrote a case study about it and this is an summary of its highlights. China’s Unicorpse & The Shanghai Bullet Proof Vest Let us begin with something counter-intuitive : failure. Behind the BAT glory, it is a well known fact that most…

Mobile payment is a major source of financial innovation which is gaining traction rapidly around the world. China is the number 1 market with US$67.7 billion transaction followed by the United States at US$24.9 billion and the United Kingdom at US$2.8 billion until December 2016 according to Statista. One can see that there is a sizable difference between even the top 3 countries globally. Hong Kong had made US$229.8 million worth of transactions in 2016 and there are room for rapid growth. If you recall, we wrote about how Hong Kong granted stored value facilities for the initial 5 digital payment…

A lot of link has been spilled about the potential of fintech and insurtech for the Asia Pacific region. However, we don’t have as much reports which looks at these two industries from the point of regulatory risks and trends. This is important because brilliant technologies can suffer regulatory setbacks. For instance, Uber was suffered from regulatory flip-flops in Indonesia since its entry in 2014. The President of Indonesia rolled back the ban in December 2015 but 12,000 protesters challenged Uber’s legality in March 2016. The latest news in December 2016 is that regulations have changed again and car-hailing companies…

Hong Kong is a well known financial centre in Asia which serves as a gateway to China. According to one of the subsidiary Hong Kong Exchange, there are 157 licensed banks and 1280 licensed money lenders in Hong Kong. So Much Untapped Potential For Peer To Peer Lending The market for licensed money lenders had increased exponentially over the 5 years. Source: Hong Kong Growth Enterprise Market (HKGEM) The universities of Cambridge, Sydney and Tsinghua and KPMG did a combined research on the US$102.8 billion peer to peer market in Asia. The study shows that Hong Kong is lagging behind…

Singapore might be the leading financial technology (fintech) hub but it has to contend with a new challenger : Taiwan. The recent fintech festival shows that the Singapore Government is looking at fintech seriously and so is the Taiwanese government. Taiwan made its first preparatory move with legislation in January 2015 which supports fintech development. This is followed by the announcement by the local regulator to use fintech as part of financial reform to improve Taiwan’s competitiveness in May 2016. Taiwanese Government Support For Fintech & Crowdfunding Given the enthusiastic government support, Taiwan’s fintech industry had blossomed. Fintech is a…