Singapore FinTech Festival 2021 was a great event where there was a chance to listen to all the wonderful speakers across the world on a variety of topics relating to Web3.0. This blog post will summarize some of the talks during the festival. The festival is a great learning experience for anyone, as it brings together some of the best people and the best companies in the world.

Day-1 [2021-11-08 Mon]

Market-changing Impact Series: Decentralised Financial Products

Web 3.0 is here. Web 3.0 is open, permissionless and trustless. What would happen if financial institutions aren’t the sole gatekeepers of trust?

In a world where there are no gatekeepers, what would new finance services look like? How would we design and evolve our business models?

Balaji Srinivasan, an angel investor, entrepreneur, and prominent futurist discusses decentralised financial products and his thesis on the rise of the network state.

Speakers and Moderator

• Balaji Srinivasan
• Sopnendu Mohanty

Notes

Web 3.0 is primarily about a backend change. If we put the history in to perspective, Web1.0 is akin to peer to peer communication. Web 2.0 is a hub and spoke model, whereas Web 3.0 is a client-blockchain-client network. Any one can be a client and any one can be server. In order to be a client, you need some form digital currency so that you can enter the network and record something on the block chain. If you have enough compute, you can become the server that is powering the blockchain. In a sense, Web 3.0 is taking the best aspects of Web1.0 and Web2.0.

One can think of Web 2.0 participants as the ones who cannot be privileged root user. May be if you have a google badge, you can access google servers as a privileged root account. In the Web 3.0 world, anyone can be a root user and there is no need to take permission from anyone. There are whole group of people who can present their digital identity and can manage debits and credits. Also in Web 2.0, the value was not digitized. Information got digitized but the intermediaries were the gatekeepers and extractors of value.

One can think of Web 3.0 of Visa + Fed Reserve + bunch of other functionalities rolled up in to one technology. With the fast adoption of this technology, what was once thought of as unattainable such as competing with the data centers of google, facebook, is no longer so. Another way to think of Web3.0 is a tech stack that contains a significant block chain component. Web 3.0 is about simultaneous root access privileges and that is game changing.

FinTech in the yesteryears were basically frontends (snazzy, agile) for the legacy backend infrastructure. That part is going to change where FinTech at the front end and Blockchain at the backend will bring significant changes to financial services. Paypal and Stripe have essentially front ends working with the same legacy backend infrastructure.

The digital currencies can be broadly categorized in to Decentralized crypto currencies and CBDCs. It will be interesting to see how these currency forms will coexist.

One can think of all assets living in a DeFi matrix where there will be a digital coins, NFTs, CBDCs, stocks, bonds, everything. The interactions between these assets will be dependent on the liquidity of the market place, trust, regulation and a ton of other aspects. One can think of DeFi in this way so that one can start looking for patterns such as

• Which asset clusters are being traded ?
• Which asset clusters are being held for long term ?
• Which assets work well with in tiny market places ?
• Which CBDC’s are doing well ?

About the ecosystem as such, it is cities, states that will start playing an important role in designing policies that help founders and funders to flourish. Pockets of clusters are going to compete against each other for human capital.

In order to learn about this technology, it is better to start with some crypto currency. Get a few crypto currency, create a wallet, play with some defi apps and then get a feel of the way this space. Buying some form of crypto is akin to having laptop or phone in order to browse the internet

“Build Web 3.0 in SG” is the one liner twitter message from the speaker

Reflections

• Have never traded cryptos or dabbled in to it. It was almost a year ago when my friend urged me to get in to this but I have been putting off. May be I should start playing with these coins to get a good education on the way these currencies work and the mechanics behind them
• Wow, a company built by a few kids in India, https://www.instadp.com/ , is doing really well within a few years time. What exactly is the protocol they have built ? What is the techstack behind the protocol ? Have they open sourced it ?
• Need to read through what exactly has China done in CBDC space
• What has been the thinking behind Latam countries that are issuing CDBCs ?
• How difficult is it to create a NFT ? How difficult is it to put it for sale ? Have no idea at all on what this entails. Might have to dig through this to get atleast a basic understanding of the space

How Financial Services Will Change - Capital Markets ?

In a world where finance industry is decentralising, how will the capital markets be moving in the next one to three years?

From exchange rate, capital movement and monetary policy to financial services, Vikram Pandit, current CEO of The Orogen Group and former Citigroup CEO, will discuss the current applications at play. And how you can create your own CEO strategy in the Web 3.0 era.

Speakers and Moderator

• Vikram Pandit
• Haslinda Amin

Notes

The changes in the financial sector will be evolutionary and not revolutionary. They will completely dependent on the way regulators come up with the new regulations around many of the concepts around crypto world. There are some obvious areas where wholesale banking is trying to make changes by taking the technology and replacing a part of the workflow such as clearing and settlement, cross border trade settlement, custody. However the real change will happen when you look at the technology for what it is and then adopt it to transform the business architecture. In today’s world, two people can execute a transaction based on a smart contract. The regulator should look at this state and think about ways to improve it by thinking about

• How should I add value to the current transaction that might have taken place with reference to a physical asset ?
• How should I add value by providing some infra so that the bipartite transaction is fair?

The above are fundamentally different questions than taking something that is already existing and retrofitting to the existing technology.

It is clear that Digital goods are in a supercyle and there will GDP boosters that will be unleashed by these goods. World around clever entrepreneurs will start asking questions like, why not have books on a defi network, why not have email that is built on a defi network? The path towards a successful defi environment will be messy but will eventually happen.

In today’s world, banks have many services bundled up and that is sometimes leading to massive inefficiencies. Defi and Web 3.0 will unbundle the services and the regulatory services will also have to be unbundled.

Stable coins are interesting as they are the perfect example of one foot in the old world and another in the new world. The way to think of stable coins is to visualize them as interoperable containers. The regulation around stable coins will be a very interesting thing to watch out.

The crystal ball projection is that in the next 1 to 3 years, every financial services firm would want to trade crypto asset class.

Reflections

• What are some of the DeFi applications that have been taken up by banks on a private blockchain network ?
• Need to understand the way DeFi protocols that are being written
• What are some of the DeFi applications that have been taken up by banks on a public blockchain network ?
• What does one mean when someone says that digital goods are in a supercycle ?
  • Hartmann Capital Research explains it
• Why did Nigeria take the route of CBDC issuance to retail public ?
• What are DAO’s and what is their purpose:
  • DAO decentralized autonomous organizations
  • Their objective is to provide a new decentralized business model for organizing both commercial and non-profit enterprises
• There are some fantastic articles by Hartmann Capital that I will have to read through, to get an idea of what investors are thinking about this
• Came across Substack

We started Substack because we believe that what you read matters and that good writing is valuable.When readers pay writers directly, writers can focus on doing the work they care about most. A few hundred paid subscribers can support a livelihood. A few thousand makes it lucrative.

How Financial Services Will Change - Insurance ?

The insurance products we have today were built to fit the economy and needs of the past. With the waves of Web 3.0 hitting the shores, will you surf or drown? How will the insurance industry be riding the waves of Web 3.0?

Come join the fireside session by the duo Julian Teicke, Co-founder and CEO of wefox, Europe’s largest digital insurer and Mike Wells, Chief Executive of Prudential Group. From IoT, AI, smart contracts to alternative insurance products and premium models, the duo will discuss what the new waves in insurance look like.

Speakers and Moderator

• Julian Teicke - wefox
• Mike Wells
• Haslinda Amin

Notes

This session had representation from a successful fintech insurance player, wefox and behemoth in the space prudential. Insurance is a $5.2T market. Both the speakers were unanimous in their opinion that technology has upped the game for insurance players where it is the customer experience that will be the game changer for winning market share. Even though many models in the actuarial world are dated back to old small data parametric models, the new models using big data are already in pray. Prudential, a 172 year old company has upped its ante with its Pulse platform that has seen 30 million downloads, thanks to covid where the fundamental interaction between the various players in the industry has gone digital. wefox a firm that has been in existence for 6 years has pulled all the right levers and has made the business suck less. In the process, it has managed to create a valuable enterprise.

Big data, more specifically, leveraging contextual data to lower premiums and improving the overall customer experience is on the minds of all the leading players in the insurance industry. China has allowed companies to have greater access to consumer data. Prudential has access to customer activities such as whether the consumer has gone to a gym, went for a hospital etc. using the 15 odd sensors on mobile.

Both the speaker said that insurance is one of the last fields where people expect change and it has traditionally been a boring product. However things are changing with firms creating a more agile and sexy appeal, in providing user experience. They cannot afford to be analog in countries like China where services are expected to be 100% digital

Insurance has seen a tremendous growth in Asia with as much as 20% growth coming in, for prudential, at the same time with almost no increase in market share. Hence it looks like the pie itself is increasing and there is a scope for many more players to offer services. Interesting tidbit info is that there are close to 5000 people in singapore who are above 100. Life expectancy is going to increase and people will be more inclined to think about insurance as the probability of need for insurance will go up.

In most companies, there are two types of silos, the technology silos and culture silos. it is probably easier and imperative to break the tech silos. However sometimes one ought to live with cultural silos as a way to reflect the ethos of the country in which a company is operating.

Insurance as a business is large part trust based. So, it will be interesting to see the impact of Web 3.0 on insurance in the coming decade.

One way to make a large organization move is to create a fast boat and then move it in parallel. Communicate to everyone that smart boat is the way to do things and everyone has to eventually move to smart boat soon.

Reflections

• It will be interesting to see how data identity via Web 3.0 will play out in this space.
• What would be the effect of 5G and edge computing, when insurers might have to deal with a ton of data from their customers ?
• With competition in this area, will the insurance have a reason to change its backend infra to make themselves more cost efficient ?
• Will there be a DeFi application in this space ? May be there are already a few ?
• How Web 3.0 is going to transform this insurance ?
• Look at DeFi pulse to get an idea of value unlocked via these platforms ?

How Financial Services Will Change - Asset Management

With accelerated change in the world and society, what does the future of the asset management landscape look like?

From hedge funds to WallStreetBets, CEO of Tikehau Capital will share insights into the emerging asset management in Web 3.0, specifically covering non-custodial ownership of assets, global access and financial inclusion, transparency and round-the-clock trading.

Speakers and Moderator

• Mathieu Chabran
• Leslie Picker

Notes

Did not find anything particularly useful in this discussion. The speaker was from a 15 year alternative investment management firm and there was nothing specific about Web 3.0 that was mentioned. Ofcourse it is easy for investors to get access to far many asset classes than in the yesteryears. Transparency between asset managers and investors will increase and it will make the alpha decay way quicker than what we have seen in the past. Web 3.0 has brought operational efficiencies in deal closure.

The forecast is that in the next 5-10 years, all the incumbents will start factoring crypto in to the equation.

Generational shift is happening and more young people want to invest and that’s a interesting feature of this new world. Whether it is COVID entertainment alone is something that remains to be seen.

Reflections

• Is retail participation in Web 3.0 enabled crypto currencies, a COVID entertainment ?
• Will PE firms fundamentally change in the way deals are sources, deals are analyzed and deals are closed, in the DeFi world?

How Financial Services Will Change - Consumer Banking

The advent of Web 3.0 in financial services is creating a paradigm shift, impacting every industry sector. It is beginning to shape new business models, enterprises, careers and the new digital economy. What are the implications and opportunities in Consumer banking? This session will dive into the current applications of web 3.0 technologies and what the consumer bank of the future will look like specifically focussing on autonomous banking, cross-border products, data portability and digital platforms.

Speakers and Moderator

• Forest Lin
• Nuno Matos
• Manisha Tank

Notes

Tencent talked about three trends in the consumer banking space

• Embedded finance: Payment, wealth management, westock(started as advisory but now have trading capabilities)
• Decentralized finance
• Distributed computing

In the context, the law and regulation is extremely important and China has laid out a healthy set of guidelines around

• Acknowledging the consumer data
• Telling the users what the data is
• Regulation of algorithms
• Explicit consent on sharing of data

Also in this journey, consumer banking are increasingly towards partners to enable the ecosystem

HSBC has a view that Web 3.0 is a set of technologies, AI/ML/Edge computing/Blockchain/DeFi that can be an enabler to do business with customers. A few examples cited by HSBC

• HSBC offered 22000 different recommendations to customers. This has enabled 10 more conversations about rebalancing portfolios. Hyperpersonalized insights is becoming possible in today’s world.
• HSBC Wealth Virtual assistants are having 2000 conversations per week, thanks to the NLP based chat agents.
• HSBC used ML algo to do early credit scoring and grant adequate credit limits way before the usual 6 month time that it used to take, to analyze and grant credit limits. It can now look at a few initial transactions and use ML algos to decide the credit limits
• HSBC uses ML to forecast the cash in ATMs across the region and then automatically kickoff replenishment so that customers have seamless access to cash.
• Use ML to extend credit to additional 500,000 customers without any additional documentation, with the help of data

Speaker made an interesting point that, even though they are massively bullish on the technology, they love customer and technology in that order.

TRUST is going to be the key for everything in the future. In a decentralized world when trust is no longer in one behemoth, it is

Collaboration is the key to consumer banking entities. Tencent has already partnered with many FinTechs, SAS companies, and SAS platforms. The key idea is to connect financial capabilities with consumers needs. HSBC was of the view that banks are now offering pretty much everything that FinTechs are offering and hence FinTechs might have to rethink their proposition. More than 90% of the interactions are done in known human channels and they are already digital companies. Agility, customer experience and how efficient the company is in providing the customer experience are going to be key differentiators for incumbents and FinTechs

Reflections

• TRUST is the key, say all the big institutions. They are saying that TRUST is on their side and their business is safe. However if you look at decentralization of trust that is happening in Web 3.0 world, Isn’t it an obvious threat to incumbents ?
• Earning TRUST is key says everyone. But if TRUST is going to be disintermediated, where is the case for one big company to think of Trust in the traditional sense?

How Financial Services Will Change - Wholesale Banking

As we develop the solutions for wholesale banking for tomorrow, how will the day-to-day roles in existing organisations play out given innovations in Web 3.0? What will the new order look like in inter-bank settlements, cross-border and cash management?

Speakers and Moderator

• Panagiostis Georgakopoulos
• Tan Su Shan
• Manisha Tank

Notes

Speakers mention four types of use cases:

• Proof of Value
• Proof of Obligation
  • Cross border transactions - using smart contracts
• Proof of Transaction
  • Lot of trade process is paper based
  • Digitization of trace for any transaction
  • Trade financing
  • SME financing uses blockchain
• Proof of Identity
  • Sustainability area
  • If I own these carbon credits, then one can create a proof of identity

DBS mentioned the usecases coming in from their clients such as

• Tokenize private ownership - Immutable block chain and enable mass participation in private assets. The solution is to issue private assets
• Supply chain disruptions - There are inherent jams and trade finance need not be broken. Clients are asking for improving the efficiencies using Web 3.0
• Sustainability - Blockchain as an enabler. If you are source raw materials, one can use the blockchain to hit the sustainability standards

JPM thinks of payments in the context of Web 3.0 as

• zero cost programmable smart contracts to move money in real world
• IoT and machines exchanging real time value in very small denominations
• Partior and JPM coin shows that technology is reaching maturity and the questions are around regulation and policy

80% of the wholesale clients are around Web 1.0 and thanks to Covid are thinking about basic digitization issues such as

• How do I connect to suppliers ?
• How do I think of payments?
• How can I get access to consumers when the intermediary is not available ?

Reflections

• How do I tokenise and use your digital exchange ?
• 23000 people work in payment infra in JPM. Will the blockchain make some of them redundant ?
• Will the regulators step in and enable the infra so that Web 3.0 can kickoff in wholesale banking ?
• FinTechs from being marginal players have become TechFins and have become very big entities that regulation has become super important

Web 3.0 Market Infrastructure and Ecosystem Transformation

How will technology and innovation shape the next generation of financial services? This session will focus on how Web 3.0 is transforming the global financial ecosystem. Join Roman Regelman, Chief Executive Officer of Asset Servicing and Head of Digital at BNY Mellon and Christopher Young, Executive Vice President of Business Development, Strategy and Ventures at Microsoft as they discuss digital assets, fintech innovation, and the future of Web 3.0.

Speakers and Moderator

• Roman Regelman
• Christopher Young
• Manisha Tank

Notes

BNY Mellon has about $40T of assets and is the world’s largest custodian. The two key elements of Web 3.0 are Trust and Innovation. The players who will thrive in the game are nimble, resilient and large. If one looks at the digital assets as a whole that comprises crypto currencies, CBDCs, stable coins and tokenized assets, the trading opportunities for asset owners and asset managers are making it imperative for BNY Mellon to transform their infrastructure. It is inefficient to have two parallel infrastructures, one for the digital assets and one for the traditional assets. Hence BNY has been doing a lot of innovation by partnering with companies, investing in companies like fireblocks, that has already become a unicorn.

The changes in the space are happening gradually from the regulatory standpoint and rapidly from the services and production standpoint. Incumbents are already announcing digital asset units with heavy consultation with the regulators.

Trust has to be absolute and one needs to know that partners be a part of the journey in the long run. Spirit of partnership is being built within the value system. The role of many individuals and companies is becoming critical is leading to democratization of data, ecosystem and innovation.

Trust and Innovation have existed since centuries. Alexander Hamilton introduced the first currency before even central banks came in to existence. Partnership should be looked upon as a culture building exercise.

MSFT believes that changes are happening in three ways

• Ubiquitous cloud, much of the blockchain technology is powered by ubiquitous cloud
• Artificial Intelligence
• Edge Computing

MSFT also believes the digital assets would become main stream.The nature of partnerships would change. If you look at the biggest NFT project, it is a gaming company. We must not be surprised with a bank partnering with a gaming company to make its services useful to the new economies built within the gaming worlds. Cryto has gone mainstream and many companies are built on Ethereum and data is stored on ethereum platform.

Innovation is happening all through of the world. It is not happening only in Valley as there is capital, skills across cities, countries.

Reflections

• fireblocks

Hundreds of crypto and digital asset businesses use Fireblocks software and APIs to custody, manage treasury operations, access DeFi, mint & burn tokens, and manage their digital asset operations.

Need to spend some time in understanding the nature of services provided by firebricks

• How is the data stored on ethereum platforms ?
• What does it mean by building a ethereum app ? How is it different from developing a mobile app, web app?
• What does it entail in creating a smart contract between two people on blockchain ?
• What are some of the examples of tokenized systems in various domains ?

Realizing the Value of Blockchain in Financial Services

Blockchain is changing finance as much as the internet changed communication-forever. In 2020, the adoption of blockchain technology gained traction. Will 2021 be the year of harnessing the value and reaping the returns?

The speakers will discuss the state of the use-cases, and how blockchain is revolutionising the way we trade and transfer money as transactions become cheaper, faster and more reliable.

Speakers and Moderator

• Darius Sit
• Mukaya Panich
• Pradyumna Agarwal
• Joanna

Notes

The speakers were of the unanimous conclusion that Web 3.0 is going to transform financial sector. How exactly that will happen is something no one can really predict but the panel talked about a few pointers. Firstly there are many firms that are already working to make cross border payment mechanism seamless. In this space incumbents and entrepreneurs are working together to make it possible. There are also DeFi protocols that are being written that provides hedge fund like strategies to retail investors. These hedge fund strategies that were traditionally available for high net worth individuals and institutional investors who had access to hedge funds: with the democratization of investment products via DeFi and Blockchain. SCB was of the opinion that Blockchain is still in the initial stages and there are a lot of stuff that needs to happen in this space, including regulation for things to kickoff. Tokenization is already happening in the asset management space. There were no specific examples provided but I guess it should be easy to find players who are making this possible.

SCB was excited about DeFi applications in the fixed income markets where innovative protocols are offering many people to participate in the bond markets. There was a mention of “proof of staking” mechanism that was making interest rate stable.

Temasek was of the view that customers are going to travel with their own data. No one would own the data and ultimately the people who succeed will be those who have been products and services.

Darius was of the view the DeFi in its current form has limitations and the space is evolving, before one can think of using it for financial services that we all know.

Temasek was also of the view that the current space is uneven field as incumbents are tied to the regulation while the DeFi space has no regulation whatsoever as they are not tied to a domicile. There was also an forecast that in future regulatory bodies will hire a ton of software engineers to make sense of these Blockchains, DeFi protocols and digital assets.

All of the speakers were lauding Singapore for providing clarity in regulation, while other regions are not so clear with their regulatory stance. Unanimously everyone predicted that this space will grow massively in the coming 1-5 years. Very valuable companies are going to be built.

Reflections

• How does one write an arb strategy on a block chain ?
• How does one tokenize and create a protocol that gives hedge fund strategies to others ?
• How does ElementFinance work ?
• 20 people have built a DeFi network managed to unlock $5B ? How have they achieved ?
• What is anchor protocol all about ?
• How is “Proof of Stakes” enabling one to create a stable interest rate environment ?
• In its current form, many DeFi protocols are offering an environment where collateral is real time, liquidity is real time. I don’t understand how this is happening right now. May be I should spend some time and understand this aspect.
• It will be interesting to keep track of various services that are going to crop up in the coming 1-5 years

Digital Currencies - The Missing Puzzle Piece ?

There is growing interest and adoption of cryptocurrencies among consumers, businesses and governments. This trend shows no sign of slowing.

Why is there a need for digital currencies to fully harness the value of blockchain use-cases? We’ll examine the current state of play with examples and case studies of live usage, and how central banks are exploring the adoption of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), and the future of digital currencies.

Hear from Cuy Sheffield, Yusho Liu, Eric Anziani and Kevin Lim, leaders at Visa, Coinhako, Crypto.com and Temasek respectively. This session will be moderated by Sharon Paul of Xfers.

Speakers and Moderator

• Cuy Sheffield
• Yushuo Liu
• Eric Anziani
• Kevin Lim
• Sharon Paul

Notes

Coinhako’s mission is to ensure access to Web 3.0. It started off in 2014 to make people buy BTC. Centralized exchanges do play an important role as there is a need to connect digital wallet to digital currencies, and make the exchange safe. Visa says that there are very few merchants who are accepting crypto.

Concept of fun has exploded in 2021. Crypto has become cool as usecases have exploded with rapid adoption of mainstream. NFTs are emerging and Cryto wallets can become a place where one can find music. Crypto wallets can become a superapp, with the adoption of NFTs.

Decentralization is not the theme but permissionless environment where a set of people can come together across the world and create something valuable, contributing in this entire space.

Temaskek’s opinion was that early stage, innovative, exponential growth is very difficult to predict. Crypto volatility is driving adoption. Another aspect is that talented individuals are jumping to this space because there is a way to monetize the efforts quickly with the help of tokenization.

Coinhako has four step process before listing a crypto coin that involves internal teams, external teams, chain analysis and tech integration.

Visa thinks that Crypto traders are using stable coins. VCs are dispersing seed investment in stable coins, and the teams are using stable coins to pay everyone in the team. There are B2B and B2C payments that are being made. Visa is thus bullish on this space.

Reflections

• How to open a meta mask account ?
• How to buy ether ?
• How to transact with ether or other cryptos
• How to trade futures and options in this space ?
• What is cryptopunks ? How is Visa involved in this space?
• What kind of chainanalysis that an exchange does, before listing a coin ?
• How are one using stable coins being used in trading
• Stable companies are holding massive amount of fiat currency. What is the metric ?
• Coinhako has not listed crappy crypto coins. But can it withstand the power of community about something not happening

How Web 3.0 will Attract the Next Billion Crypto Users?

In this session, Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek will be sharing with Bloomberg’s Jonanna Ossinger about the future of crypto in Web 3.0. Where will we be in 20 years time? What are the key verticals that will boost and enhance growth: Gaming with it’s 3 billion user market and expanding use cases outside of trading and NFTs. Bitcoin leads the crypto adoption cycle and there is nothing like it’s growth seen anywhere on the internet before. But what’s next? Learn about the expanding use cases and where Crypto.com will be in year 2030.

Speakers and Moderator

• Kris Marszalek
• Joanna

Notes

Crypto.com founder believes that there will be an exponential growth of cryto adoption in the world in 2022 and expects the user base to grow from 250B to 1B in 2022. He seems to compare the userbase with that of gaming community that is about 3 billion. Some really wild projections of 5 billion in 5 years have also been made. The company has about 2800 employees and is heavily investing in Blockchain gaming and DeFi. They also have a venture arm with a war chest of 200M USD. Facebook has announced an investment of 10B in metaverse and Kris thinks that the community all over the world will outspend and outwork Facebook. Web 3.0 will not be held by 4 large companies but it will be a true community revolution.

Most of the work being done by crypto.com is to adhere to the regulations of the various jurisdictions so that they can attract a great userbase.

Kris is of the belief that Blockchain, DeFi will a very important technological shift and it will be community lead. In five years time, the only internet that people will know is the Web 3.0

Reflections

• Why are stable coins less volatile or perceived to be less volatile ?
• How will the payment startups that are already working in this space be impacted by Blockchain ?
• How will incumbent payment firms be impacted by Blockchain ?
• If big tech companies loose their edge, won’t the world be turned in to a gig economy where individuals can work from any part of the world and contribute to this crypto space ?
• If there is going be billion users in a year, what role will data science play ? Will it play a role at all ? What role will ML play ?

Building the Technology Stack for a Decentralised Future

Building applications and services of tomorrow will require a shift in how we view the ownership of information and assets. In this session, Glenn Gore, CEO of Affinidi, will outline a high level framework of services and early patterns of adoption and use cases that are deployed in the real-world and coming soon as Web 3.0 technologies shift from the hands of the disruptors to normalised everyday interactions.

Speakers and Moderator

• Glenn Gore

Notes

Speaker begins the talk with his view on the evolution of Web 3.0 technologies by saying

• Web 1.0 - Passive Consumption
• Web 2.0 - Participative Web
• Web 2.0 - Centralizes and limits the interoperability
  • Data control and ownership by centralized systems exposes us to a range of risks and fundamental challenges
• Web 3.0 - Decentralized Web is akin to webs of services working together

The speaker emphasized the importance of TRUST, the key theme for Web 3.0 and spoke about Self sovereign identity. This is the new buzz word that talks about users taking their identity with themselves and then sharing only the relevant information with other service providers. SSI would make significant reduction in the annual $150M KYC spent. There is a whole wealth of information about SSI in the manning book. The speaker gives the main essence of SSI that comprises comprises Decentralized identifiers(DID) anchored to a distributed ledger. In SSI world, the customer data is holder centric, consent driven, secure, portable and interoperable

The speaker goes on to give an overview of the Web 3.0 stack:

• Core products, engineering
  • Verifiable credential management system
  • Foundational engineering
• Suite of solutions, capabiliites
  • Trust
  • Rules engine
  • Schema management
  • Identity binding
• Common use case categories
  • Financial services
  • Health
  • Travel
  • Secure
  • Portable
  • Interoperable

Reflections

• What does it take to create a simple wallet prototype ?
• What does it take to create a unified data structure for covid vaccination history for a data individual across geographies ?

Banking on the game

How to make complex financial knowledge easily accessible and enjoyable for billions of people? How to make financial education and customer engagement work the fun way? Understand the power of Video Games and learn how to reach out to a totally new audience, acquire and educate customers (and your team) creating an impact the fun way.

Speakers and Moderator

• Matthias Kroener

Notes

The speaker talks about the gaming market(200B USD) that is growing annually year on year at 10% across all age cohorts. Gaming via Web 3.0 has taken off this year with some of the gaming startups like Axie infinity attaining great traction. NFTs have emerged as a new asset class

The speaker talks about a framework to analyze blockchain gaming that includes the following components

• economic model
• virtual goods
• currency
• game mechanics
• values

The above framework is covered in the book titled, Blockchain and Crytocurrencies

World of games is merging with the world of finance. Gaming is the new FinTech. It is supporting all relevant KPIs such as

• Increase reach
• Reduce the cost of customer acquisition
• Customer engagement and education
• Customer life time value
• Brand value to customer and team
• KYC
• New Revenue sources

Reflections

• Gaming is taking off in the Blockchain enabled world ? How is different from second-life?
• What is the relevance of NFTs to gaming ?
• Is the popularity in gaming coming from the fact that the gaming rewards can easily be realized in terms of crypto payments ?
• Why did Axie Infinity become the most popular NFT ?

Smartkarma: How Web 3.0 Will Impact the Financial Services Industry

We are on the cusp of a revolution in the worldwide web with Web 3.0 transforming the way we learn, transact and interact. This session presents a preliminary look at Smartkarma’s in-depth and bespoke analysis of Web 3.0’s impact and opportunities on financial services, capital markets, asset management, wholesale and consumer banking. Presented by Raghav Kapoor, Smartkarma.

Speakers and Moderator

• Raghav kapoor

Notes

Smartkarma is called the spotify of research where it puts across independent research across asset classes and makes it available to asset management industry. They have produced a 25 page report that goes in to detail about the impact of Web 3.0 on financial services.

Reflections

• How can data be stored on a blockchain network ?
• Are there separate protocols that need to be written to store non-transactional data ?
• What does filecoin accomplish its objective ?
• How does arweave accomplish its objective ?

Web 3.0 in Insurance/Pension market

Traditional structures within insurance have been in place for decades and have served the sector well delivering peace of mind, protection and security. Centralised structures, processes and systems have been at the foundation of the industry. Friction, manual processes and inefficiencies still remain in the value proposition, distribution, infrastructure and customer service layers. The advent of web technologies has added to this complexity but also provided solutions. As Web 2.0 heralded new 3 core layers of innovation, namely mobile, social and cloud, the next evolution of the web will focus on quantum computing (or edge computing), decentralised data networks and AI.

Speakers and Moderator

• Annabelle
• Hugh Karp
• Jonathan Larsen

Notes

The speakers represented incumbents and startups. Nexus mutual is DAO that is in the insurance space and hence it was interesting to know that a completely community driven insurance company can be run on a blockchain. Nexus mutual business runs on smart contracts based on ethereum. It was pointed out that there was no shortage of talent in DAO as everyone wants to work in this space, given the mindshare NFTs have garnered in the recent times.

Annabelle mentioned about dynamic pricing of insurance premiums as an example of AI use case in prudential. Ofcourse many MNCs are recruiting people from Blockchain startup companies to lead their internal Blockchain efforts. Annabelle predicts in the next 1-3 years many companies in the insurance space would have experimented with smart contracts and likely there will be some practical offerings from the incumbents

PingAn was more skeptical about the whole Blockchain tech as it had not seen any massive use cases in its business, yet. Even though they employ 30,000 R&D engineers and 5000 data scientists, most of the applications mentioned as examples fall under traditional AI

• facial recognition to match loan seeker’s identity with china’s citizen database
• Using AI on retinal images to scan for any of the 30 health issues
• Using image processing AI techniques in the auto claims business: analyzing uploaded pics to disseminate better insurance products and premiums
• Parametric insurance that gets automatically kicked in based on certain AI engine
• Telematics insurance

Reflections

• How does https://nexusmutual.io/ work ? What are the type of smart contracts written ? What does it take to write a smart contract ? Can one write a smart contract in any language ?
• How do agents write smart contracts in DeFi insurance world ?

Building Blocks Better: Paving the way for financial markets 3.0

As the financial industry moves towards a digitally native future, segments of the ecosystem are growing fragmented & over-served, whilst others remain poorly invested into. The needs of a digital economy do not mirror the traditional—protocols for cybersecurity & open data remain nascent. Hear how Temasek, IFC & Standard Chartered identify what gaps are in danger of emerging, & how to bridge them. [This session is brought to you by: Temasek]

Speakers and Moderator

• Harald Eltvedt
• Paramita Dasgupta
• Kevin Lim

Notes

Most of the speakers emphasized the importance of collaboration in Web 3.0 world that was key to creating valuable services. The narrative that we have right now, might change in the years to come, but if the companies and communities can pivot themselves based on changing market dynamics, Web 3.0 will be a massive force to recokon with and will change the financial services, as we know it.

SC Ventures has three ways to do this: one by having an accelerator unit that can work with startups to create innovative services that can spun in to companies, second by investing directly in to innovative companies by doing Series B investments, and third by involving in venture building activities.

There was an emphasis on mixing different kinds of teams, i.e. expertise from incumbents and expertise from the young entrepreneurs to create valuable services.

Reflections

• If collaboration is the key and it is very difficult to predict which particular bet will pay off, it looks like being a VC in this space could be very attractive

Web 3.0 in Corporate Banking

Traditional structures within corporate and investment banking have been in place for decades and have served the sector well delivering trust, trade and in the main certainty. Centralised structures, processes and systems have been at the foundation of the industry. As the complexity, volume and intricacies of trade and transactions increase, it places greater strains on the sector. This has increased friction such as issues around transaction timeliness, fee transparency, and traceability. The advent of web technologies has added to this complexity but also provided solutions. As Web 2.0 heralded new 3 core layers of innovation, namely mobile, social and cloud, the next evolution of the web will focus on quantum computing (or edge computing), decentralised data networks and AI.

Hear from Annerie Vreugdenhil, ING, Robert Leshner, Compound Labs and Umar Farooq, Onyx by JPMorgan. This session will be moderated by Joyce A. Tan.

Speakers and Moderator

• Robert Leshner
• Annerie Vreugdenhil
• Umar Farooq
• Joyce A. Tan

Notes

JPM has been in the space for a long time and has grown from a team of two to two hundred people today. They have launched their own digital coin, invested in platforms with collaboration with MAS, DBS. Despite working on this for many years, the total transactional value on this platform is $1B per day, which is insignificant as compared to $8T that flows through JPM. JPM believes that all the new startups and companies operating in DeFi space are inspirational and give them pointers to work on specific aspects, that are relevant to wholesale banking space. JPM does not see DeFi players as competitors as they feel that the real unlocking of all the potential usecases is 5 to 10 years away from now, especially in the wholesale banking world. JPM sees the DeFi space akin to Napster in the music industry. It will be a while before the spotify comes up.

Compound labs, an DeFi in the interest rates market with a $12B locked value is an interesting concept that has scaled well in the last few years. It is completely deployed on Blockchain and all the transactions happen via smart contracts. Essentially one can think of the market as always on market that are enabled by Web 3.0 technology. The founder is of the belief that the DeFi companies are already satisfying many ideal features of the market that any regulator want such as fairness, transparency and data protection. Given these are already by default adhered to by any DeFi player, the regulators should ideally have easier time to put in the relevant guidelines that instill confidence among the retail, institutional and nation-states.

ING sees the DeFi P2P space as an exciting opportunity where standardized collateral can spawn interesting services to be offered by innovative services.

Reflections

• Why did Compound succeed in this space ? Is it because it was first mover ?
• What does it take to write a smart contract in the interest rate world ?
• How is JPM coin doing ? If coins are launched in private networks, how is it possible to know metrics about the coin adoption ?
• Most of the wholesale players are paying attention to DeFi space and adopting innovative solutions. May be the VCs will focus on firms that are built to flip?
• What does it mean when someone says that anyone can contribute to Compound infrastructure ?
• Compound is entirely built on Ethereum. Does it create a lock-in for the company when more energy efficient Blockchain technology kicks in ?

Trusted Enterprises in a Decentralised World

For decentralised finance to prove ultimately successful, it must be viewed as trustworthy in the eyes of consumers. Marc Benioff, co-founder and CEO of Salesforce, examines how such trust may be earned, and how, through technological advances such as Stablecoins, and new regulation, it’s possible to build a higher level of consumer trust in financial services than ever before. Together with Michael Gronager, CEO of Chainalysis, he also dives into his own thoughts around the crypto space and what needs to be done to create a more sustainable growth.

Speakers and Moderator

• Marc Benioff
• Michael Gronager

Notes

Marc spoke about various trends that he is seeing from being a CEO of salesforce and chairman of Times. Marc is infact an investor in Michael’s company. Time ventures is an investor in 200 companies and has $2B war chest, and has invested in chain analysis. Time ventures is focusing on many NFT based companies. Time has NFT business now. Some of the NFTs are getting resold for 10x. Marc acquired Slack for $27B and says slack becomes even more important in the post-covid world where most of the firms are working remotely. A cool idea that Marc shared was that his company is opening digital headquarters

Time ventures is focusing on startups who are creating sustainability based services. Marc says that his company focus on TRUST and then creates processes to operationalize trust. Singapore is a great example of operationalizing trust.

Michael said that getting to know people face to face is a premium service that a company can provide to its employees

• Five trends relating to work
  • Work at Home
  • Digital headquarters
  • Large corporate training facility
  • Offsites and Programs

Tracing is a great usecase for Blockchain and it might be worth the time to spend looking at the companies that are focusing on tracing.

Reflections

• What does - https://www.chainalysis.com/ do ? What sort of analytics is done by the company ?
• What does opensee do ? It is called as ebay for NFTs. Time has partnered with this platform to buy and sell NFTs.
• What are some of the usecases for trading in the DeFi space ?

New Collaboration Models in the Era of Embedded Finance

We’re entering the next phase in the Internet’s transformation of financial services with the rise of embedded finance. The integration of financial services into non-financial websites, mobile applications, and business processes is projected to generate $230 billion in revenue by 2025, a 10x increase from $22.5 billion in 2020. Some have claimed that this era is one where “every company will be a fintech company,” which spurs new models of collaboration between various ecosystem players. Stripe CFO Dhivya Suryadevara reflects on the role infrastructure builders like Stripe plays in facilitating these new collaboration models against the backdrop of her first year at the company, in a conversation with Rebecca Martin of MAS.

Speakers and Moderator

• Dhivya Suryadevara
• Rebecca Martin

Notes

Dhivya mentions that Stripe is going through a massive adoption of many companies in the Asian region. Embedded finance entails taking financial tools that businesses need and make them directly available to them. StripeCapital is an example where users who need capital are easily disbursed to them. 14% of the commerce happens online and there is so much more upside for payment services. Dhivya is estimated to be a $300B by 2025. Lot of potential in the payment services and bullish on crypto. Roadmap based on what users need.

Reflections

• How does the cryto effect businesses such as Stripe ?
• Are all payment companies will have Web 3.0 features in its products and services ?

AI Driven Transformation at Prudential

At Prudential, we leverage AI in multiple streams: in User Experience, in Process Automation, to increase controls, to detect frauds and to predict future. We have a story to tell about our AI journey at Prudential and how we shape our AI driven transformation. Participants from Insurance industry are invited to join us for the session to look at our journey and to collectively determine opportunities presented by AI in Insurance. [This session is brought to you by: Prudential]

Speakers and Moderator

• Madhan Seduraman
• Venkata Krishnan
• Priyanka Agarwal

Notes

OPEX Team has been set up at Prudential to create operational efficiencies by using AI and ML. The team showcased the following applications where ML has been used

• Cognitive assistant services
• Cognitive Engines
  • Image redaction
  • NRIC verification: Verification of NRIC document via Image processing
  • Image Quality classification - Verify the quality of the image and email the customer if the image doesn’t match the necessary quality specs
  • eClaims: Intelligent processing for claims processing.Can a claim be adjudicated automatically ? AI model acts as a claims approval or denial engine
  • Incentive Audits
• Smart Robotics
  • AML - Whenever new customer is onboarded, a bot collects the information about the customer from the public sources and flags off indicators of risky customers
  • Mailbox intake
  • Medical Bill Payments
  • Payment Reconciliation/Reversal

Madhan outlines the OPEX AI strategy in the following categories

• Automation
  • NLP ML
  • Deep Neural Networking
• Customer Experience
  • Chat bots
• Compliance
  • Object detection(image redaction)
  • NLP/OCR(sensitive data masking)
• Prediction
  • claims risk scoring model
• Transformation
  • Email topic modeling
  • calls transcription

Venkata Krishnan spoke about a few models in detail

• Claims Risk Model
  • Three years of claims data used to train the model
  • Anonymize the data to ensure privacy
  • Extensive data analytics to get the key features
  • Fuzzy labeling technique to create annotated data
  • NN modeling to identify models
  • Ensemble modeling score
    • First model that does scoring on each claim
    • Second model that does scoring on the associated claims
• Image Redaction for Credit Card
  • Hide customer credit card information
  • Uses Yolo V5 Transfer learning to mask credit card expiry dates and middle 8 numbers of each credit card

Reflections

• Interesting applications of ML in Insurance space. I would have assumed traditional quants working in this space would have morphed in to teams that are delivering these solutions. However it looks like that that is not the case.
• Data strategy in the organization is the key. Unless the organization spends some time in thinking through the data structures and data formats and the right databases to use, it will be difficult for ML teams to deliver value.

Airwallex ASEAN Expansion Update

One of the fastest growing fintechs today, Airwallex was founded in Melbourne in 2015 with a mission to empower businesses of all sizes to grow without borders without the constraints of the current financial system. The company, now valued at US$4 billion following its Series E fundraising, has been accelerating its global expansion. It recently launched operations into the US, expanded its EMEA presence and marked its entry into Southeast Asia with a Malaysia licence. In this session, Airwallex will be speaking about its global ambitions, its expansion into a new ASEAN market and the increasingly important role fintech will play in boosting the digital economy. Presented by Jack Zhang and Nazim Ali from Airwallex.

Speakers and Moderator

• Nazim Ali
• Jack Zhang

Notes

Speakers are from Airwallex and they announced that they have secured payment license from Singapore goverments across

• Account issuance
• emoney
• online payments
• Cross border transfer

It was mentioned the global reach of Airwallex platform was the main differentiator with other payment providers who focus on solving payments in one single country

Key Global Trends: 4. Racing to Build the Next-gen Market Infrastructure

Blockchain is revolutionising the way financial institutions and people interact. Paving ways to financial inclusion for billions of people without access to traditional financial services.

What will cross-border payment solutions look like in future? Will blockchain usher in the next phase of real-time payment? Apart from the opportunities, we’ll also discuss G20’s challenges - speed, cost, access and transparency.

Hear from Jason Thompson of Partior, Jos Dijsselhof of SIX, moderated by Conan French of IIF.

Speakers and Moderator

• Jason Thomson
• Jos Dijsselhof
• Conan French

Notes

Speaker from Partior mentioned about the existing systems and the ways that the team is exploring ways to improve the operational efficiency using smart contracts. Mentioned about connecting existing infrastructure with future systems(Project Nexus). The challenge ahead is to figure out ways to make all the various players in the market to work together. Tamesek, JP Morgan, DBS and Partior are working together to make Blockchain based technology available. The size of the problem is making the players to be open minded so that it is unlike FinTechs who are focused on certain verticals.

Jos mentioned that the current systems are efficient , but most of the settlement systems are T+2 and hence SIX group is working on initiatives to improve the settlement business. SIX group is in to data, payments and exchange business. The need of the hour is to move from batch to real time and SIX group is working to using blockchain to create atomic settlement, transaction, custody, clearing on the securities. Jos felt that the regulatory framework is very important so that investors are well protected. SIX is also working with central banks to create relevant digital assets. Digital exchange will be competing with the traditional exchange and that’s the way to make the enterprise to make open to new business models.

Reflections

• Automobile industry vs Financial services industry. Many business models in automobile industry is changing, akin to financial services industry
• How to bring transaction and data together ?

Blockchain and its Power to Impact on Inclusion

• Blockchain technology has extraordinary potential to give access to financial and non-financial services, provide digital identity and ensure ownership of its data to vulnerable populations excluded from the formal system.
• Blockchain is one of the emerging technologies with the extraordinary potential for market transformation and social impact due to its ability to make markets more efficient for providing goods and services. In addition, it ensures greater transparency and inalterability in the transaction log.
• Some areas of blockchain use with high social impact include agricultural traceability, green certification, property records, medical history, or professional certifications, to name a few.
• In this sense, the LACChain Alliance emerged as an IDB Lab initiative in 2019, being the Global Alliance in which more than 50 allies participate, contributing to the development of the blockchain ecosystem in Latin America and the Caribbean.
• With this partnership, it is expected that the benefits of this technology reach the most underserved populations throughout the region.
• LACChain’s objective is to accelerate the use and development of applications with an impact on social, economic, and financial inclusion through infrastructure for the region that allows recovery and sustainable economic growth in Latin America and the Caribbean.
• The above, through providing knowledge at the service of the different initiatives emerging in the countries for the development of national ecosystems in the region, providing technical advice, market stimuli, and analysis of impact data as revulsive for the democratization of the use of this technology.
• Today, LACChain has more than 50 projects distributed in 10 different sectors throughout 15 countries in the region. Registering a total of + 1M people benefited and +10,000 companies.
• LACChain’s value proposition includes the presence of international consortiums, the analysis of data on impacts, the enabling of technological infrastructure, and a marketplace or application market.
• LACChain currently has more than 600 entities interested in deploying nodes on the network, 65 entities running nodes, 34 projects with impact on inclusion, and nine countries developing an ecosystem.
• Our infrastructure has been recognized since 2019 by the ITU (The United Nations specialized body for standard-setting) as one of the fourteen reference architectures currently available.
• LACChain is a permissioned public blockchain network; public, decentralized, transparent, not based on cryptocurrencies, not anonymous (so it is adjustable), and that provides privacy.
• LACChain enables the “Internet of value” through its infrastructure based on the internet itself. LACChain allows the management of information in an immutable way and incorporates an “intelligent” layer, through smart contracts, which enables the creation and transfer of all types of digital assets such as certification and the exchange of data and information securely and reliably.

Speakers and Moderator

• Alejandro Pardo

Notes

Speaker talks about the Blockchain offerings that have been developed by IDB with partnership with public and private companies. The services include Tokenized fiat money, Digital identity and DLT networks

Reflections

• Amazed at how one single lab can develop so many offerings in Blockchain space

The Digital Secret Sauce to Reach More Consumers Globally

A suite of payment and marketing solutions is supporting e-wallet operators to help local merchants reach consumers globally even as travel is curtailed amid the pandemic. Hear from Ant Group owner and operator of leading digital payment platform Alipay on the secret sauce that is making this possible. Presented by Cheng Guoming, Ant Group.

Speakers and Moderator

• Cheng Guoming

Notes

Speaker talks about Alipay+ ,an Ant group product that can be adopted by various partners across the world that provides cross border payment services, remittance services and mobile wallets

Reflections

• Partnership seems to be the name of the game in scaling up the payment game as one cannot expect one single player to dominate all the jurisdictions
• Did not see any Blockchain mentioned in the product release - May be it is already sitting in the infrastructure developed by Alipay

Michael Miebach on Web 3.0 in the New Economy

The way we move money is changing. This challenges legacy players to upgrade their “games” and systems. How do we design and build the infrastructures and ecosystems for payments of tomorrow? How can we build the bridge of financial inclusivity to uplift the underserved? Where is innovation pointing us as we build towards the future of payments?

Learn more from Mastercard’s CEO Michael Miebach in conversation with Jo Yeo of MAS.

Speakers and Moderator

• Michael Miebach
• Jo Yeo

Notes

CEO of mastercard had the following to say:

• Do not focus on technology but focus on what you are solving for the customer(access/price/data) and then use the technology as an enabler. Do not be fixated on technology
• Digital inclusion is going to be game changer, where one is not constrained by legacy requirements.
• There are going to many more fintech unicorns coming from Asia

Reflections

• It will be interesting to watch how Fintechs will incorporate Web 3.0 solutions and become more competitive and relevant to compete with incumbents or partner with incumbents

The Battle for US$250bn of Payments Revenues by 2030

The structure of the payments industry is fast evolving, radically transforming the roles of both FSIs and non-FSIs in the ownership of the payments process. IDC predicts that by 2030, 80% of consumer payments could be handled by non-FSIs*. This IDC InfoBrief looks at the forces driving these changes and how new payment technologies enable any business with a digital front door, not only banks and fintechs, to drive a redefinition of their position and value as well as to reimagine the customer experience. Against the backdrop of soaring global digital payments volumes, regulatory moves around open banking, government real-time payments, centralized digital currencies, and national cashless schemes have shaken up incumbents, opening up traditional “safe” revenue streams and leveling the playing field. All eyes are now on capturing the current and next wave of explosive growth in contactless and real-time payments. Opportunities for cooperation and coopetition abound, taking fintechs and nonbanks, or virtually any business with a digital front door, into the turf of banks. Next- generation payments technology offering real-time product customization at all usage levels and transfer of value across any asset classes is what will fuel the future dominant banks and fintechs. Presented by Ravi Patel, Episode Six and Cyrus Daruwala, IDC (a Blackstone Group company)

Speakers and Moderator

• Ravi Patel
• Cyrus Daruwala

Notes

Research done by the group says

• By the end of the decade, 60% of the payments would be made outside of fiat currency
• By the end of the decade, 73% of the payments will be made by non-FSIs
• $230B opportunity
• Cryto currency, loyalty points are being used for payments

Industry experts believe that the entire taxonomy around payments is changing with the emergence of TechFins. There is also a massive push from the governments across the world. The speakers made a product announcement that can be used for any digital asset

Reflections

• No wonder my previous boss, Sanjiv, started a company 5 years ago, in the payment industry. With the explosion set to happen, as research says, I am sure he is going to crack it big time

Shaping the Future of Financial Services with Decentralised Finance

Is Decentralised Finance taking over the banking world? Decentralised Finance is an emerging phenomenon, and it is rapidly gaining the attention of mainstream media since 2020.

Globally, about 1.7 billion adults remain unbanked. There’s a race to “bank the unbanked” to promote financial inclusion. On the other end of the spectrum, there’s also efforts to “un-bank the banked”. With the rise of blockchain, it’s time to reformulate the consumer banking system with more secure and more affordable financial products. Let’s hear from an unparalleled group of Decentralised Finance innovators and change-makers on how Decentralised Finance will define the next era of global finance.

Hear from Dr Ben Goertzel of SingularityNET, Johann Eid of Chainlink Labs, Sudhir Pai of Capgemini and Justin Amos of Lygon. This session will be moderated by Anjali Kapoor of Alt Key Theory.

Speakers and Moderator

• Justin Amos
• Sudhir Pai
• Ben Goertzel
• Anjali Kapoor

Notes

• You can set up any smart contract with code and you don’t need any intermediary
• AI to trade baskets of alt coins and you need AI to manage
  • Volatility
  • Regime changes
• DeFi as an opportunity rather than a threat
• Bringing incumbents in to DeFi world - role of consulting companies
• Lygon is a digital asset market place and tokenize financial contracts between multiple parties. In doing so, it leverages smart contracts
• Trade processing spends 80B USD every year - Blockchain can help reduce the operational efficiencies
• Realizing the potential of Blockchain in a big way has not happened in a big way
• Newer asset class creation in DeFi space will attract players in to the market
• Obvious benefits to smart contracts
  • Speed to contract is the key for SMEs
  • Immutability of contracts - reduce fraud
  • Reduce carbon footprint
  • Increasing choice
• ETH has settled $6T worth of transactions
• Transactions and lower cost are important drivers behind Blockchain
• Speed of innovation is also key for DeFi adoption
• Exciting new mechanisms and new instruments will create massive opportunities
• TradeFi instead of being a tourist of DeFi should play a bigger role in mass adoption
• Banks brings certified customers and partners to the game. It is better for CeFi to work with DeFi
• More than 40% of the bank’s code is built on COBOL
• Blockchain and AI are major disruptive forces. Regulations need to adapt to these trends. We are 2 to 5 percent in to the DeFi revolution.
• Challenges to DeFi adoption
  • Lack of understanding
  • Consumer protection - If I am regulated entity, what is the type of risk ?
  • Open banking has taken ages - If we apply that lens, incumbents will take a long time to adopt
  • 1.7 billion unbanked - giving people identity
• SingularityNet is porting AI platform Cardano platform
• Governments in Africa are more open to Blockchain initiatives

Reflections

• AI skills are going to be useful in the world of Blockchain and cryptocurrencies space
• From a trading perspective, it will be interesting to build models that track volatility regime changes.
• Coins with meagre historical data - is there a scope for applying quant models ?
• I think for adoption of Blockchain in banks will take atleast a decade. We see cloud tech everywhere but if you want in to most of the banks, the tech infra is not cloud based. They are migrating a few aspects to cloud but the progress is slow
• For a gung ho technologist and a person who wants to create stuff, experiment, banks might not be a good place to experiment
• When the innovators in the space say that the space is just starting and we are at 2% or 3% in the journey, it is safe to assume the field is open for anyone to do anything

Key Global Trends: 1. New Collaboration Models in the Era of Embedded Finance

We’re entering the next phase in the Internet’s transformation of financial services with the rise of embedded finance. The integration of financial services into non-financial websites, mobile applications, and business processes is projected to generate $230 billion in revenue by 2025, a 10x increase from $22.5 billion in 2020. Some have claimed that this era is one where “every company will be a fintech company,” which spurs new models of collaboration between various ecosystem players. Stripe CFO Dhivya Suryadevara reflects on the role infrastructure builders like Stripe plays in facilitating these new collaboration models against the backdrop of her first year at the company, in a conversation with Rebecca Martin of MAS.

Speakers and Moderator

• Dhivya Suryadevara
• Rebecca Martin

Notes

• Pandemic has seen many businesses come online and stripe has helped them in
• Supporting Caroussel, Grab and a whole set of new users in stripe
• 50 category leaders in the enterprise space
• Asia is an important region where global ecommerce is going to happen
• Non financial players offering financial players - Constraints on banks on what they can do. Loans can be offered via stripe capital and the money hits your account instantaneously
• Banks are bones - Stripe is the Cartilage
• 14% of commerce happens online - there is a lot more room for everyone
• Crypto team in place with Stripe. Bullish on cryto
• Launching in India, Indonesia and Thailand in 2022

Reflections

• If payment tech firms start incorporating crypto in to their infrastructure, and they start hiring crypto teams, what can we expect them to deliver ? Will they do work in the public Blockchain space ?
• Will the merchants start using cryptocurrencies for payment, given its volatile nature ?
• Is Web 3.0 not a threat for payment firms that want to become the intermediaries ?
• If everyone starts accepting crypto via their wallets. what is the need for a payment processing company in the retail space ?

Key Global Trends: 2. Decentralised Finance - Redefining the Architecture

The promise of decentralised finance is in creating a fair and transparent financial system. Open-source, permissionless and trustless. What is the architecture that’s needed to support decentralised finance?

What capabilities are unlocked in a decentralised architecture? What are the frameworks for interoperability between networks? What innovations will it bring? How do we mitigate the risks and overcome the challenges? How will decentralised finance impact consumers, institutions and the financial services industry?

Learn more from Rene Reinsberg, Celo and Sergey Nazarov, Chainlink, moderated by Morgan Beller, NFX.

Speakers and Moderator

• Sergey Nazarov Co-Founder, Chainlink
• Rene Reinsberg Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder, Celo Moderator
• Morgan Beller General Partner, NFX

Notes

• DeFi is the first implementation of hybrid smart contracts
• DeFi cryptographically guaranteed outcome
• More transparency, More return and more control
• Internal operations and backend is open to public
• DeFi is necessary because financial products are not inclusive, not accessible for many people
  • Middleman has a big say on who gets banked and who doesn’t
• DeFi gives a sense of empowerment to an individual in the context of money
• Users understanding the key aspects of DeFi - That is a challenge
• May be the single users of DeFi might be in few millions
• Some of the entry points in to finance has become easier such as collateralized loan
• There is a format of value called crypto. What % of crypto is in DeFi ? a few percentage points
• DeFi - Big open source bank. Fuel to the rocket is not even pumped yet. The forces
  • inflation
  • lack of trust in centralized systems
  • say one thing - do something : 50 such things that centralized systems do
    • exchange does not go down - exchange goes down
• DeFi will be at trillions in the years to come
• Mega trend at play : Money as we know it is changing.
  • use NFT to take a loan. Just not possible in the traditional banking system
• We are might be underestimating the potential of NFT
• Banks are very client oriented institutions and that’s what got to where they are
  • Fundamental question - at what point will my user base want to interact with cryto world via me ?
    • decentralized Blockchain transactions
    • return on custody
• People who got ahead of internet and People who haven’t. It is exactly the same situation on
• DeFi is not completely onchain contract. It is a hybrid contract that includes onchain code and offchain oracle. onchain code (stores the state of the contract) and offchain part(validation, oracles, trustworthy and transaparent)
  • Without oracles, it is difficult to build DeFi applications
• NGMI - Not Going to Make It
• People are wanting to do DeFi on mobile. Uberswap - 86% is happening on mobile
• Hackathon - 1000 developers signed up for creating a mobile app for DeFi
• Next year and five year predictions
  • DeFi moves in to $1T TVL
  • No single place to get 4 to 8%
  • Massive customer adoption
  • Regulated financial industry will use Blockchain technology and create DeFi products
• Yield will be the entry point for many people
• Billion people will use DeFi in the next 5 years
  • Getting paid in stable coins and getting yield

Reflections

• Cello - What does it do ?
• Nice analogy Big open source bank
• It is useful if one joins a team where you can do something. Be it a start up or a firm that want to use Blockchain
• Imagine I were x years in to a firm and then fintechs and AI startups keep cropping up ?
• What does chainlink do ? How do they aggregate oracles ?
• It will be interesting to know the components of a smart chain DeFi application. How does one feed in oracles ? Is it an API call ? What Blockchain is being used by DeFi apps ?
• How does one get yield from existing cryto coins ? How does one stake crypto ?
• What are the metrics to track ?

Web 3.0 in Financial Services for the Consumer & Retail Sector

The consumer and retail sector serves as one of the most competitive sectors in financial services today. To stay ahead of the curve, innovation is key. This discussion brings together 2 consumer focused institutions that will dive deep into case studies that focus on services that embrace web 3.0, touching on the future of money, digital assets, payments and the overall financial revolution.

Speakers and Moderator

• Jacquelyn Tan
• Oki Matsumoto
• Sandeep Malhotra

Notes

• Trusted internet(Web 3.0) via bulletin board (Web 2.0)
• Web 3.0 : Because of Blockchain, it can create a trusted space
• Why is shifting data ownership transformational ?
  • All brokers transact via stock exchange and is centralized. The data in DeFi world in a P2P fashion.
• How can value created in one community be ported in to another community ?
• Importance of data privacy and regulation
• decentralization is happening and there is a lot of scope for innovators to be disrupted

Reflections

• Most of the questions were precise but the answers to some of the questions were really vague. Business BS and nothing else. Sometimes I wonder that it is people who are running incumbent companies are precisely the achilees' heal that finally get disrupted by technologies like Blockchain

Blockchain – Digital Assets, CBDCs, Tokenisation

In this session, Katsunori Tanizaki of SMFG will be speaking with Bloomberg’s Joanna Ossinger on topics concerning blockchain - digital assets, CBDCs and tokenisation.

Speakers and Moderator

• Katsunori Tanizaki
• Joanna Ossinger

Notes

• SMBC digital strategy
  • Combine data from financial services to move in to non-financial services
  • UI/UX driven innovation
  • Platform and embedded solution
  • Expand target customer base
• Aspire to create embedded finance solutions
• Invested in Blockchain based supply chain management
• Private security token exchange has been set up by SMBC
  • New businesses will be created with the help of security tokens
• ESG related initiatives by SMBC
• Working with MAS on a digital platform in ESG

Reflections

• ESG is starting to be a key focus area for many companies. What are the math/quant models that are being developed in the space ?
• What are security tokens and how are they different from the regular cryptocurrencies?

From In-store Payments to Cloud Commerce

As the leader in the in-store payment industry, Ingenico is witnessing the market transformation from traditional POS retail payments to digitised and embedded payments powered by software and cloud commerce platforms. In this session, Matthieu Destot, EVP, Head of Terminals, Solutions and Services Global Business Line (TSS GBL) will discuss the market forces at play globally and in Asia Pacific, the challenges incumbents and new entrants face when entering the in-store space, and the initiatives that Ingenico is taking to design and connect the commerce ecosystem of tomorrow.

Speakers and Moderator

• Matthieu Destot

Notes

• Ingenico Payment infrastructure
• We are moving towards Eco system economy
  • Groups of independent players that create product and services that together constitute a coherent solution
• Omnichannel is in full mode.
  • Point of payment to Point of commerce

Reflections

• I was overwhelmed by the domain specific jargon that I couldn’t make sense of the talk at all. May be I am completely ignorant of this space and such talks are too complicated for me to understand.

Mapping: Setting up Payments Standards

The internet and technology have brought about a revolution in digital payments, and never before have consumers and businesses had more choice over how they want to make and accept payments. But is this too much choice? With a myriad of options, are we reading the same book, but finding ourselves seldom on the same page? This panel will examine what - if any - standards of speed, price, convenience or transparency should we expect in our payments experiences, and how to build them together as an industry.

Speaking at this panel moderated by Caesar Sengupta of Arbo Works are UOB’s Janet Young, Standard Chartered’s Kahina Van Dyke, Visa’s Matt Wood and Wise’s Venkatesh Saha.

Speakers and Moderator

• Janet Young Managing Director & Head Group Channels and Digitalisation, UOB
• Venkatesh Saha Chief Executive Officer, Wise Asia-Pacific Ltd, Wise
• Matt Wood Head of Digital & Fintech Partnerships, Asia Pacific, Visa
• Kahina Van Dyke Global Head of Digital Channels & Data Analytics, Standard Chartered
• Caesar Sengupta, Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Arbo Works

Notes

• Payment at speed of now
• Payment as a means to an end has transformed a lot. It is heart at embedded finance. All services are embedding payments as a part of offering a wholesome customer journey
• Payments will harness Web 3.0
• Payments in the cross border world is still inefficient. Fees will go down in this space
• VISA
  • The ways we will be paying it today will not be too different 5 years from now
    • There will be more proliferation of services
    • There will be diffusion of payments
• 100 Billion USD month in UPI in India. Standards play an important role
• Regulators play a critical role in creating a healthy eco system
• Digital connectivity and Digital Identity are pre-requisites for payments to take off
• Creating the licensing standards
• Trust in place to take care of lowest common denomination payments
• Digital assets as a bridge currency in cross border payments. Massive role to play from the technology standpoint
• Interoperability is a pain. There is massive friction. People could come together for sustainability. If we can get CDBCs working, it can solve cross border payments
• Wise - Ton of efficiencies yet to achieve in Fiat world. 150 Billion Pounds are lost in the cross border payment. Wise saves 1 Billion Pounds
• Visa - Network of Networks. First half of 2021 - $1B in crypto cards
• Singapore merchants already have a ton of choice.
• CDBC - what should they think about ?
  • Identity
  • What data to share ?
    • Enough to provide the finality of the transaction
  • Enforceability
  • Safety
  • Need skillsets
  • Need to think through what needs to change, what needs to remain same ?
• Fiat will still be relevant and it will not be a winner takes all mentality.
• Payment tech and adoption happens very slowly

Reflections

• Fiat is not going to go away anytime soon is the sentiment echoed. Reminds of all the people who have been against fiat currencies, who have written books that have gone on to become best sellers, talks that have gone on to become the widely seen talks. The reality is that Coinbase as of April 1 2022 is listening to the regulators around the world and is trying to coexist with fiat currencies and regulators. FTX is actively courting all regulators around the world so that institutions can get crypto access. Avalance is courting many goverments for cryto adoption. All these trends point to one direction - fragmentation of payment modes, increase of choices for everyone. Will it be disrupt payment space ? Unlikely. It will happen slowly over a period of time where payment firms will morph themselves to accommodate the crypto world.

Western Union Cross-border Payments Announcement

Sohini Rajola will discuss how collaborative partnerships are changing the game when it comes to offering customers choice, flexibility, and seamless experiences. She will announce Western Union’s latest strategic collaboration. She will also discuss how Western Union is creating an exponentially more robust consumer environment and further discuss the future of global payments by companies taking a stand to open doors and share expertise with a focus on what ultimately matters – customer happiness, loyalty, trust, and an opportunity for them to participate in the global economy.

Speakers and Moderator

• Sohini Rajola

Notes

• 170 years old company
• Onmi channel fund collection and fund disbursement
• Partners can plug in to western union platform
• Integrate in to Western Union via API or hosted model
• Announces partnership with Singel dash

Interoperability in Payments: For the Old and the New?

A key to improving cross-border payments is interoperability – making sure that payment systems can talk to each other. How can we improve interoperability between existing payment systems? And as central banks explore Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), what lessons do we need to learn to ensure CBDCs are interoperable from the start?

Speakers and Moderator

• Agustin Carstens

Notes

• Singapore is one of the five hubs for BIS
• PayNow (Singapore) to PromptPay (Thailand) - Cross border payment example
• Challenges in interoperability
  • Technical
  • Data and semantics
• POC to connect Europe and ASEAN cross border payment systems
• BIS has taken up many initiatives on CBDCs

The role of digital and financial technologies to harness business opportunities and increase access to finance for MSMEs

In conversation with OCED Secretary-General Mathias Cormann. Micro- and small medium enterprises (MSMEs) make a vital contribution to our economies and our society. Digital technologies can harness opportunities for MSMEs, including for connectivity and access to finance, and foster their contribution to the recovery. OECD analysis and instruments support the objective of allowing all firms, including MSMEs, to reap the benefits of digital and financial technologies

Speakers and Moderator

• Mathias Cormann

Notes

• 30% to 50% of SMEs increased their digital uptake in the Pandemic
• OECD guidelines for digital connectivity
• Alternative financing is the key - 53 Billion dollars
• Single P2P lender accounted for 16% of all approved loans - 300M pounds
• Also looking DeFi applications
• Platform to adopt sustainable finance for SMEs

Digital Innovation: What Role Can We Play as Central Banks?

Innovation may not be the first thing that comes to mind about central banks. Yet digitalisation has the potential to transform the financial system in its entirety. As central banks, we have to embrace these changes, but there are also things that we need to preserve in this process: the public trust in money, and the stability of the financial system. How can these principles be put into practice ? Regulation is one part of the way, and fostering innovation is another, with central bank digital currencies being a “token” of our work in that area.

Speakers and Moderator

• François Villeroy de Galhau Governor, Banque de France

Notes

• MAS turned 50 in 2021
• Banque de France is more than two centuries old
• Innovation and stability can appear contradictory in the shortrun but are complimentary in the long run via TRUST
• Payment, DeFi, crypto assets, quantum computing are all digitalization forces improving financial sector
• Fintechs are getting more mature and central banks are instrumental in making sure digitalization a powerful force
• clear fair and balanced regulatory framework is the guiding principle of any regulator
  • easier said than done
• cyber risk is a systemic risk
• Trust is not about financial system working well but also making sure that algos are unbiased and fair
• Tech sprint on AI explainability - credit risk prediction models
• CBDC is a key area
• Banque de France - experiment on CDBC with fintechs
  • Testing several usecases of CBDC
  • Different types of financial instrument - tokenization, sovereign issuance and payments
  • Various technologies - Blockchain, open and proprietary protocols
• 2023 - Decision to float CBDC in Euro
• Interoperability between various CDBC is a critical objective

Reflections

• Central banks are experimenting on CBDC and there is a possibility of a scenario where the crypto currencies might take a beating if central banks put in regulations that makes them difficult to survive
• Need to follow this space to get an idea of how things shape up

Turning Bold Ideas Into Reality

The fintech segment has new breadth and complexity. Capital investment has grown, strategies for profitability have matured, and the number of players has increased. Mastercard has evolved much to ensure there are tools and resources for every fintech company needs. We love to share how we have evolved and the new solutions for the fintech segment. Presented by Amy Neale, Mastercard.

Speakers and Moderator

• Amy Neale Senior Vice President, Fintech & Enablers, Mastercard

Notes

• VC investment in H1 2021 = $60B
• projected market for embedded finance by 2030 is $7T
• 200% increase in VC money going in 2021
• Tech is changing with smart phone penetration
• Everybody wants to be a fintech
• All fintech players have three things in common
  • Everybody wants a partner
  • Bold ideas
  • Talented developers
• Mastercard developers
  • Build
  • Launch
  • Grow
• How is mastercard doing it ?
  • Products and solutions - Framework to issue cards
  • API platform for everything across mastercard platform
  • Partner network
  • Startup programs
  • Community

Hyper-Personalised Banking

Unifying its digital bank TMRW and mobile app UOB Mighty on a single platform UOB TMRW. UOB will scale across ASEAN through delivering a data-driven hyper-personalised digital banking experience. This session dives into the inner workings of UOB’s digital strategy anchored on creating an adaptive banking experience engaging customers through gamification and integrating sustainable practices into digital banking. Presented by Kevin Lam, UO

Speakers and Moderator

• Kevin Lam Head of UOB TMRW and Group Digital Banking, UOB

Notes

• Digital Adaptive Banking
  • Dynamic UI and UX for various segments
• Simple
  • See all their rewards at one place
• Transparent
• Gamification for earning rewards
• Personalized Carbon insights based on individualized consumer actions

Helping People Get the Most Out of Life

Prudential is supporting people in being healthy and financially prepared for longevity with its digital health and wellness app, Pulse. The Pulse app is open for download by everyone and they can make use of the health and wealth tools to better manage their two key priorities in life - health and wealth - all in one app The two new regional partnerships will enhance the offerings on Pulse which will benefit users. Presented by Lee Boon Huat, Prudential Corporation Asia.

Speakers and Moderator

• Lee Boon Huat Chief Digital Officer, Prudential Corporation Asia

Notes

• Prudential sponsor since 2017
• Pulse - AI digital assistant, Knowledge center and 360 view(single view of all insurance plans)
• Singapore life expectancy is 81 for men, 85 for women
• In Asian markets, 42% of healthcare spend is settled out of pocket($400 Billion)
• Smarter Health and Prive technologies - fintech partners
• Prudential has 60 tech partners

Reflections

• Classic example of a giant partnering with fintechs to offer value added services for digital experience demanding customers

Perspectives on Building a Digital Bank

Hear from Dwaipayan Sadhu of Standard Chartered Bank Solutions (Singapore) Limited - what a truly digital bank means from a customer perspective and some of the key principles that we are using to build one.

Speakers and Moderator

• Dwaipayan Sadhu

Notes

• mox first digital bank set up in HongKong in 2020
  • 190k customers and 5.7B HKD
• Singapore - Second digital bank in Asia partnership between SCB and NTUC
• True digital bank is not a consolidation of experiences.
• Amount of tech debt makes it impossible to give a good magical experiences
• How to build a true digital bank
  • Starts and ends with the customer
    • designed with the clients
    • iterate and iterate quickly
    • measure, track and act on customer feedback
  • tech first
    • solve all challenges using tech
    • 70% of workforce are coders
    • modern architecture cloud only and containerized
    • build selectively and partner the best for SCB
  • secured by design
    • risk and control embedded in design
    • culture of collaboration
    • cyber and tech risk
  • data ecosystem are key
    • relevant real time and accurate
    • build range of skills
    • data governance
    • integrate in to a deep ecosystem
  • collaborate, driving ownership, win as a team, lose as a team

Driven Forward: APAC Tech-First Road to Sustainable Finance

With more defined global and regional regulations, rising consumer awareness, and increasing environmental, social, and governance (ESG) related risk factors, financial services firms look to incorporate ESG factors in their products, policies, and processes. However, advocates and practitioners face challenges in showing business value, measuring progress, and standard reporting. In this newly launched report, we surveyed 250+ senior decision-makers from both banking and insurance sectors to understand the challenges, opportunities, and current sustainable finance actions practitioners take for the banking sector in Asia Pacific. Presented by

Speakers and Moderator

• PC Chakravarti, Accenture.

Notes

• Launch of new report on ESG
• Inclusion of ESG in business or investment decisions for the long-lasting benefits of clients, partners, stakeholders and society at large
• Top strategic priority for financial institutions
• Not just a regulatory push. Many stakeholders have a strong voice in the sustainable agend
• Covid has accelerated focus on sustainable finance
• Challenges
  • Lack of solid business cases
  • Lack of skill and talent behind the transformation
  • Complexity and enormity of the transformation
  • Lack of Budget and funding to support ESG
  • Lack of adequate, reliable and comparable data

Reflections

• Looking at this field, it reminds me of industry issue and will extract many people to pivot their career
• Time is right for sustainable finance - says the speaker. Is there a confirmation bias here ?
• Many companies will offer products to cash on the bandwagon. God knows whether the investments in these products will yield economic benefits or not.

Creating an Advantage with Quantum Computing today

Learn from Crédit Agricole CIB’s Pierre Dulon and Valérie Sauvage on how to create an advantage with quantum computing today

Speakers and Moderator

• Valerie Sauvage Managing Director and Head of IT for APAC & Middle East, Credit Agricole CIB
• Pierre Dulon Deputy CEO for IT & Operations, Credit Agricole CIB

Notes

• 1300 people dedicated to KYC and IT in Singapore
• Core business of ibank is processing information
• Quantum computing can be a real game changer
• Very promising in terms of calculations
• Portfolio optimization
• Simulation
• Security
• Beyond quantum computers, quantum inspired algos have a strong potential
• Specific math tools that are designed to be used with quantum computers
• We know that QC requires new skills. It needs different skill sets
• Solid background of mathematics
• Understanding of solid state physics
• What we actually do with quantum computing ?
  • Dedicated group to explore business cases
  • Accelerate 2 POC
  • 1 billion euros investment
• Banks will not be able to run with Quantum computers in a decade from now
• Parterning with Pascal FinTech
• CIB is doing groundbreaking work in the area of quant computing. There are many banks experimenting with this technology but I think this is the first time I am seeing a real life POC that is being worked on

Tyme Completes its Series B Capital Raise, Cementing its Expansion into Asia.

Tyme Group is announcing the second half of its Series B capital raise. This announcement follows Tyme’s successful US$110m capital raise in March 2021. Tyme is a global digital banking group with its first deployment TymeBank in South Africa with 4m customers and a second deployment, GOtyme, planned for spring 2022 in the Philippines. Presented by Coen Jonker of Tyme and Jojo Malolos of GOtyme.

Speakers and Moderator

• Coen Jonker Executive Chairman & Co-Founder, Tyme

Notes

• Tyme has a unit based out Singapore
• Emerging markets digital banking solution
• Design Build and Operate Digital banks
• 110m USD lead investors from UK
• Announcements
  • South Africa Feb 2019 launched and reached 4m customers. 60% have been active based on 30 days metrics
  • SA - New production developments
    • Salary advance product
    • BNPL product
    • Vitual POS solution
  • Vietnam - 200 engineers and developers - 40 code drops every week
  • GoTyme - Solution for democratizing finance
  • Kiosks in retail stores
  • Financial services to unbanked
• Bring digital banks to millions of customers

Reflections

• It will be interesting to see how firms like Tyme will compete with crypto firms
• Crypto firms are also trying to reach the unbanked firms but in a totally different way

An Entrepreneurship Story: Building AMTD Out From Scratch and Creating Ecosystem to Connect Through Space from Earth

Hear from Dr Calvin Choi’s entrepreneurship story building AMTD out from scratch and creating an ecosystem to connect through space from Earth, in a conversation with CNA’s Elizabeth Neo.

Speakers and Moderator

• Calvin Choi Chairman, AMTD Group Moderator
• Elizabeth Neo Presenter, CNA (Mediacorp)

Notes

• Based out of HK and SG
• Important to team up with the right people
• Finding the right talent
• Aspiration - Momentum - Teamwork - Determination
• Building a network
• Opportunity to connect various licenses
• Surround yourselves with younger gen
• Conducts executive program in Fintech

Founders' Stories: Building through a Pandemic

In this panel, we hear from founders Val Yap (AMTD PolicyPal), Johnson Chen (CapBridge Financial), Kelvin Lei (AQUMON) and Fred Ngan (Bowtie Life Insurance) on their experiences in building through a pandemic. This session will be moderated by Dr Feridun Hamdullahpur, AMTD International

Speakers and Moderator

• Val Yap Founder and CEO, AMTD PolicyPal
• Johnson Chen Chief Executive Officer & Founder, CapBridge Financial Pte Ltd
• Fred Ngan Co-Founder & Co-CEO, Bowtie Life Insurance Company Limited
• Kelvin Lei CEO & Co-Founder, AQUMON Moderator
• Feridun Hamdullahpur Chairman, Board of Directors, AMTD International

Notes

• AMTD PolicyPal
  • Started off as a firm helping people manage insurance policies
  • AI driven financial analysis tool
  • Education tool
• CapBridge Financial
  • Access to private market opportunities
  • Platform top tier financial products to individual investors
    • Fractionalized Bonds
    • Top Tier PE funds
    • Unicorns - Offer opportunities
    • Alternative assets - ESG, Crypto
  • Private exchange out of Singapore
• AQUMON
  • Digital wealth management firm
  • 3 years of research
  • Robo advisors to 100 companies
  • 50 PhDs in the team
  • 3 years of research working from 8:00 AM - 11:00 PM - 6 PhDs
  • Cryto currency ETF backtesting
  • Saas model in wealth management
  • Connect with any large institution within a month
• Bowtie
  • Provided online convenience platform for obtaining insurance
  • Started in 2018
• Covid has helped fintechs in the insurance space
  • Urgency has increased up
• Larger allocation towards private markets - Retail investors are only allocating 2 to 5% . It will grow in the

Reflections

• 10 PhDs working from 8.00 AM - 11:00 PM every day - That’s a fantastic effort that was put in before creating the firm.

Singapore FinTech Association Payments Track: Discovery and Vision: Exploring the Future of Payments Technologies

Innovation in payments technologies have been accelerating in recent years, particularly in Asia Pacific, with an uptick in real time payments, projects linking national payments infrastructures, the emergence and fast adoption of new form factors and digital wallet operators, and growing consumer demand and expectations around seamless, invisible payment experiences. This panel examines the trends shaping the payments innovation of tomorrow, including a discussion on which factors are driving change, and what the next phase of innovation in payments technology could look like. Hear from Arik Shtilman of Rapyd, Chris Yeo of Grab Financial Group and Lawrence Chan of NETS, moderated by Mastercard.

Speakers and Moderator

• Chris Yeo Managing Director, Head of GrabPay & GrabRewards, Grab Financial Group
• Lawrence Chan Chief Executive Officer, NETS
• Arik Shtilman Chief Executive Officer, Rapyd Moderator
• Gautam Aggarwal Senior Vice President, Regional Chief Technology Officer, Operations and Technology, Mastercard

Notes

• Tokenization and Mobile has remained constant in the last few years
• NETS sees three things happening
  • Better understanding of AI and data
  • Blockchain
  • 5G Connectivity
• P2M payments via Nets
• How do we ensure that there is a good user experience via embedded finance ?
• Rapyd - Started in 2017 and is now $10B valuation
  • Offers plumbing to everyone to offer payment tech
• Main competitor for payment firms is CASH
• QR as a form factor increases - there will be more payment providers in the market
• Rapyd has created standardized API across hundred countries.
  • Solves the fragmented regulation via technology
• Effect of GDPR on Grab
  • Policies and groups that have a watch on the data being used across various offerings
• Seamless checkout and Consolidation across payment providers is going to happen
• May be there will be a few payment platforms and will move away from fragmented markets
• More than 50% of hawkers are signed up - NETS
• Educate more on payment mechanics
• You cannot make money by just doing payments
• Payments
  • Convenience
  • Trust/Security
  • Rewards What value can you give to consumers?
• Blockchain technology - there is potential for countries to come together and create a hub
• Grab is working with crypto firms to figure out cryto payment strategy
• Standardize the way one can pay across payment options
• WISHLIST from the panelists
  • Seamless checkout experience
  • Merchants to accept multitude of payment options without too much plumbing
  • More customers and Large transactions per customer

Reflections

• Loved the visual that was put up before the session.

Day-2 [2021-11-09 Tue]

Web 3.0: In conversation with Kevin O’Leary

Hear from Kevin O’Leary, O’Shares ETFs chairman and of “Shark Tank” fame as we go into his mind (and personality) on his thoughts about Web 3.0, what caused him to change his personal views on decentralisation and digital currencies in the space of barely 2 years. How does the world of traditional investing complement new forms of financial services? Also, why should institutions look at it - before it’s too late.

Speakers and Moderator

• Kevin O’Leary
• Sina Nader

Notes

Kevin spoke some great things in his discussion with FTX. Institutional markets are hungry for investing in crypto market but are plagued because of compliance issues and lack of single platform where they can mark to market easily, instead of dealing with a dozens of wallets across in a spreadsheet. Kevin was a disbeliever in cryto a few years ago, but has completely changed his mindset in the last few years. He has allocated 7% of the funds to all crypto and believes that there are a lot more funds coming in to crypto space.

For any skeptical investor, Kevin’s pitch is,

Do you have allocation in Google, MSFT, Amazon ? If so, what stops you from investing in cryto which is nothing but a software platform for the future ?

Kevin presents another usecase in his fund : He brought down the real estate exposure of his fund from 31% to 8% and wanted to deploy cash. He hunted around for various opportunities to deploy cash and all he obtained was 21bps for 90 days. He then took the route of using for stable coins where he could lend the money for 90 days so that stable coins can be used to take exposure to cryto asset, the yield shot up to 8%. This is one of the reasons that lot of money is being used up for stable coins. This usecase also made him hire a new set of team focused on cryto. His PE fund team looks at deals, 50% of which are related to DeFi space. Never has been so much concentration of ideas and deals in a single space. This space is going to explode in the next 10 years and what we are seeing is just the beginning.

Kevin also mentioned about another use case where he is mandated to hold large stocks in the native country that the stock is listed. In order to meet the mandate, Kevin had to pay a lot of fees for currency conversion and this is a great case for seamless crypto payments.

The reason for imminent explosion of crypto is rooted in the ground reality that institutional investors are not able get to this asset class because of compliance reasons. Once there are platforms that can comply with the regulatory requirements, more money will flow in.

The way to understand this space is via self-education, experimenting with wallets and understanding this space.

Kevin believes that this is a tremendous opportunity for the young generation and entrepreneurs to spend the next decade exploring the opportunities in this area.

Reflections

• If a incumbent can turn around and shift his investment philosophy, there must be a compelling need for him to do so. Will the DeFi space explode in the coming years ?
• Will be see the next generation of people working in the area of Blockchain, Web 3.0 technologies to disrupt the financial services as we know it ?
• What role will regulation play in making or breaking this space ?

The Future of Money, Finance and the Internet

As we enter into the Web 3.0 era, how will money, finance, and the internet-enabled economy of the future look like? We are seeing innovations such as decentralised ledger technology and blockchain catalyse monetary innovation and transform how financial services are being delivered, while economic transactions get facilitated through the internet in exciting new ways. Hear from Ravi Menon, Managing Director of Monetary Authority of Singapore.

Speakers and Moderator

• Ravi Menon

Notes

A very interesting talk that mentioned three important components that is driving innovation - money, finance and internet.

Ravi starts off by giving a brief primer to money, finance and the internet. Money is named after the Roman goddess of money Juno Moneta, who carried the title Moneta. The greek god of wealth is Plutus. Hence the concepts of money and finance have been around since millenia.

If one looks at money, there are primarily two forms of money in the current era, besides crypto world of money. Physical cash and digital cash that is in the form of deposits at various banks. 92% of the money in circulation is coming from the deposits at the banks.

In the modern age, there are other forms of payment that have become available. In the recent times, besides cryto tokens, stable coins have become a way to hold money too. They are redeemed at part and claimed to be backed by currency. Big companies have started accepting stable coins such as VISA and Mastercard.CBDCs is another areas where central banks around the world are experimenting with issuing digital currencies directly. MAS has released a whitepaper on the same.

MAS has taken up many projects such as Project Dunbar, Project Ubin, Partior to leverage DLT technology to solve some of the existing platforms. Ravi mentioned a few Collaborative platform projects that MAS has worked with banks

• CheckFin - verified credentials of FinTechs
  • CheckFin platform launched in Dec 2021
• Project Greenprint - data platform to support green finance eco system
  • Four interoperable platforms
  • Comparable and reliable ESG disclosures
  • ESG registry to record and maintain ESG certifications
  • Connect green technology providers and corporates
• Project Cosmic
  • Rich and dynamic network of data to fight financial crime

In the area of internet, Ravi described the three phases of internet that we have seen so far as follows:

• Web 1.0 - Readable internet - Most users were passive consumers of content.
• Web 2.0 - Participative web - Rich exchanges of information, with user contributed info
• Web 3.0 - Personal Internet - Empowered - Decentralized sharing - Smart contracts and tokenized assets
  • Tokenized assets are digital representations of physical assets written using smart contracts
  • Rights and ownership could be transferred seamlessly
  • Smart contracts and tokenization are already onway
    • OLAM issued digital bond
    • SemCorp issued digital bond
    • Digital bonds can be issued in small quantities - coupon payments can be reduced

Ravi is also bullish on DeFi space and says it is nascent field as of now. MAS has put in infrastructure so that banks, partners can play around this technology and see if they are good enough usecases that can be worked on and put in production.

DeFi related technologies do need some sort of regulation but as of now, nobody knows what exactly needs to be done by whom, given the default nature of permissionless technology. May be the existing regulatory frameworks need a revamp, May be the control or governance itself can be dispersed across blockchain

Reflections

• What projects will be spun out of MAS in collaboration with industry players, in the field of money, finance and web ?
• How will MAS regular DeFi space, if it becomes big ?
• MAS is against retail CDBCs but will the case becoming compelling enough to rethink their strategy ?
• How are other central banks, who have already issued retail CDBCs, going to put safegaurds against protecting local banks ?
• Plan to read The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking sometime during the year end break

Web 3.0 Conversation on the Convergence of Media and Finance

This one’s for the fans! In a first for #SFF, we welcome music icon Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park to join us on the speaker line up. Since early this year, Mike has been working on a variety of projects that aim to bring value back to music and the people involved in it. One of the key ways is via blockchain and, more specifically, non-fungible tokens (NFTs). We’ll be asking for his thoughts on Web 3.0, the generation of monetary value and how entertainment and finance are able to converge in this new era. This session will also touch on the mechanics of the social economy and how Web 3.0 enhances use cases in the area. This session will be moderated by Katherine Ng, Tezos.

Speakers and Moderator

• Mike Shinoda
• Katherine Ng

Notes

Mike Shinoda, an artist, who is now making his art available via NFT spoke about the usefulness of Blockchain lead, NFT lead innovation. Frankly, I did not follow many aspects that were being talked about. I guess the power of adoption is driven by the fact that the ownership can be atomized. Stuff done by artists can be owned by fan - fractional ownership at play, similar to investors holding a piece of ownership of a company via stocks, bonds etc. The second factor driving NFT adoption could be the price discovery element that is facilitated by NFT. The third most important aspect is that artists of tired of getting ripped off by the intermediaries and want to control their data, their identity, their brand by themselves

Reflections

• What is a drop mean in NFT jargon ?
• How are independent artists creating NFT?
• Does it require tech skills to create an NFT ?
• How does an NFT art that you have bought, interact with your digital wallet ?
• What is cryptopunk ?
• What does it mean when an artist says that he is going to establish a Dao ?
• What does proof of stake mean ?
• Tesoz chain is energy efficient proof of stake chain Blockchain. What does this meam ?
• What does it mean when an artist says that he is dropping a generative art on NFT platform ?

Building the Value Exchange Layer of the Internet

Every civilisation has developed a type of money as a kind of ledger of value. Instead of hauling a cow to trade for other goods, societies developed fungible money, like gold or some other precious commodity, and paper money.

Cryptocurrencies are perhaps the most sophisticated ledger of value ever developed in the history of the world.

What is the definition of the value exchange layer of the Internet? How does the transfer of value work in decentralising economies? How do Web 3.0 and the finance industry converge? What transformation will it bring to institutions and individuals? Find out in this conversation between Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin and Raoul Pal of Real Vision.

Speakers and Moderator

• Pal
• Vitalik Buterin

Notes

Buterin spoke about the emergence of mixed financial services, the services that are not necessarily about money but have a strong money component that makes it very useful to customers. NFTs as such encapsulates everything from crytotokens to digitized form of physical assets. The factor that is driving these assets is the fractional ownership idea, where anyone could own a piece of brand, piece of real estate, piece of art, with minimal friction. Good part is that all these will sit in the digital wallet just like any other token

Another compelling reason to tokenize real estate is that traditionally the choice has been a binary choice - either you own a real estate property and are massively exposed to one asset class or you are underexposed to real estate if you are on rent. There is no possibility of something in between. That’s where NFTs become important and useful.

Buterin mentioned that governments and regulation are going to play an important role in creating an environment where good projects are supported. He mentions that his focus areas are

• Watching scaling happen on the network
• Zero knowledge proof technology
• emergence of Dao’s

Reflections

• How to create a Dao ? What programming effort does it require ? What skills does one need to create a Dao ?
• What is the cost of setting up a Dao ?
• What is Zero knowledge proof ?
• What is a social recovery wallet ? How does one build one ?

Foundational Tech Firesides: 1. Distributed Ledger Technology

The next generation of technology will need a strong core to support blockchain applications.

What’s the technology behind blockchain applications? It’s Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). It’s a decentralised database managed by multiple participants, across multiple nodes. Blockchain is just one type of DLT.

In this talk, Gavin Wood of Parity Technologies will examine the tradeoffs between centralised and decentralised finance. Is interoperability the answer to the scalability question? How we should not adopt, but adapt to DLT. This session will be moderated by Manisha Tank.

Speakers and Moderator

• Gavin Wood - Polka Dot founder
• Manisha Tank

Notes

Speaker was the CTO of Ethereum and has worked on several aspects before working on Polkadot. This is again one of the sessions I did not understand many aspects that the Gavin was talking about. All I could gather was the Polkadot is a far superior network to Ethereum in terms of creating DeFi applications. Ethereum apparently is good for creating easy to use scripting language but is not so good for creating scalable DeFi apps. Gavin has been working on this project for the last four years and hopes to work on building polkadot as the next gen infrastructure for all the DeFi apps.

Speaker was humble enough to acknowledge that he has no say in how the technology will be finally put to use, and does not want to moralize about technology. He is focused on building technology that creates openness, transparency and uncorruptability.

The reason he is kicked about polkadot that it is much more efficient way to build DeFi apps and it is a system that is out in the wild, building incentives that make it challenging for anyone to break the system.

From a person who has been working in the field for a long time, it is important to pay attention to his words - Building DeFi is difficult

I guess before you jump on to doing a startup, it is important to understand the field and see if it plays to your strengths.

Reflections

• What is proof of staking ?
• What is the application of sharding in proof of stake ?
• What is Parachain ?
• What is Relaychain?
• What is Byzantine fault ? How does it related to DLT ?
• Need to watch TED talk by Gavin

Foundational Tech Firesides: 2. Development of Responsible AI

AI has enormous potential to be life-changing for billions of people the world over, but it can also be exploited to inflict as much harm as it can do good. How can we - as developers, owners, policymakers, and users of AI systems - ensure that AI lives up to its promise to benefit humanity through the responsible and ethical development and use of AI?

Newly inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in the US, Dr Marian Croak shares with Manisha Tank, Google’s experience in putting its AI Principles into practice.

Speakers and Moderator

• Dr. Marian Cook
• Manisha Tank

Notes

Dr. Marian mentioned two principles that are driving responsible AI at Google

1. AI Systems do not produce any risk to the humanity. As we all know the virtues of the technology are not guaranteed. This means that company as a whole must build technologies that have fairness, transparency, privacy and security built in to them. Also the AI needs to be interpretable in a way
2. Human centered approach to AI - This involves making sure that the systems being designed are working well and can be improved so that it has principles of trust, inclusion etc built in to them.

The speaker has spent more than 40 years in the area of technology and at one point in time was responsible for reliability engineering for the entire AT&T network. The excitement of using those principles that she has internalized in her career and play with them at Google is what the speaker is looking forward to. On a practical level, Google has released many white papers, tools that give a guidance towards building responsible AI systems.

Reflections

• There were many startups that have realized that this is an area of opportunity. It will be interesting to see the ways in which these startups can build solutions that help banks, financial institutions to get a grip on all their current AI solutions and the way in which these solutions are adhering to responsible AI principles that are either laid out internally or specified by regulator

Foundational Tech Firesides: 3. IoT

The exponential growth in the number of internet connected devices, systems and assets have unleashed a tremendous volume of data which are driving the transformation of processes, risk assessments and customer experience across industries. Financial Institutions could strengthen their capabilities in fraud detection and enrich sustainable financing initiatives. By augmenting it with data from connected assets, Insurers could improve their risk assessment. Meanwhile, retail banks could offer a more personalised user experience for their customers. In this session, we will discuss the application of IoT in financial services, and how this might be complemented by technology such as 5G, edge computing and blockchain. Hear from Derrick Loi, Ant Group, moderated by Manisha Tank.

Speakers and Moderator

• Derrick Loi
• Manisha Tank

Notes

Derrick talks about three areas of IoT that are seeing a lot of activity

1. Artificial Intelligence of Things in which the data collection and processing of data is being more streamlined, curated, more intelligent
2. With the emergence of 5G, there is more compute power at the edge and hence AIoT devices can become very powerful in cleansing and curating data
3. Curated analytics is now possible with AIoT and 5G combination.

The above three areas are opening up several opportunities for the financial sector, where the scope for building trust is enhanced with enhanced user experience.

Ant group has also launched many open APIs so that a partnership ecosystem can be built around its tools. The speaker was of the view that one of the best ways to create responsible AI solutions is to see to it that everyone in the chain gets to monetize the transaction instead of a centralized party. This essentially means that Web 3.0 and Blockchain will have a lot to play in this area.

Reflections

• A few years ago, a colleague of mine, left the datascience team he was heading and joined a IoT startup. It will be interesting to catch up with him and learn about the new developments in this area
• Another colleague of mine who was heading sales in the asset management space joined an IoT startup that was focusing on using satellite data and other forms of alternative data to create signals for the buy side. Wonder how that startup is taking shape now, with the emergence of 5G end points

Foundational Tech Firesides: 4. 5G

5G networks promises high data rates and lower latency and are primed to unlock new capabilities and advance digitalisation in financial services. How might 5G interact with related fields such as internet of things, augment reality and decentralised finance?

This session examines how 5G networks might enable an immersive and hyper personalised experience for consumers and change the financial services landscape.

Hear from Cisco’s Chuck Robbins, moderated by Manisha Tank.

Speakers and Moderator

• Chuck Norris
• Manisha Tank

Notes

4G was introduced more than 10 years ago and with the emergence of 5G in 2019, Chuck believes that there is an enormous opportunity to take the current user interaction to a whole new level. With the adoption of 5G, it is now possible to have enhanced video interactions possible. With low latency 5G networks and IoT, the future looks very bright for technology as a whole.

In the context of financial services, Chuck believes that 5G will bring in inclusivity in all the businesses. More people can work from home, More people can use the power of 5G to interact with others around the world. Chuck mentioned the release of webex hologram, the next generation of real time interactive meetings enhanced by augmented reality.

Reflections

• Cisco should do incredibly well in the coming years, with its wonderful technology that powers more people to collaborate with each other on the internet.

Foundational Tech Firesides: 5. Quantum Computing - How and when will our day to day lives be affected by Quantum Computing?

Quantum computing has been described as the next industrial revolution affecting all aspects of society and business. Countries all over the world have declared national programmes around this subject. What kind of impact will we expect to see with the proliferation of quantum computing on cloud services? Presented by Ilyas Khan and moderated by Dr Yogesh Patel, Callsign.

Speakers and Moderator

• Ilyas Khan
• Yogesh Patel

Notes

Speaker points out the fact that Moore’s law is not going to run out anytime soon as engineering advances are amazing and people will creative innovative solutions. Quantum computer has been around 40 odd years and the basic technology uses atomic and subatomic particles as carriers of information. A traditional computer uses a contrived structure, a transistor, a binary structure. We use the concatenation of the binary structures to allow all the processing to happen Since we have math around transistor, there are limits to what we can do and what we cannot do. A quantum computer has no such limit uses nature at that level that is governed by quantum mechanics. It is the constant law of the universe. Every one is subjected to the fundamental law of quantum mechanics.

In order to make quantum computing a reality, nation states are coming together and collaborating with public and private enterprises. Cera Certain countries believe that the future well being is dependent on the ability to use quantum computing

Speaker feels that we are a very early stage and it might easily take another 10 years to get a fault tolerant quantum computer being available for the masses. Google has already announced that it will be coming out with a quantum computer by 2029. The most promising applications are in the are of cybersecurity About the future of the usage, the speaker is very humble and desists making any specific predictions.

Reflections

• What is Schrodinger’s cat ? How is it connected to quantum computing ?
• Will quantum computing make Web 3.0 cryptography weak and breakable ?
• How will quantum computing effect the emergence of Web 3.0 technologies ?

The digital “secret sauce” to reach more consumers globally

A suite of payment and marketing solutions is supporting e-wallet operators to help local merchants reach consumers globally, even as travel is curtailed amid the pandemic. Hear from Ant Group, owner and operator of leading digital payment platform Alipay, on the secret sauce that is making this possible. [This session is brought to you by: ANT Group]

Speakers and Moderator

• Cheng Guoming

Notes

The session was mostly around the way Alipay+ is partnering with all the payment providers across the world to make payment space more inclusive and expansive.

Reflections

• Payment infra is being dominated by FinTechs and TechFins.It looks like collaboration is the key to scaling in this business

Roundtable in Partnership with Ecosystm: The Building Blocks of Web 3.0

Web 3.0 is the next phase of the internet’s evolution, but what technologies does it need to succeed? While the Web 3.0 stack is not yet fully developed, much progress has been made to set the foundations for a new online ecosystem that breaks away from the traditional web into new realms of online interaction. There are many examples of early-stage Web 3.0 applications which show how much potential the technologies can help realise. The concept of Web 3.0 may be interpreted differently but it is, at its core, a movement for a free web. A high-level discussion about Web 3.0 components and how they will shape the future of your online activities.

Hear from Brenda Harvey of IBM APAC, Divyesh Vithlani of Accenture, Emin Gün Sirer of Ava Labs, Peter Wright of ST Telemedia Cloud and Vincent Yang of Firework. This session will be moderated by Ullrich Loeffler of Ecosystm.

Speakers and Moderator

• Brenda Harvey
• Divyesh
• Vincent
• Emin
• Peter
• Ulrich

Notes

Out of all the speakers, Emin stood out. He was of the opinion that Web 3.0 was fundamentally different technology than compared to the buzz words that were being used by others. Edge computing, 5G, cloud computing are not about Web 3.0. Web 3.0 is fundamentally about creating applications based on the peer to peer relationships that work on a permissionless manner.

The session was random collection of thoughts aired out by various speakers. Every one though was of the opinion that data sovereignty is going to be defining feature of the next generation of Web 3.0 technologies. All the application use cases atleast are in the two area

• use cases where there is a problem of trust that needs to be solved
• Test the intermediary value in any process and see if the Web 3.0 can decentralized the power

Reflections

• There seems to be a difference of opinion about the usage of Web 3.0 technologies from the incumbents point of view, as compared to start ups.
• How does firework make money ?

FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) with Wealth@Pulse

Our speakers will talk about the financial impact of the pandemic on our readiness for longevity, and using digital tools to help people achieve FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) with financial planning. We will also provide insights into Wealth@Pulse, our wealth ecosystem on Pulse, our digital health and wellness app. With Wealth@Pulse, we want to help people get financially ready for longevity. [This session is brought to you by: Prudential]

Speakers and Moderator

• Nelius
• Ian
• Charmine Yee

Notes

The session talked about the solutions offered by an incumbent partnering with a fintech. FinTechs around the world are following this model where they partner with an incumbent to deliver digital solutions in Asia where most of the firms are going with digital-first solutions. CIO of Prudential talks about Ruby, a financial chatbot that provides valuable information for all the customers visiting Prudential’s FIRE platform. The speakers were of the opinion that with the emergence of Web 3.0 technologies, it is not possible to get segment of one strategy implemented.

Reflections

• Financial well-being is being redefined and firms are following a multi-faceted way. The solutions are combining human expertise with machine efficiency in the field of insurance solutions.

Creating a customer-centric approach to business payments

Creating a customer centric approach to business payments The customer is every fintech’s critical source of inspiration, powering how businesses choose to innovate and grow. To be customer-focused, Fintech businesses are leveraging on customer insights, advanced tech and data to reimagine business and organizational models. This is an organisational effort that require alignment of company culture to cultivate the right mindset and values in all employees. My goal is to share how fintech businesses have leveraged on technology and a customer-centered mindset to innovate and grow in new and unprecedented ways. [This session is brought to you by: THUNES]

Speakers and Moderator

• Nanz Lim

Notes

Speaker talks about a few use cases where customer centricity in the payments space has lead to increased customer stickiness. The point of customer centricity starts internal to the organization where you empower your employees to get direct feedback on their work from all customers, so that they are ready to improve the game and enabled enhanced customer experience. The usecases presented related to Xero and Adobe.

Reflections

• Payment industry is $125T industry size and there will be many firms that will work on improving the customer experience

Product showcase of AMTD Digital’s companies

• Featuring Airstar BANK
• Featuring AMTD PolicyPal

Speakers and Moderator

• AMTD

Notes

This was a product demo of Policy Pal and Airstar Bank. Policy Pal was providing digital experience to all insurance needs across all age groups. One can upload an existing document and the app will recognize all the relevant fields, digitize the document so that the customer can share the document with anyone. The service also has other features such as financial planning, financial calculator, premium calculator, life insurance, general insurance and interaction with financial consultants.

Airstar bank was focused on making the banking experience frictionless where placing a term deposit takes a few seconds, opening a bank account takes a few minutes and obtaining a loan 24 by 7 with out going through massive amount of paper work. There are no account management fee, loan processing fee etc.

Reflections

• Wow, was blown away by Airstar bank demo. If banking services become so frictionless as demonstrated, it will give a real run to the incumbents. No wonder all the big banks have started digital banks in important geographies. SCB has started one in HK and SG. I think many FinTechs will try to partner with these banks to scale their existing offerings. Also in a few years, nothing should stop an incumbent to evolve and offer everthing FinTech offers and severe ties with the FinTech

Building Global Trade Solutions

Next generation payment platforms like Rapyd can help small and large businesses go global quickly and more cost effectively - to collect funds from buyers globally with their locally preferred forms of payment, to escrow and move money safely to reduce risk from new trading partners, and to pay out funds to suppliers and vendors efficiently anywhere in the world. [This session is brought to you by: Rapyd]

Speakers and Moderator

• Jonathan Hall

Notes

In the product demo, the speaker says that improving the payment infrastructure is key for many businesses. Despite knowing this, many firms are unable to get the strategy right. Demo is about pitching Rapyd and talking about the differentiating features of the offering.

Reflections

• $4.3T 2020 Retail ecommerce biz size

Venture Investing in Crypto

As of mid June 2021, record breaking $17 billion has been invested into crypto industry this year. With an all time high amount of interest in crypto, this session will highlight how institutions and VCs can position themselves for future opportunities/trends in blockchain technology and projects. [This session is brought to you by: FTX]

Speakers and Moderator

• Ramnik Arora

Notes

Found this talk very interesting as Ramnik talks about the difference between the traditional VC workflow with the VC workflow of a crypto firm. Never knew that 17B USD has been invested in various crypto firms in the first half of 2021. The speaker mentions the following aspects that makes crypto exchanges very powerful

• 900 Bitcoin per day industry - 20B a year industry
• Buying a stock on an exchange has so many layers as compared to buying something on a crypto exchange. It is so much easier to buy stuff on a crypto exchange where buyer and seller interact with a cryto exchange
• Investing in crypto is similar to a situation where you are offered to buy a small piece of TCP/IP
• From a market microstructure, cryto is very different

Typically a traditional VC firm’s workflow has the following limitations:

• Long time to build products
• Monetization is divorced from the offering
• New users are treated equal to existing users
• Marketing is spent inefficiently

Cryto turns the VC investing upside down

• Because of composibility, building a startup does not take years
• cryto makes by definition makes money the first class citizen and hence it is easy to monetize the work for various players
• early makers have more advantage - the early community builders and developers have more tokens and hence are financially incentivized to do a better job
• Cryto investing is capital efficient. Marketing could be spent efficiently and its results can easily be measured in terms of its impact on the token value
• data is entirely public and hence the working of any project based on crypto is transparent for a VC

The speaker is of the view that a small number of startups can scale very quickly and VC will need to adopt a completely different approach to get their play right

Reflections

• A few years ago, it was ICO. Not it is Dao. Is there a value for a VC to follow this route ?
• Many big VC firms are following this route of funding through crypto tokens. Will it work ? Has it worked in firms ? Are the valuations for crypto start up justifiable ?

Building the next generation of global Internet and financial infrastructure

TRON, one of the largest public blockchain platforms in the world, was launched in 2018 by Justin Sun, and committed to promoting and building the infrastructure for decentralized Internet. In 2018, TRON acquired BitTorrent Inc which has more than 170 million active users per month. Nowadays, TRON has more than 57 million active users and more than 2.5 billion transactions per day. [This session is brought to you by: TRON]

Speakers and Moderator

• Justin Sun

Notes

I was blown away by what Justin Sun has achieved so far. Starting Ripple a decade ago and then starting TRON blockchain, that is touted to be superior to Ethereum, are some of the achievements mentioned. The entire presentation looked like a CV walk through of Justin Sun. While the CV walk through was impressive, I am wondering whether the chain is as robust as being advertised. I have come across so many words in this demo that I have no clue about.

Reflections

• Never knew BitTorrent was acquired for 140M USD
• BitTorrent created BTFS - File system protocol. What is the advantage of the protocol ?
• What is on-chain token swap ?
• What is stable coin swap ?
• Why did TRON acquire BitTorrent for $140M ?
• What does it take to build an stablecoin eco system ?
• What is staking-mining ?
• What does JustSwap do ? Why is it largest DeFi on TRON?

Embedded Insurance & The Future of Distribution

While modern insurance has been around since the late 18th century, the insurance distribution process has been slow to evolve. Customers, whether buying for personal or commercial protection, still buy insurance directly from an insurer or through an independent agent and/or broker. But, with the advent of new technologies and rapid digitisation, distribution channels and processes are being remodeled and made more relevant through embedded experiences that are convenient, highly personalised and trustworthy. [This session is brought to you by: Austrade]

Speakers and Moderator

• Arjit Chakraborty

Notes

Speaker talks about the way selling insurance has changed in the recent years, as many customers are preferring insurance at the time of transaction than as buying as a stand along product. A survery reported that 78% are looking for embedded insurance using transaction data. Hence the distribution of insurance product has become more contextual and transaction driven. This is where FinTechs are partnering with ecommerce providers in providing embedded insurance to customers. With the customers demanding convenience and trust from embedded insurance and not just plain old stand alone insurance, this would be an interesting field to watch when FinTechs, incumbents and ecommerce providers fight it out.

Reflections

• What does the term attachment rate, in the context of embedded finance ?
• Why are attachment rates going up, post covid ?

Access and Transparency: Financial Inclusion in the Web 3.0 Era

This session will focus on the impact of Web 3.0 technologies in addressing financial inclusion, especially dimensions of access to financial services and transparency as it relates to decentralisation and data governance.

Hear from Alfonso Garcia Mora of IFC, Ling Hai of Mastercard Asia Pacific and Salim Dhanani of BigPay. This session will be moderated by Professor Olayinka David-West of Lagos Business School.

Speakers and Moderator

• Alfonso
• Ling
• Salim
• David-West

Notes

Reflections

Inspire, excite, and transform - The FSI DREAM Demo in a box

In this session, we showcase a new analytics accelerator from Microsoft that has prebuilt Dashboards, built for Personas in Banks with all of the supporting technology packaged for easy deployment into the cloud. Customers and partners can easily customize and integrate. Use cases are built out for ESG, Financial Crime, and Customer Experience. [This session is brought to you by: Microsoft]

Speakers and Moderator

• Sanjay Soni
• Morrissey

Notes

The demo is about creating a fully integrated webapp that can be used by various entities internal and external to the organization. It showcases various MSFT Azure technologies that can be used to build a powerful dashboard. I wasn’t too impressed with the DREAM demo as it looked amateurish.

Reflections

• How does MSFT Azure develop summary for documents, powered by Agolo ?
• ESG Analytics - Is there a scope of showcasing graph analytics ?
• MSFT has built a demo for responsible AI - usecase SME lending
• Synapse Analytics - How does the query perform with GBQ ?
• How does Azure cognitive form scanner work ? What kind of NLP is being used ?

Asian Debt Capital Markets and the Yellow Brick Road to digitalisation

Blockchain, digital exchanges and other tech innovations promise to make debt capital markets more transparent, efficient and inclusive. But why are digitalisation efforts taking a while to see real traction? What are the inhibiting factors keeping market participants from embracing digital? What does true democratisation of financial markets mean to both market participants and governments? [This session is brought to you by: DBS]

Speakers and Moderator

• Clifford Lee

Notes

Found this short session very useful as the speaker highlighted three factors that could be causing a slowness in digital services adoption :

• True cost of financial liberation
  • Problem: Economic interests vary across various countries and hence financial liberation while it sounds nice on paper and looks good from an idealistic standpoint, countries have their own incentives to create frictions in cross border payments
  • Solution: Laws and Govt policies have to be written for the new way of transacting
• Finding Solutions to real problems
  • Problem 1: Debt markets are OTC and hence practices have evolved the years to make it more efficient. The marginal savings offered by FinTechs and digital initiatives are not enticing enough for the entities to switch.
    • Solution: FinTechs need to think beyond immediate efficiency
  • Problem 2 : Touting Fractional ownership is not enough
    • Solution: Fractional ownership can be put in place with the current technology with regulatory guidelines
  • Problem 3: Touting Banking for unbanked is not enough. Banking is already super competitive and all unbanked customers are being targeted. If there are certain types of customers that are unbanked, may be it is not digital solutions that are going to help, but something else.
• Transparency
  • Problem: This is peculiar as everyone wants it but nobody wants to offer. Current players do not want to be totally transparent eroding their information asymmetric edges. So, offering transparency as the USP might not cut it.

Speaker ends the session saying that digital solutions must be built so as to align with multitude of stakeholders. FIX Market place, an initiative launched by DBS is quoted as an example

Reflections

• What is Yellow Brick road ?
• If the solution offered by Web 3.0 technologies is fundamentally threatening the way incumbents perform, how can technologies be collaboratively developed ? There is going to be bloodshed and I guess it is better to admit it than say that FinTechs will have to adapt themselves and create solutions to suit the multitude of stakeholders in an enterprise ? It is utopia that all stakeholders will be in agreement on anything, much less on disruptive technologies like Web 3.0

HSBC MarketSpace: Re-inventing businesses in a hyper-connected world

Organisations are now competing in a multilateral competitive landscape. In order to re-invent the business and thrive, how do we drive effective collaboration, digitalise at scale and maximise business outcome? Looking into the platform business in Securities Services industry to facilitate strategic partnership, exchange between multiple parties and drive non-linear growth of value. [This session is brought to you by: HSBC]

Speakers and Moderator

• Lee

Notes

Session was one of the most boring sessions. The speaker was reading out of slides as though it was some internal HSBC presentation. He was touting about some platform that will be make everyone better.

Reflections

• I wonder what are all these chief digital officers doing in big banks ? Are they really adding any value to these enterprises

Digitize and thrive in the era of borderless commerce

Last year’s seismic shifts opened up vast new possibilities for cross-border eCommerce. As the uneven pandemic recovery continues, it’s clear shopping behaviours have changed for good. This session captures and highlights the current and upcoming global shifts that will shape the future of cross-border commerce. [This session is brought to you by: PayPal]

Speakers and Moderator

• Rakesh

Notes

The session by Paypal highlighted on the explosion of ecommerce in 2020 because of pandemic. The market increased from $3.35T in 2019 to $4.38T in 2020, almost adding a second US market. It is expected that 67% of all online shopping is to expected to happen via Mobile. Cross border shopping has also significantly increased across many markets. The speaker pitches Paypal as a partnership platform based on the following strengths

• available in 200 countries and payment possible in 100 currencies
• predictive algos for merchants to monitor charge backs
• 392M customers
• Streamlining operations and report capabilities for understanding the customers

Some Highlights of stats

• US
  • 61% shop via smart phone and 60% shop via laptop
  • 33% shop domestic and international sites
• China
  • 39% shop domestic and international sites
  • 43% use alipay
• India
  • 49% shop domestic and international sites
  • 91% shop via smart phone and 59% shop via laptop

Reflections

• I guess whatever Web 3.0 dApps are being built, I think there is a need to build both mobile and desktop interfaces. Are there secure wallet apps available for mobile ?

Yield Generation: Opportunities in Cryptocurrency Volatility

Crypto is a fast-growing frontier asset class and there are many profit making opportunities in the space. Crypto derivatives allow for the implementation of strategies with compelling risk-reward profiles for both financial investors as well as crypto asset owners. These strategies can deliver very scalable alpha. The inefficiencies and dislocations in crypto options and futures allow investors to make outsized returns while mitigating downside risk. [This session is brought to you by: QCP Capital]

Speakers and Moderator

• Darius Sit

Notes

Darius talks about the products offered to institutional players. The fund($2B) provides institutional type strategies and was formed in 2017(with a current team size of 60 ). They trade spot and derivatives across CeFi and DeFi The products offered are

• Term carry(expected returns 10%)
• Cash carry and spread strategies (expected returns 20%)
• Option strategies (Very high realized vol and implied vol)
  • Synthetic mining
    • Selling put and call options and taking premiums in coin. Take a less risk as you are not buying BTC
    • Returns can be anywhere between 50%-100%
    • Consistently earning coins and accumulating coins without the hassle of having to put up high upfront cost
  • Leverage strategies
    • Ramp up with leverage
    • Buy option strategies such as put spreads, call spreads
    • Digital - Premium multiplier strategy
      • Use premium to buy a digital call and if your call goes right, then you earn premium times x
  • Structured products
    • More longer term products

The team also offers a Market update channel on telegraph

Reflections

• Wow, looks very interesting and caters to growing hunger of institutional players wanting to play in the derivatives market

BTTC - Building Age of Connecting All Chains

BitTorrent Chain launched by TRON is a scaling and cross-chain solution connecting TRON, Ethereum and BSC. A closed loop of both layer 1 and 2 networks with sound cross-chain connectivity will take shape, delivering both a robust underlying network of global settlement layer and a heterogeneous, scalable cross-chain network that features high throughput and full compatibility with EVM. [This session is brought to you by: TRON]

Speakers and Moderator

• Justin Sun

Notes

Was expecting a talk from Justin Sun but it was an advertisement repeated twice in a span of 10 minutes

Reflections

• Came across an earlier video by TRON that was CV walk through of Justin Sun. This video was nothing more than a combination of buzz words. I wonder whether TRON is actually making any money or is it surviving on the charisma of the founder ?

Driving the Future of Money With Data + AI Showcase

Consumers have more options than ever when it comes to money and banking, and are demanding superior experiences. Today, the race is on to obtain 360° views of customers, modernize risk management practices and innovate fast. Hear how leading firms leveraged advanced analytics to scale data analytics, become customer-centric, minimize risks, prevent frauds and drive sustainable value creation. [This session is brought to you by: Databricks]

Speakers and Moderator

• Junta Nakai

Notes

Databricks is a company that is known for creating Spark and hence is a go-to tool for any data engineer or datascientist. Over the last decade or so, they have created compelling offerings to various sectors by introducing mlflow, delta lake etc. The speaker is of the view that banks are going to be radically transformed with the emergence of open banking where the customer transacation data is no longer captive with one central organization but is available to the entire eco system such as fintechs, regulators, other banks. This will enable banks to move away from product centricity to customer centric thinking.

There are three Ts that are needed for an open bank to disrupt the existing structure:

• Talent
  • With 8 million monthly downloads of open source tools from databricks platform, there is a growing base of talen that are getting themselves trained on the open source ML and data tools
    • Spark (Data engineering)
    • mlflow(ML)
    • delta lake(Real time data applications)
    • redash(BI and SQL analytics)
    • Koalas
• Tools
  • With the availability of Lakehouse that can combine all the advantages of data lake and data warehouse, many firms have a richer tool set to work with
  • Lakehouse can take in structured batch, structured streaming, unstructured streaming, unstructured batch
  • Lakehouse architecture also has a data governance layer that is useful to configure various data access policies
  • With Spark, mlflow, redash, delta lake, the firm can perform various types of analytics such as
    • Data Exploration: Why did it happen
    • Predictive Analytics: What will happen ?
    • Prescriptive Analytics: How can we make it happen ?
• Time to Market: Speaker pitches that the ecosystem provided by databricks will enable firms to cut down time to market for productionalizing the models.

There is also an interesting report mentioned relevant to FSI domain spanning Personalization, Risk Management, Fraud Analytics and ESG

Reflections

• Will have to download some of the recently added open source components and play with it. Was always under the impression that Spark is all that databricks offers. They seem to have a ton of new interesting offerings

Data Gravity – The new megatrend and its impact on the BFSI industry

By 2024, Banking and Financial Services firms across G2000 Enterprises are expected to increase their Data Gravity Intensity by a CAGR of 146%. In this session, find out what Data Gravity is and the macro trends amplifying it, how Data Gravity intensity for the Banking and Financial Services industry will be exacerbated by regional growth in key banking and financial hubs, and what they can do to future-proof their business and mitigate the effects of Data Gravity. [This session is brought to you by: Digital Realty]

Speakers and Moderator

• Mark Smith

Notes

The speaker talks about a metric to compute data explosion

1

Data Gravity = (Data Mass * Data Activity * Bandwith)/(Latency^2)

and says that data gravity is going to explode in the coming few years because of the following factors

• Many enterprises are becoming digital and hence there will be exponential rise in the data. It is expected that the data will grow from the current size of 64 Zetabytes to 180 Zetabytes of data by 2025. (1 Zetabyte is 1 Trillion GB)
• Enterprise will have 80% of the world’s data
• 4G to 5G will results in increase volume, throughput and hence an explosion of data when combined with IoT technologies
• Legal and regulatory policies will force companies to store local data
• Integration of physical and digital security systems

Mark sketches a blueprint that companies can use in their journey to manage the data gravity in the coming few years

Reflections

• Enterprises will have to adopt a Data centric, Data first model. It is not where analytics or compute is, it is where data is, that matters. So, it will be interesting to see, what will data centers will morph in to? What capabilities they will add to their offerings ?

StraitsX, enabling access to Digital Assets markets in SouthEast Asia Showcase

StraitsX, developed by Singapore-based payments leader Xfers provides B2B API-enabled payment rails for digital assets leaders in SEA. On the StraitsX platform, businesses and individuals can mint and redeem XSGD, the first and only SGD denominated stablecoin fully backed by fiat reserves. Tune in to this session to learn how StraitsX and XSGD are enabling Digital Assets growth in SouthEast Asia! [This session is brought to you by: Xfers]

Speakers and Moderator

• Aymeric Salley

Notes

XSGD is a stable coin offering from StraitsX. The payment service platform from StraitsX has processed 2B USD till date. It has two kinds of API, the first kind is the payment API that allows one to accept payments via traditional payment network, the second is the Payout API that disburses funds to their customers. They are also in the process of releasing Treasury API. The company was launched in Aug 2020 and is well entrenched in the to Blockchain infrastructure as it supports a wide range of wallets, custodians, data analytics platform.

Reflections

• I found many of the terms mentioned by speaker very difficult to understand, being a newbie to this entire field. May be I should read through and understand the basic infra that one has to put in place to launch digital coin ?
• How is launching digital coin different from launching a stable coin ?
• What is Zero Knowledge Proof ?
• What is Zillaqa ?
• What does multi-chain XSGD ?
• Need to get an idea of the various players
  • Personal Wallet players
  • Protocol players
  • Exchanges
  • Analytics offering players
  • DeFi players
  • OTC Desks
  • Insitutional wallets and Custody solutions

Payments for New Business Models

The pandemic accelerated what was already a rapid shift to digital in Asia. From entertainment to e-commerce, consumers are moving online.

Tech providers have moved rapidly to keep pace and have launched digital platforms across nearly every segment of the market including B2B. This has enabled consumers to embrace new approaches to work including the gig and creator economy. This rapid shift is forcing payment providers and platforms to think creatively, address problems differently, and introduce new business models to enable these digital-native models. In this session, experts from the payments industry Peter De Caluwe (Thunes) and Keren Levy (Payoneer) will discuss the changes that they have seen in the market, how they’ve adapted their approach to payments and platforms, and what they see as the new normal going forward. This session will be moderated by Zennon Kapron, Kapronasia.***

Speakers and Moderator

• Peter
• Keren
• Zennon

Notes

Speakers talk about various aspects of cross border payment companies whose mission is to help customers and businesses make payments across countries. The speakers are two payment companies that operate at a global scale and are doing really well. Some of the points mentioned in the discussion are

• Thunes is active in cross border movement - mobile money operators
• In the last 12 to 18 months, there has been an acceleration of physical cash to electronic cash
• With Covid, the gig economy has got a boost and many more people are coming online to exchange services across nations. This has given rise to a focus of many payment providers to facilitate cross border payment with minimal friction
• More and more are customers are purchasing online across the globe and this again makes the cross border payment pivotal in the success of the entire eco system
• 300,000 SMEs are opening a wallet on a monthly basis
• Most surprising aspect is that cross border payments process is still heavily inefficient

Reflections

• Despite the massive talk on Web 3.0, it looks like basic cross border payment systems are not in place. With or without Blockchain, this space is set to explode in the coming years

Shaping the Future of Payments & Securities

We are seeing incredible change in the world of payments and securities, driven by technological innovation and evolving customer expectations, and intensified further by the pandemic. Payments are expected to be fast, predictable and transparent. How does digitisation and innovation define ASEAN’s financial services landscape, and what are the next big opportunities in financial services? [This session is brought to you by: Swift]

Speakers and Moderator

• Sharon

Notes

• Swift is an industry owned, not for profit cooperative providing messaging services
• Messaging to Transaction management
  • Frictionless payments
  • Instant processing
  • SME and consumers

Reflections

• Who guides the specs for all the developments related to Swift ?
• Is there a governing body that decides the roadmap ? If so, who are the industry players that have the major say in the roadmap?

Embedded Payments in a Decentralised World – What’s Driving Our Future Economy

The tech that is driving the new economy – Embedded payments – how has embedded finance changed the way consumers move their money. How has BNPL changed the game for everyone? – Decentralised finance & cryptocurrencies – does cryptocurrency have a role to play in mainstream payments or is this the domain of pundits?

Inclusive finance – What does meaningful access to finance and payments look like? What are the challenges that remain? – What types of collaboration would be game-changing for inclusive finance? And what are the obstacles?

Ethical innovation – Balancing innovation and security (fraud in a digital world) – How Visa is thinking about securing the ecosystem (importance of trust, resilience etc.) and can build more on this interesting topic

Speakers and Moderator

• Al Kelly
• Jo Yeo

Notes

• Ride sharing settlement at the end of shift
• Buy now pay later is huge in certain markets such as Australia
• Visa installments facilitates buy now pay later feature
• Philosophy is to enable as many fintechs as possible
• Stable coins have a great potential in transactions
• Visa is playing crypto in 5 ways
  • Buying crypto currencies
  • Convert crypto to fiat and do real world purchases
  • Facilitate Visa’s clients to get crypto payments going for their clients
  • Facilitate crypto settlement
  • Work with central banks for CDBC
• 7 cents for every dollar is fraudulent on credit cards
• 9B dollars on technology by Visa
• 1.7 B customers are unbanked
• meaningful access to unbanked is something that everyone needs to work on
• Innovation usecase
  • Tokenization - Phanton number that takes the place of real credit card number. It is available only on a one time basis. Improve the security of the ecosystem

Reflections

• Visa is trying to tweak the real centralized solution to a DeFi world. Don’t know whether it will serve the purpose
• These are the type of middlemen whose business will be under massive threat if DeFi

Global Trends with the CEOs

The overall theme of the 9th November program is about “Building Financial Services on Web 3.0”. The day includes core strategy sessions and deep dives into how the web 3.0 tech stack will transform financial services today and the future. Topics include foundation sessions in DLTs, IoT, 5G, AI and Quantum. The purpose of this session, towards the end of the day, is to reflect from a CEO-perspective on the challenges they face and how they balance and prioritise in a rapidly changing landscape. We would like the CEOs to share their candid views on topical news and announcements – giving a unique insight into the mind of a CEO. We encourage open Q&A from our senior, invite-only audience as well as the online audience to make this session as intimate and approachable as possible.

Speakers and Moderator

• Dr Calvin Choi
• Helen Wong
• Mike Wells
• Piyush Gupta
• Dawn Karen Tan

Notes

• DBS
  • Web 3.0 is a bit broader than merely a Blockchain driven world
  • Relevance of 5G - Capacity of bandwidth and latency that makes metaverse, hybrid 3D world
  • Data and AI are also going to be fundamental to Web 3.0
  • Web 3.0 from DBS
    • In a decentralized finance, the following are the obvious cases
      • Proof of identity
      • Proof of value
      • Proof of Obligation
      • Proof of Transaction
    • Client - Blockchain - Client allows you to do fundamental things
  • L1 - The technology is fantastic and hence firms are building L1 infra
  • L2 - Intermediaries will change. The role of intermediaries will change. If you are experimenting L1, then you will be able to participate in L2
  • L3 - Contracts, tokens and smart contracts will not need intermediaries. You don’t need governments, central banks, regulators. Do we want to believe that 7 billion people will want to live as an individuals with out any governance frameworks
  • L1 is already happening. L2 will happen and is already happening at a few places
  • Usecases
    • Digital exchange
      • Tokenize and list assets. Every asset class is going to be tokenized. Every asset is digital already. It will get tokenized. The capacity to find liquidity for tokenized asset is going to be important
      • Trading capability
        • It is unlikely to be money. It is a store of value
      • Digital custody service
        • Custodize the crypto keys - partnership
      • How to use Blockchain to change the settlement process
        • Use a stable coin and do instant cross border settlement
    • For Blockchains to succeed, the more people you can bring in to collaborate, the more you can get it working
  • Web 3.0 will change the world but you will still need intermediaries
  • Trustless
    • Theoretically every thing can be disintermediated and hence trust can be realized via smart contract
    • Disintermediation of commercial banking
      • Saver could directly go to MF
      • Commercial banks morphed in to Investment banking
      • In a disintermediate world, there will still be roles liquidity provider, market making, custody, client ownership and client relationships
  • Whole people are developing carbon calculators
  • More participants agree on protocols, the more usage
  • CBDC - regulatory arrangements would have to be different
  • Bill Gates: World needs banking, it does not need banks
• OCBC
  • First bank to use Blockchain to do cross border payment
  • Blockchain
    • fractional bond investment for retail and institutional investors
  • AI use case
    • reduce financial crime by early detection
  • Can you get all players together ? Who is going to due diligence of the data in Blockchain ?
• Prudential
  • 10 years worth of technology adoption has been enabled by Covid
    • 30 million downloads of Pulse during Covid
  • Web 2.0 : Big tech firms - trust getting eroded
  • Any one not investing in AI in the next 5 years will lose out
  • 47 partners on Pulse platform
  • In the next 3 years, insurance companies need to interact digitally
  • Fractionalization
    • Asset classes unavailable to customers are now available to investors
    • MFs have been fractionalized

Reflections

• Given the skillsets that I have cultivated over time, may be it is better to look at this Web 3.0 space and see if I can contribute. As they say unless I am able to deliver something of value, it is hard to generate wealth
• Intermediaries will morph and new intermediaries will be crop up. What are they ? It will be interesting to look at them and probably be a part of them

First decentralised and distributed AI competition, based on blockchain

Rocket Capital Inv. is a Financial Institution regulated by MAS and powered by 2 main technologies: Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain. The Corporate Mission is to design a new Modern Portfolio Theory combining in-house financial expertise with external machine learning forecasts through a blockchain forecasting tournament on financial markets. Data scientists from all over the world can freely participate in the weekly competition by submitting their prediction on the cryptocurrency market; the best finishers will be rewarded in MUSA tokens at the end of each week. [This session is brought to you by: Rocket Capital Investment]

Speakers and Moderator

• Giovanni Trombetta
• Davide Capoti

Notes

• Licensed financial institution regulated by MAS.
• Decentralized and distributed ML forecasting of financial markets
• Hedge fund powered by internal and external intelligence
• Build a wisdom of crowd predictors
  • Decentralized machine learning competition
• Rocket competition
  • Dataset
    • Price
    • Social sentiment
    • On chain data
    • Closing price as target
  • Dataset is normalized
  • When the challenge is open, participants can work on predicting the crypto prices. These models are then aggregated to create an ensemble model
  • Data scientists can get the rewards from the competition
  • competition
    • each step guided by smart contracts
    • dApp to simplify participation
    • all competition documents are on a block chain
    • open source verification tool - verify correctness
    • MUSA token
  • Challenge walk through
    • Dataset is released and stored on IPFS
    • Download dataset and work on the forecast
    • Submissions are encrypted
    • Competition contract can be interacted with a DeFi wallet
    • At the end of the challenge, users are added giving additional MUSA

Reflections

• Kaggle is something almost every one working in the data science field knows about. However Rocket capital competition is something that looks very innovative. I think one should atleast participate in a few competitions to understand the nuts and bolts of this technology.
• What does it entail to work on a specific aspects of competition ?
• How does one download data for the competition ?
• How does one encrypt the data and submit the data ?
• How can one verify the correctness of the results ?
• This looks fascinating as some one has done a kaggle for Blockchain and Web 3.0 space. This means that that by participating in these competitions, there could be a ton of learning.
• The competition says - “You need to install Metamask to be able to participate.” What does it mean ? It also says “Switch to Polygon” ? What does it mean ?

Crypto Compliance Will Make or Break Your Business

As crypto integrates deeper into the global financial system, banks and blind spots. Presented by crypto businesses are under pressure to establish rigorous AML compliance controls. The mandate to evolve risk policies and upskill and re-tool compliance teams to manage crypto risk is non-negotiable. In this talk, you’ll get the blueprint for a robust crypto compliance program so you can counter crypto Rae Teo and Stelios Tach, Elliptic [This session is brought to you by: Elliptic]

Speakers and Moderator

• Stelios Tachtatzis
• Rae Tao

Notes

• Elliptic was founded in 2013 and is in to providing services to fight financial crime
• Crypto transactions are mostly used for illicit activity is a myth. In 2012, the % of transactions that were related to financial crime was about 30%. Currently it is less than 0.5%
• Solutions and data that can understand Blockchain transactions
  • What are the counterparties involved ?
• Challenges
  • Complexity - ever evolving crypto ecosystems
  • Typologies - more sophisticated strategies to layer funds
  • Multilayer monitoring
    • at the Blockchain level and at VASP level
• Risk based approach to digital assets

Reflections

• This company has been in business for over a decade and I really could not understand the kind of compliance tools that the company has built. All I could see was a network graph with various counterparties

Key Global Trends: 1. Digital Currencies - Gaining Global Acceptance

There’s greater acceptance and appetite for digital currencies now than ever before, but roadblocks still remain: questions of uses cases and concerns over volatility. Join us in this conversation between Circle’s Jeremy Allaire and FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried who will discuss these challenges, and ask what tangible improvements digital currencies will bring to the financial services industry, and the financial system as a whole.

Speakers and Moderator

• Sam Bankman-Fried
• Jeremy Allaire

Notes

• Why are events with digital currencies now different from yesteryears ?
  • In 2017 and 2018, institutions were not part of crypto
  • It is starting to get institutional adoption
    • Users
    • Partners
    • Regulators
    • Institutions
• Why is this phenomenon of DeFi happening it today ?
  • Two big things that are dovetailing
    • Rapid digitalization of money
    • Fears of inflation because of fed printing money
• There is a lot of resistance from a lot of players
• Analogy with voice communications in the early VoIP area
• Take all the islands in the crypto system and you can transfer money across all these islands is pretty liberating
• Getting people comfortable with the public internet is going to be very difficult
• Where do you think we are in crypto journey ?
  • Early adoption phase but we are seeing some trends
  • Large number of people have dabbled with crypto
  • Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) is designed to measure the adoption of new technology based on customer attitudes.
  • We could be a few years away or we could be one or two decades away
  • All the metrics could breakdown
  • Triggers
• Fractional reserve commercial banking can be replaced by cryto currencies

Reflections

• Who came out with TAM term ?
• Sam Friedman says it could be easily be a decade or two before crypto becomes completely mainstream
  • For a newbie who wants to get in to this space, it is important to keep this time frame in mind. Whether you can sustain your interest across bull and bear markets ? It all depends on whether you are excited about the technology. If you are genuinely excited about working in this space irrespective of whatever happens to the space, then it might we worth getting in to this space
• Is fear of inflation a genuine cause of concern ?
• What is the wealth generation potential of the space ?
• What does it take to crunch out a prototype in this space ?
• If one looks at the contributors in this space, they range from academic professors, to PhDs to young graduates dabbling in to this space. What does a quant who has spent most of the time understanding ML, HFT and Big data play a role in this space ?

Key Global Trends: 2. The Future of eCommerce in Web 3.0 World

SMEs are often seen as innovation laggards. What infrastructures in Web 3.0 can be used to drive value for SMEs? We’ll discuss what role Web 3.0 takes in product development today and in the next one to three years, and how advancements in tech will start to intersect to drive greater value in future.

In this panel moderated by Navin Suri of Percipent, hear from David Hardoon of Aboitiz, Rachmat Kaimuddin of Bukalapak and Sangeet Paul Choudary of Platformation Labs.

Speakers and Moderator

• David Hardoon Managing Director Aboitiz Data Innovation
• Rachmat Kaimuddin Chief Executive Officer Bukalapak
• Sangeet Paul Choudary Founder Platformation Labs Pte Ltd i
  • Coauthor - platform revolution
• Navin Suri Chief Executive Officer & Founder Percipient Moderator

Notes

• A lot of revenue models that have powered Web 2.0 relies on capturing greater data
  • Idea of data capture was posited as a benevolent experience. But what we have really seen is that platforms capture more data than they need and they end up commoditizing the market
  • Power shifts to platforms
  • Lot of power to platforms than we would have imagined at the start of ecommerce revolution
  • Nature of openness is strategic convenient to platforms
• Regulatory role
  • Failures of Web 2.0
    • Things are fundamentally changing. Underlying necessity for the regulator to do something
    • Speed at which regulations can be put in place
• May be need for a data regulator
• How will market places change ?
  • There will be some fundamental changes taking place. Mapping market places in to Web 3.0 world
    • Bundle infrastructure and governance in the old world
    • Most of the infrastructure is built by developers and unbundled by the governance
    • Minimally extractive protocols
    • Ecosystem builds the infrastructure components
    • Winners share all eco system
    • Less of market places and more of agents doing work
    • Shift to metaverse is a killer use case
  • We are still at a stage where token value is driven by speculation.
• Central infrastructure components are going to be centralized
• What should banks be doing given that Web 3.0 tide is rising fast ?
  • Finance is there to enable moments of life. No matter whether you are traditional finance or modern finance, the underlying engine is the embedded finance.
  • Current world is waking up to the existential question of what is money ?
  • Money is a data point. Banks and regulators can regulate the data point
• Web 3.0 will be about agents who share databases. We could have a decentralized regulation because data is shared and commonly available
• Follow the money TO Follow the data

Reflections

• Sangeet has written a book on Platform revolution that dissects the reasons why platforms have become successful in today’s world. He is not spending his time working on a DeFi protocol. It will be interesting to watch his work and where he goes with this protocol
• There are limitations of Web 2.0 that has lead to the creation of Web 3.0. Will it fade away ? Unlikely. Will the benefits of DeFi because of a crash ? Unlikely. But it will be damn interesting to track this market and see where it goes
• What are the math, quant, financial applications in this space?
• Who is going to create value by disintermediating the platforms ?
• Let’s say you had a tremendous amount of quant skills and you were sitting in pre-internet era. What would you do ? Would you create a internet company or would you bet the performance of these companies? Bezos was working in a hedge fund before he moved out to create amazon. Sam Friedman left HFT to create FTX. There are many in the finance field who are moving in to the cryto space.
• Prototyping experiences and Prototyping conversations would imply that I spend most of my time tracking the developments in this field. How do I do that ? Will someone pay me ?
• Real wealth generation happens by compounding or having skin in the game. Either be an investor in these companies or be a founder. If you take a random set of quant or HFT traders
• Stumbled on to a site https://a16z.com/crypto-startup-school/ that has an interesting set of videos that talk about crypto and startup
• What is Celo Protocol that is built by cLabs ?
• One great thing getting in to the build phase of crypto is that there is a fantastic potential to understand the infra and build something. Whether this build phase has math/stats/finance/econometrics/ is something that I need to think about

Key Global Trends: 3. Greener AI – The Impact of AI on the Environment

Can AI be green?

A recent study released by MIT Technology Review found that training a “regular” AI using a single high-performance graphics card has the same carbon footprint as a flight across the United States. Training a more sophisticated AI was even worse, pumping five times more CO2 into the atmosphere than the entire life cycle of an American car, including its manufacturing.

How can financial institutions and companies mitigate AI’s environmental impact while reaping its benefits? What are the current notable initiatives and projects aimed at reducing AI’s carbon footprint?

Speakers and Moderator

• Bruno Sanchez-Andrade Nuno Microsoft Planetary Computer Program Director Microsoft image
• Dr Daniel Klier President Arabesque Holding image
• David Patterson Distinguished Software Engineer Google image
• Dr Michael Natusch Chief Science Officer Prudential plc

Notes

• We need to make sure the data is right so that we can attack the right problems
• Find AI to use ESG data, look at capital allocation
• Environment impact of machine learning model. Four factors that matter for ML model
  • Actual ML model that you are running
  • Processors that you are using
  • Data centers where it is held
  • How clean is the energy supplying the data center
• Optimizing across factors would reduce the carbon foot print by 1000x
• Oklahoma is a great place to have a data center
• Customized processors can reduce the carbon foot print
• Data centers
• It is important to create carbon free energy sources. Asia is the hardest place to get carbon free clean energy sources
• Non financial data - ESG: Data is limitless and unstructured.
  • Without AI, it is impossible to make sense of data
  • How do you make sense of the data and help capital allocators to get the allocation right ?
• Green credentials of technology provider is becoming important in RFPs
• Are we underestimating when AI will get democratized, when more companies use powerful models ?
  • Because the companies are tying to be carbon neutral, then they report their carbon emissions. ML is insignificant to the over all carbon footprint
  • Airline travel carbon emissions are much more greater than machine learning models
• Customers want their companies, governments should demand services that has lesser carbon footprint
• AI is the solution to many of the problems
  • Patterns to make hardware look more efficient
  • Job to hold is by tracking progress
• AI will help you in operational efficiency

Reflections

• S-Ray is an ESG data provider that has partnered with FactSet to distribute ESG data to asset management industry
• There will be a need for companies providing ESG data. Of course with data exploding, there will be a need to use Machine learning, AI technologies to collate, make sense and create sensible metrics. So, for a person who is skillful in this area, there is a lot of work that one can do and get paid for.
• Machine learning model based footprint is insignificant as compared to the carbon footprint by various companies
• If you look at the research done in the sustainable finance area, ML is being used to create models to create carbon calculators, sustainable finance tools, etc.
• Interesting profile of https://www.weforum.org/people/daniel-klier who now heads an ESG data provider

Key Global Trends: 4. The State of Quantum – One Million Qubits

The modern “computing” arms race – which big tech firm will win the first place for building the biggest and most powerful quantum computer?

Current quantum computers are less than 100 Qubits (quantum bits). How can one go from less than a hundred to one million Qubits?

Speakers and Moderator

• Dr John Martinis Professor of Physics UC Santa Barbara

Notes

• Information are stored as 0 or 1. Qubit are stored as 0 and 1
• 50 qubits - super computer
• Not all algos can be solved via quantum computer
• Reduction of information
• Sycamore processor - 54 qubits
• 1/10000th of room temperature
• Besides building super conducting of quantum systems, there is a wide eco system
• Quantum algos
  • Factoring, security of RSA protocol
  • Quantum Chemistry
  • Optimization and AI
• Working on error correction
• In 10 years
  • 1m qubits in the next 10 years
  • We are 64 qubits. now
  • China reproduces quantum supremacy experiment
• Exciting
• It might take a
  • 50 million qubits to crack RSA
  • RSA should be retired in 0-5. Years
  • Right now it can do mathematical operations
  • Improve present hardware and invent algos
  • Very large number of people are working on this

Reflections

• RSA should be retired soon - so what are the repurcussions on Blockchain space ?
• Found this session very interesting as it broke down the technology and its repurcussions in a simple way that anyone can understand

Key Global Trends: 5. Empowering Payments with DLT

Blockchain is built on a distributed ledger technology (DLT), and has an inherent trustless and decentralised nature. This eliminates intermediaries and helps facilitate peer-to-peer lending.

What’s the role of DLT in the new Internet economy? How do we balance the power of DLT with responsible innovation in finance?

Speakers and Moderator

• Dan Schulman President & Chief Executive Officer PayPal
• Jo Yeo Head, Payments Development and Data Connectivity Office Monetary Authority of Singapore

Notes

• More change in the financial system in the next 5 years than the last 30 years
• Pandemic has swept all of us in to new digital era. Online and offline are blurring
• All ways we interact - we are moving from physical to digital
  • education
  • shopping
  • fitness classes
• infrastructure will going to be modernized.
• Paypal has 400 million people on the platform and 32 million merchants on the platform
  • Dramatic rise in all form of digital payments
  • Merchants of all sizes are embracing digital first strategy
  • In the US, small businesses decreased by 5% but merchants that were using paypal, their sales grew by 25%
    • 80% of sales happened overseas
  • buy now pay later is becoming a rapid growing area
  • Basic financial services, basic checking functionality is also moving in to the digital realm
• Paypal investments in Blockchain
  • Several aspects of cryto
    • Buying and Selling
    • Utilizing cryto as utility, Programmability of money
    • Underlying technology
    • CBDCs - 80% of the banks are thinking about CBDCs
  • Paypal thinks about the underlying technology
    • Working on central banks, regulators on technology
  • What does DLT make paypal better ?
    • 185 million people in US worry about financial system every month
    • Cash flow is uneven and hence not being able to get money in time makes life difficult
• It is impossible for just the private sector or just the public sector to increase trust in financial services. There needs to be regulators and policy makers who work with the individual companies to get responsible innovation
• Next needle moving in payment space
  • Quantum computing in the next 5 years that will processes upside down
  • Machine learning, AI along with Quantum computing will
  • How to create more people in to the system and create more financial health by creating infrastructure and products that are easy to understand, less expensive, create good financial habits for consumers and allow small businesses to thrive. This is all with in the reach for financial services companies

Reflections

• Data, AI and ML are going to play a massive role in the years to come. What role will it play in the cryto space ?
• Most of the financial services companies will be focused on creating cheaper and simplified services and products to increase financial inclusion.
• Every one is focused on infrastructure play in the cryto space as that is the one that will create massive value in the years to come.
• Reminds me of an incident 15 years ago where someone in my apartment was pitching the idea of dropbox. Ideas are dime a dozen. Implementation is all that matters
• Which companies in APAC are working on incorporating cryto in their payment infra ?
• What will be the role of quantum computing for Blockchain technologies

Building and Embedding Responsible AI

Can we teach morals and ethics to AI?

As AI has become increasingly integral in various products and services, it must be managed through a responsible approach.

Our AI experts will examine and discuss the reference architecture for coding Responsible AI, the model choices and evaluation criteria, managing data and bias, model training and feature engineering.

Learn from our experts Dr Lachlan McCalman of Gradient Institute, Professor Mohan Kankanhalli of NUS, Shameek Kundu of Truera and moderator Professor Steven Miller of SMU and Hybrid Intelligence Advisory.

Speakers and Moderator

• Lachlan
• Mohan
• Shameek
• Steven

Notes

• Focusing on building AI systems whose impact is in line with the expectations of the people building it
  • Sufficiently precise to make sure that impact and expectations are in sync
• People behind AI are eventually responsible AI
  • Researchers need to be aware of responsible AI
  • People who put together need to be aware of responsible AI
  • Deployers should be aware of the implications of AI
  • Users need to be aware of AI
• Complex interaction between four personas
• Two parts of ML/AI
  • Basic software quality management - reliable
  • issues around bias, opaqueness
• Ensuring AI system obeys the law - might seem simple but becomes difficult
• Ability to magnify and create negative feedback loops is something that is different from a regular software product
• 2018 - MAS FEAT Guidelines - Fairness, Ethics, Accountability, Transparency
• Responsibilities for using AI so as to leverage its strengths
• If you train system with easy examples and then harder examples, the system is more robust
• Lending model biased against women - Financial institution can be used to investigate the reason for the bias
• Focus on existing human run systems is replaced with AI system that does the same thing
  • What does the replacement do ?
  • Removing discretionary aspects of human decision making - what are the consequences
  • Bridge between technical decisions and human impact
  • Software the clarifies the impacts to the stakeholders
• Causal inference in explainable AI
• looking at root causes for model quality to various issues
• Trying to do machine unlearning

Building Global DLT Networks

Are you ready for the leap towards open, trustless and permissionless networks? For these networks to work, we’ll need infrastructures to support it. It’s called the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT).

We’ll talk about how to build global DLT. Understanding approaches to overcome scalability in a DLT, their current focus for their networks and what is the future for DLT for enterprise and retail, and Governance models on a production networks. We’ll discuss considerations on leveraging Private and Public DLTs or hybrid networks, and the impact interoperability between networks can make. We’ll explore designing decentralised versions of financial products using DLTs and cybersecurity considerations in designing and deploying.

Speakers and Moderator

• Andrew McCormack Centre Head Bank of International Settlement Innovation Hub - Singapore Centre
• Carl Wegner Chief Executive Officer Contour
• Richard Brown Chief Technology Officer R3
• Alan Lim Head, FinTech Infrastructure Office Monetary Authority of Singapore Moderator

Notes

• Contour is one of the first DLT networks in production
  • Network of corporates, banks and technology partners to make trade finance easier
  • Letter of Credit - Take something that is standard and make it work on Blockchain
• Payments use case
  • Massive investments in the backend will be the key to the success
  • BIS innovation hub is looking at
    • Tremendous opportunities in connecting instant payment systems - Project Nexus
    • DLT will play an important role - Project Dunbar with a host of partners
  • Challenges are increased complexity
  • CBDC - Multi CDBC platforms - governance, access, jurisdictional boundaries
    • Lucrative business for incumbents
• Big problems being solved using DLT
  • World leading enterprise Blockchain - Individually firms are pretty well run and have got sophisticated AI. When you look at interactions between firms, the level of automation is so much lower.
  • Corda - individual bank branches reconciling with each other on a Blockchain
  • Blockchain is not to remove players from an industry. If you set out a project is to eliminate a player, the project is going to find going tough.
• Why use DLT for Contour ?
  • Contour is built on R3 Corda
  • Blockchain was the solution because people got the budget to build stuff on Blockchain
  • DLT is now the base layer. It gives an opportunity to store the data on-prem or cloud, but allows multiple databases to stay in sync
• DLT is well suited for inter-firm ecosystem problems
• BIS Use cases of DLT
  • CBDC
• Should CBDCs need DLT ?
  • What are good problems does DLT solve ?
    • Bringing multiple entities need to coordinate and participate in a workflow
      • Process is expensive
      • Too tedious to do business
    • Some CDBC will not need a Blockchain architecture
• Contour key lessons
  • Building networks are difficult and bring participants in
  • Have to find a reason for the players to participate and collaborate
  • Blockchain is a technology when noone is talking about - that is when it has hit mainstream
• BIS focused on payments and CDBC
• Lot of opportunity as well as complexity is the feature of DLT and anything valuable especially in the DLT space needs a great team

Consumer Trends: Payments CEOs Talk

In this sessions, we welcome payments CEOs Aung Kyaw Moe (2C2P), Kris Marszalek (Crypto.com) and Lucy Liu (Airwallex) who will be speaking about how consumer payments have evolved in the pandemic and what behavioural changes are we seeing. What is the impact for businesses? Find out how Web 3.0 technologies are enhancing consumer value propositions, the new collaborations and the drive towards embedded payments, the implications of embedded payments and how this will evolve.

Speakers and Moderator

• Aung Kyaw Moe Founder & Chief Executive Officer, 2C2P
• Kris Marszalek Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Crypto.com Moderator
• Melissa Guzy Co-Founder & Managing Partner, Arbor Ventures

Notes

• Biggest change in consumer behaviour
  • Proliferation of different wallets
  • BNPL - New trends
  • Fundamentally the industry has tremendous potential to innovate
  • During the pandemic, the speed for digital payment adoption has accelerated
• Unexpected change
  • Paying with crypto will hit mainstream
  • Every merchant will accept crypto - Will be a sudden change
  • CBDCs will have bigger payment
  • Bridges between mastercard and Blockchains
  • Every regulator might want to issue CDBC
• Hundreds of projects are being worked on to make Blockchains effective
• Monitoring the regulators
• Make sure merchants have all the payment options
• Data Security and Data Privacy standards
• Next iteration of internet - Some of it will be owned by large groups
• Blockchain gaming can explode
• Key inflection point
  • Crypto.com founder is a serial entrepreneur
  • Intense satisfaction of taking a company from an idea on a napkin
  • best way to live a life
  • drop out of the university and start building
• Showing that you are vulnerable is the best way to be close to people
• 70% of crypto’s employees works remotely
• Future is by no means ONLY remote

Challenges facing Chinese Banks in 2021 and what fintechs can do

In 2021, China has introduced new policies regulating its financial sector, posing some new major challenges to its banks; operations and business models. On the flip side, it creates a huge opportunity for the Fintech players in the country who have collectively built the largest Fintech empire in the world in the past few years. LexinFintech will share how the Chinese Fintech landscape has shifted and how its Fintechs can help banks tackle the challenges. [This session is brought to you by: LexinFintech]

Speakers and Moderator

• Jay Xiao CEO, LexinFintech

Notes

• LexinFintech - 140 million customers
• Loan originations 36 Billion USD
• Helps 2000 banks in China in their digitalization initiatives

Open Banking and the Rise of Banking-as-a-Service in Asia

Open Banking is driven by the increasing maturity of Open APIs and of the provision of cloud banking services. • The revolution represents the merger of business goals and technology enablement to create new commercial models. • Because banks no longer need to be monolithic, they can specialise. • BaaS is one result of this specialisation – banks can focus on scale and openness, and others on customer engagement. • The result will be an acceleration of business innovation and change. [This session is brought to you by: TEMENOS]

Speakers and Moderator

• Stewart Davis Commercial Director, Temenos Banking Cloud

Notes

• Company is creating the entire banking ecosystem as an API and exposing it as a service
• The entire pitch was so boring and devoid of numbers that there wasn’t anything particularly interesting that caught my attention

Adopting Quantum Technology

Quantum computers work thousands of times faster than traditional computers. What can we expect from quantum computing technology in the next 10 years? Which industry sectors will greatly benefit from harnessing the power of quantum computing? When and how should one get involved to seize the opportunities? Learn from Dr Bob Sutor, IBM and moderator Dr Yvonne Gao, National University of Singapore, Centre for Quantum Technologies.

Speakers and Moderator

• Bob Sutor

Notes

• Qubit - Quantum bit
• Most of the people are familiar with bits. Bits and bytes have been the backbone for information processing
• Alternative ways of doing computing - one of those ways is Quantum computing
• Based on quantum mechanics — formulated by people like Max Plank ,
• Einstein and relativity - replaced the work of newton
• Nature is a great big computer - all electrons are the data and applications are every physical and chemical reaction
• In the lat 70s and 80s , May we can imitate the way nature works
• Quantum mechanics to Quantum computing. Qubits contain much more information. You can’t stop and look at them in the middle. Probability is involved. Model is trickier and the promise of the power extraordinary
• 25 quantum computers on cloud - IBM
• Surprisingly it is accessible
• What is the timeline for quantum computing to hit main stream
  • Why would you want a quantum computer at home ?
  • A lot of what goes on your phone or computer is not happening on local device
  • As long as you have capacity to do quantum computing on cloud
• Trick is to make quantum computing get to work at high speed
• You can’t add qubits
• It gets complicated to build quantum computer with more and more qubits
• Goal is to have enough qubits to solve the problem
• One little stray of photon totally destroys the quantum computation
• Reduce the amount of noise
• As people build these qubits, 2 years ago it takes 45 days, it takes 9 hours today
• Right combination of good enough qubits and fast enough qubits
• It is not only about the number of qubits - size of device, the clock cycle, type of computation
• Applications
  • Initial breakthroughs will be in chemistry
  • Optimization techniques that will be developed in chemistry may be transported to Finance
  • Monte Carlo simulation
    • 80 million calculations to get 4 digits of pi
    • Some algos can reduce millions to thousands
  • Optimization
  • Risk analysis
  • Artificial Intelligence
• How will quantum help AI
  • It is the heavy calculation behind NN
  • Quantum computing is radically pattern
• Small prototypical devices
  • Test problem
• Start learning and get hands on
• Ways of using real quantum computers right now
• Combination of available systems, available material - cost is the time
• Get in there
  • Because quantum mechanics is a strange part of physics,
• Why the speaker wrote a book ? Because I want to figure out something
• Keep working on it and it is worth it

Reflections

• This requires a completely different set of skillsets to build and experiment

Claims Nexus - Your one stop hub for all health insurance claims services

CLAIMS NEXIS - An IMDA supported one-stop hub to connect Healthcare Providers and Insurers in Singapore complete with a comprehensive range of services such as (a) routing (b) Data Extraction (OCR) (c) Pre-authorisation/LOG (d) Claims adjudication (e) Fraud detection. Come see a demonstration of SMART FRAUD, a component of Claim Nexus that detects healthcare fraud, over-servicing and over-charging. [This session is brought to you by: AIDA Technologies]

Speakers and Moderator

• Tan Geok Leng Chief Executive Officer, AIDA Technologies

Notes

• AIDA technologies - supported by IMDA
• AIDA provides solutions to insurers for many years. They are deployed across many providers
• Claims Nexus Hub is a cloud offering by picking the right components
• Hub for GPs, ancillary health providers and hospitals and insurers
• Services provided are
  • Data Extraction
  • Claims routing
  • AI Fraud detection
    • Claim level
    • Benefit level
    • Item level
    • Surgery level
  • AI driven claims adjudication
• Services that are forthcoming
  • Waste analysis
  • Abuse analysis
• Simple dashboard for claims
• Outlier analysis for claims

Reflections

I liked the way the entire presentation was wrapped up highlighting all the aspects of the solution. I guess this is one of the best short presentations in the Fintech festival

Also liked the way they have a simple interface to try out the product. It is something that incumbents in the data-analytics space to adopt

Click to Pay: A new shopping experience with a simple, fast and convenient checkout

Click to Pay is just what it sounds like, a one-click payment option. It is designed to simplify the online checkout process and further secure shoppers’ personal information. This consumer e-checkout built on EMV Secure Remote Commerce (SRC) specifications promotes simplicity, familiarity, trust and frictionless user experience to boost conversion. [This session is brought to you by: Netcetera]

Speakers and Moderator

• Nitin Palande Head of Sales and Partnerships, Netcetera

Notes

• Why create an account to pay ?
• In one click buy everything and move on
• People without accounts can buy and walk away
• Guest checkout - Process is tokenized
• The solution is a nifty one that avoids user to go through the account registration and entering a ton of details.

Reflections

• What happens to such services when merchants start crypto wallet enabled payments ? Why would someone need Netcetera at all ?

Redefining the Mobile Experience for Business Owners

Managing a business is anything but easy. Business Owners deserve more than a platform designed for checking cash balances and making payments. The mobile phone changed the way we communicate, consume information and perform tasks. How can a bank leverage this change to better serve the needs of Business Owners? Come see how OCBC Bank is redefining the Mobile experience for Business Owners. [This session is brought to you by: OCBC]

Speakers and Moderator

• Shih Wei Kow Global Transaction Banking - Product Development, OCBC Bank
• Marcellus Chan Global Enterprise Banking - EMB Segment Management, OCBC Bank

Notes

• What is needed for a business owner?
  • Customer Journey easier
  • Analytics instead of data
  • Alerts on significant changes
• Built a mobile version that makes it easier for business owners to keep track of all the information across accounts

Reflections

Deploy 5G/IoT Solutions in Financial Services

The first generation mobile network (1G) was all about voice. 2G was about voice and texting. 3G was about 2G plus data; 4G was everything in 3G but faster; and 5G will be even faster; it will be fast enough to download a full-length HD movie in seconds.

But 5G is more than just speed. It’s also the foundation for realizing the full potential of IoT.

What’s the current status of 5G and IoT? What are the emerging opportunities that you can tap on? What paradigm shift can 5G and IoT bring to financial services? What are the characteristics of 5G and IoT? What works and what doesn’t? What would be the challenges of deploying IoT tech stack? How can enterprises rethink their current infrastructure to make full use of the potential of 5G? And the most exciting topic: how can 5G and IoT possibly integrate with AI and Blockchain to form a new ecosystem? Hear from Han Kwee Juan, DBS and Olivier Klein, Amazon Web Services. This session will be moderated by Alan Lim of MAS.

Speakers and Moderator

• Olivier Klein Chief Technologist, Asia Pacific and Japan , Amazon Web Services

• Han Kwee Juan Managing Director and Group Head of Strategy & Planning, DBS Moderator

• Alan Lim Head, FinTech Infrastructure Office, Monetary Authority of Singapore

Notes

• 5G and IoT - Lot of different devices can communicate with each other
  • Financial inclusion in the rural and remote areas is a use case
• Speed, Low latency and Network slicing
  • Slice network in to pieces so that each piece can be used for a different workflow
  • 4G is 1/10 the speed of 5G
  • Free of cable - No need to think of nearest cable point
  • Deploy cash in ATM machines without worrying about the nearest cable point
    • chinese new year - customers want new notes
• Can have device to device communication
• Fraud Detection at the edge
• Deploy ML capabilities on the edge where the IoT device is
• Car Rental company to track assets
• Car Insurance products could use IoT and 5G to get more data and drive more analytics
• Create a much greater hyper personalization
  • Computing at the edge - real time data
• Real time financial options while customers are browsing
• DLT can be very useful
• Embed IoT in the devices that are being insured .
• Warehouse financing - traceability from the registry on Blockchain and IoT data can be used to improve the operational efficiencies
• Lay out various components across infra
• It is all about collecting data and what you can do with the data
• Insurers can reduce premium based on the behavioral data analytics from IoT data
• KYC scenarios
• Proof of Identity via Blockchain
• Autonomous cars in a warehouse via Blockchain, IoT, Cloud computing, 5G
• Challenges
  • ATM Hardware needed to be tune to take advantage on 5G
  • All software components have been moved to private cloud, containerized via micro-services architecture
  • AI Governance - Manage the models on the edge
  • Security
  • Need to have a real pain problem that can only be solved by combination of the above technologies using ecosystem players

Reflections

Project Demonstration: AI Projects (Global Veritas Challenge)

The Global Veritas Challenge is a Hackathon-styled event which seeks to accelerate the development of solutions which validate artificial intelligence and data analytics (AIDA) solutions against the fairness, ethics, accountability and transparency (FEAT) principles.

This year’s Challenge comprised eight problem statements across four banking use cases. The Challenge was open to FinTech firms, solution providers and financial institutions worldwide.

The three winners of the Global Veritas Challenge will be demonstrating their winning prototypes and how they help the banking industry validate their AIDA solutions against the fairness principle. Sopnendu Mohanty of MAS will be opening this session.

Speakers and Moderator

• Sopnendu Mohanty Chief FinTech Officer, Monetary Authority of Singapore

Notes

• Key themes
  • Product marketing
  • Risk compliance and Fraud monitoring
  • Loan Originations/KYC
  • Credit Scoring/Profiling
• Finalists
  • Visa
  • Dreamquark
  • 2021.ai
  • Cylnx
  • EY
  • Aizen
  • Experian
  • SAS
  • Truera and Demyst
• Winners
  • Visa
    • Fairlines aware ML toolkit
    • Fairness aware pipeline
    • What are the problems that are being solved ? Denial of service , Harming vulnerable groups
    • Approach is via Shared Accountability
      • AI Developer
      • AI Deployer
      • Oversight/Audit
    • Extend Microsoft’s Fairlearn library
    • Metrics
      • Acccuracy
      • Recall
      • Fairness metrics
  • cylynx
    • Open source Python library that has been developed after consulting research papers and domain experts
    • Workflow includes a survey form, model card and model report
  • Truera and Demyst
    • Six steps
      • Define the ‘fairness group’
      • Set fairness objective
      • Assess if the model places the group at a disadvantage
      • Analyze root causes
      • Conduct targeted intervention based on root cause analysis
      • Analyze accuracy vs fairness tradeoffs
    • Not about complex ML algos but the adequacy of right data
    • Help in diagnostics and causal analysis
    • Acquiring more data could help as compared to build complicated ML models

Reflections

• Video demo seems to be the norm for case presentation competitions
• The stats framework used across all the winners is pretty much standard in ML literature. However I think all the teams took the concepts, built relevant software targeted towards specific themes - product marketing, credit card transaction fraud, credit scoring

An Economist View - CBDCs Gaining Global Acceptance

In recent years, policymakers and particularly central bankers have shifted from initial scepticism of CBDCs to a stance that is more open-minded. There are still several open questions about the role for CBDCs in many jurisdictions where payments infrastructure is already efficient and financial services is widespread and inclusive. Many central banks today are engaged in some form of CBDC research, but few have committed to its issuance.

Speakers and Moderator

• Hyun Song Shin Economic Adviser & Head of Research, Bank for International Settlements
• Antonio Fatas Professor of Economics, INSEAD Moderator
• Bernard Yin Yeung Stephen Riady Distinguished Professor in Finance and Strategic Management, NUS Business School, National University of Singapore and ABFER

Notes

• Considerable progress has been made in the retail payment system
• Digital economy - central role of data. Triple imperative
  • Competition, Openness and Network effects
    • Interoperability
    • Robust data ownership and data governance
    • APIs that enable competition to come through
    • CBDCs are way of reinforcing the above features
  • KYC, AML, Role of Digital ID
    • CBDC will take it to the next level
  • Privacy and Trusted system
• Tangible link between central bank and population
• Simplification of architecture for cross border payments
• Design of CDBC is important
• Way to guard against illicit money laundering - digital id will be important
  • central bank will have control on the ledger
• Central banks will have a say on who has access to CBDC
• Purely money being digital is not going to effect USD. There are other drivers behind the effects
• Payment has become complicated as there are many players in the process of seamless checkout
• Central banks are not going to replicate the current payment systems. They are going to work with the current infra
• It is not just about creating a digital asset. There are many areas where central bank has never been involved such as virtual worlds, ecommerce.
• Repurcussions of CDBC introduction is not easy to analyze. It depends on the details
• Extreme interoperability - Leveling the payment space.
  • Might create market power away from the banks
  • Tech companies with users might become more powerful than central banks
• Limits to decentralization
  • To what extent do we need central banks to provide the base layer

Reflections

Day-3 [2021-11-10 Wed]

In conversation with Ben Horowitz

Speakers and Moderator

• Ben Horowitz
• Vikram Pandit

Notes

Ben talks about the new world of permissionless web where the world is opening up to programmable money, programmable property laws.

Looking to extend the crypto functionality in the current infrastructure is akin to

• In the early days of movie making, movies were recording of actual plays. It is OK to begin with as it allows one to scale the one act plays. But the movie medium is fundamentally transformational. If you look at the current state of movie making, one realizes that leveraging new technology meant changing the mindset and exploring new fields
• Credit cards that were designed for the physical world have been made to work in the virtual world. This creates a lot of security risk and unnecessary burden on the merchant network. 3 digit security code at the back of card is a joke

It is AI that has been the hottest trend in the recent decade or so. However Ben is of the opinion that Web3 will overtake AI in the years to come. China is considered AI country. The rest of the countries in the Asian region have the potential to become Web3 countries

There are many people out there who do not see the value of Web 3.0. Like the early Americans who could not think of why someone would pay to buy a piece of land that was openly available to everyone, Web 3.0 is still very nascent and everyone might not really understand why someone would pay for NFT.

Some of the areas that excite Ben are:

• Digital property rights in the virtual world - We never had property rights in the digital property world
• Bridges between real and virtual world (coinswitch in India)
• Play to earn games such as Axie infinity that open up a new class of games

Ben is supremely bullish on the future of Web 3.0 and thinks that is it not too late to get started. He compares the current situation to early stages of internet. There are large virtual economies that will be built and it is people who are flexible, willing to learn and take risks that will reap the highest return on their time and efforts.

Reflections

• If a person like Ben who has been in the tech space for so long, is bullish on Web 3.0, then he might be on to something. Based on the various points mentioned, what does it take to immerse oneself in this field and get a good grasp of the space ?
• If Web 3.0 is going to overtake AI, is it not the best time to do something in the area, contribute to this growing space and take advantage of the explosion of opportunities that might come out ?
• Is there scope for applying math, stats and market knowledge in this space ?
• May be if one gets in to trading crypto, the job is similar to that of a quant trying to make money in this space using traditional quant skillsets ?
• The decision making for a quant is similar to deciding to one facing in early internet ear, whether to generate wealth by starting an internet company or trading internet company or being a venture capitalist in an internet company?
  • Well starting a company is risky but has the maximum payoff
  • Trading the company is what uses my quant skillset

Data for Sustainability - Green Data Pipeline

This panel will discuss the various innovative data acquisition approaches such as through the use of sensors, IOT, satellite imageries, to enable organisation to better monitor their ESG commitments and measure the impact of climate actions. Hear from Dr Ana Pinheiro Privette, Amazon, and Pieter Franken, Safecast. Moderated by Sang Shin, Temasek.

Speakers and Moderator

• Pieter Franken Co-Founder, Safecast
• Ana Pinheiro Privette Lead, Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative, Amazon
• Sang Shin Director, Digital Innovation, Temasek

Notes

• Data is out there and companies cannot hide any more.
• Amazon
  • Amazon has been active in lending infrastructure to sustainability problems.
  • How to move big data to sustainable data ?
    • We have more data than ever before
    • Big challenge in sustainable data is
      • what is the relevant data ?
      • where to find it ?
      • how to use it ?
    • We have to use datasets across domains. Use technology for marry fundational data sets across domains
    • Make the data colocated with compute so that everyone can use these datasets for create datasets for sustainable finance
  • How do we ensure trust and quality of the data ?
    • Need to have the transparency on how the data was produced, how was collected, munged and documentation about it.
    • new movement emerging on open data, open science, open source
• Safecast
  • What is the firm in to ?
    • Collecting data in decentralized way
    • Started after a nuclear disaster 10 years ago
    • Grassroot initiative to collect data
    • Global volunteer group that works across 100 countries
    • Measures radiation data, air quality data and the data is put in public domain
    • data available at 170 locations are put in public
  • How to leverage crowdsource data ?
    • Focused to enable ordinary citizens to collect data
    • examples
      • mobile detector that goes on cars, bikes etc to collect data
      • stationary sensor at a location that measures air quality
    • publish data under creative commons - everyone can use the data
    • there are not many datasets that are geo-tagged. the company puts an effort to create such data sets
    • You can also have to feed in to human need. To crowdsource the effort, the volunteers should have a sense that the data can be used by themselves
    • Collecting data bottoms-up
  • How do we ensure trust and quality of the data ?
    • Trust is not a renewable resource. It is important to have trust in data.
    • Continuous validation of the data ensures trust

Reflections

• How does one use Blockchain to use build trust in decentralized data collection mechanism for sustainable data?
• Trust , Transparency and Open source the data - These are poster child use cases for Blockchain. It will be interesting to see usecases, startups in this area

Sustainable Food: Responsible Food Production and Consumption

A sustainable food supply chain not only concerns the food being served, but also where it is sourced and how it was processed and delivered onto your plate. Pressured by climatic changes, limited natural resources, world food insecurity and food waste, the food industry have to attain the balance between green practices and viable financial returns. We invite Sunny Verghese, CEO of Olam to discuss the challenges and opportunities towards a more sustainable and greener food supply. Moderated by James Crabtree, IISS-Asia

Speakers and Moderator

• Sunny Verghese
• James crabtree

Notes

• Global food and agricultural sector has done a brilliant job of providing food to the population. However the current system is broken
  • 25% of green house gas emissions - food and agr sector.
  • 75% of nature and bio diversity loss
  • 71% of fresh water withdrawals
  • Invisible cost of nature - Backoffice is not set up to charge us
  • 817 million people hungry
  • Combined externality - 1.3 T dollars, 1.7 T dollars - 3 T dollars lost of natural capital
  • Food system is broken. We have to do it differently. We have to do it from end to end
• Words do not translate in to actions:
  • 195 countries came and signed up - 17 UN Goals. 169 precise targets. We have to achieve in 2030. Massive action gaps between pronouncements with what is actually delivered. We do not know how to change it . 85% is implementation.
• What is needed is End to End transformation ?
• Food has to be transformed in the context of two existential crisis-
  • Green house gas emissions
  • collapse of bio diversity
• Only a few countries have carbon taxes. Policy makers have to insist that the companies declare carbon footprint. 30 Million dollars to measure carbon footprint.
• Technology first solution - more accuracy in measure carbon footprint. How to measure carbon footprint in a supply chain ? It takes 9 months. It should take less than a few weeks.
• Mandatory disclosure of carbon footprint, water footprint etc
• Granular action at the firm level
• Green pass initiative - Smart carbon management platform that can be used across different sectors. Measurement system that is reliable, accuracy - ML and AI led model. Looks at all the activity factors that generate carbon emissions. One needs to get to emission factors that are about 50 odd. OLAM has developed and piloted the carbon measurement across all the countries. Green pass helps you to abate and manage
• Users can simulate the levers to pull for reducing carbon footprint. You also want a story to tell stakeholders about what is being done
  • Harnessing the power of data science - technology lead solutions allow you to contemplate innovation
  • Deep Sustainability expertise: It is a complex topic. OLAM measures 350 sustainability metrics across 10 sustainability topics.
  • Being creative on coming up with business models
• 5.2 million farmer base across the world
  • 65% mobile penetration in rural areas in India and 85% in Indonesia
• Provide contextual nudges to farmers is free
  • Seeds, fertilizers
  • Credit Scoring
  • Market Offtake : Ability to sell directly from the farm to the end user

Reflections

• There are a lot of folks who are getting in to sustainable finance area. Of course there is demand in the area. But more importantly I think one needs a deep domain expertise. Mere data science skills or modeling skills are not enough. In fact I think the solutions will often result from a collaborative exercise between various teams
• Never knew that ML and AI are being used to create carbon footprint calculators. Is it a small data or big data in place ? What kind of models are being used here ? If the models across vendors are incompatible, how are the new models in this area making it more transparent?
• OLAM is investing a lot of time and effort in building models to support sustainability. It will be interesting to see the tools that OLAM build in the future. Will they make it open source ?

Sustainable World: Reforestation

“We don’t have a lot of time… and we have a very large problem to solve. We need simple, proven solutions.“Yishan Wong, Terraformation Founder and CEO (ex-Reddit CEO) will share about Terraformation’s approach to solve climate change through mass reforestation in a sustainable and scalable manner. Moderated by Dr Darian McBain, MAS.

Speakers and Moderator

• Yishan Wong Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Terraformation
• Darian McBain Chief Sustainability Officer, Monetary Authority of Singapore

Notes

• All solutions are about reducing emissions or removing CO2
• Even if emissions are reduced to net 0 commitments, what is needed a large CO2 sink to save the earth of global warming ?
• Scaling is what is needed
• Solutions of climate change try to develop a new technology. Terraformation is less about new technology but doing something scale.
• Scalability - Let not technology add the new risk
  • New technology is the main source of problem
• Large enough of carbon sink by 2050 creates a different set of scalability issues
• Scale Kitchen cleaning is different from Reforestation problem
• Climate Tech - Every one is extremely collaborative.
• Raised 30 million dollars
• 3 billion acres of reforestation
• Scale and Speed
• Fintechs - Use technology to move money. Attack the areas where there are inefficient areas
• Climate Tech funding: Lot of money on sidelines wanting to help. Physical translation from money to building things to attack climate problems is the hard problem
• Solar Punks - Optimistic view of future. Develop technology that aid nature

Reflections

• Somehow I did not understand what exactly the firm is doing? Yes scalability, speed, innovative solutions are needed to solve climate problems but what exactly is being done by terraformation ?

Sustainable Finance Impact Series: 1. Impact Investing

Impact investing has seen a boost in popularity. In 2020, nearly $2.3 trillion were invested with intent for impact. This is equivalent to about 2% of global AUM. Impact investing remains a small market niche, but one that is attracting growing interest. What are some of the key success factors for the impact investing market to achieve scale and efficiency, and what are the challenges?

Hear from Lisa Genasci, ADM Capital, and Stephen Bird, abrdn plc. This session will be moderated by Vivek Pathak, IFC.

Speakers and Moderator

• Stephen Bird Chief Executive Officer, abrdn plc
• Lisa Genasci Managing Director, ADM Capital Climate, ADM Capital Moderator
• Vivek Pathak Director & Global Head, Climate Business, International Finance Corporation

Notes

• Impact investing 700B in 2019 and expected to accelerate ?
• How have impact investment strategies financially ?
  • Difference between Sustainable investing vs. Impact investing
  • Morning star - Global flow in Sustainable investing - 1.4 T
  • PWC estimates that 2/5th of industry funds would be in ESG
  • True drivers have been regulation,
  • 2015-2020: 1000 research reports , 59% of positive correlation between stock performance between companies doing ESG work
• Investing with intention
• Having a much more debates in various climate related issues
• Risk of impact washing
• There is a difference between sustainable investing, ESG investing and impact investing

Reflections

• What is the difference between various kinds of investing - sustainable, ESG and impact ?
• What are the ways investment companies are measuring the above activities ?
• What does it mean when a firm says that I have allocated $X in impact investing ? Is it different from investing in companies that have ESG scores
• This whole space is getting interest from a wide swathe of participants. If 2/5th of the assets are going to be in ESG space, may be there will scope for dedicated fund managers who have deep expertise in sustainable finance, impact investing

Sustainable Finance Impact Series: 2. Impact Investing

The predominant financial instruments in green finance are debt and equity. Last year, green bonds reached the $1 trillion mark in cumulative issuance since its inception in 2007. Yet, the global green financing gap is estimated to range from US$2.5 trillion to US$ 4.8 trillion. How can technology enable the creation and efficient distribution of green financial products? What are some of the strategies to mainstream access of green loans to wider range of participants in order to generate a significant collective impact to the environment? How can we scale the market further for new sustainable/green financial products?

Hear from Eric Lim, UOB, and Patrick Odier, Lombard Odier, moderated by Vivek Pathak, IFC.

Speakers and Moderator

• Eric Lim Chief Sustainability Officer, UOB
• Patrick Odier Senior Managing Partner, Lombard Odier Moderator
• Vivek Pathak Director & Global Head, Climate Business, International Finance Corporation

Notes

• Green bonds crossed $1T
• 4 areas that technology be used in green finance
  • Rise of sustainable data - Faster, accurate and reliable
  • Distribution of ESG assets or investing. With the rise of digital banking, it will be critical to get this right
  • Use of AI, ML helping portfolio managers construct portfolios and rebalance the portfolios
  • Possibility of using Blockchain in green and sustainable finance
• From an investment perspective
  • Impact will be the essence. Need to rationalize the way the impact reporting is done
  • Harmonize impact reporting across several standards. Impact reporting is very fractured. It causes immense confusion among investors
  • Analyze the assessment of greenbonds and impact investment via ML, AI and Blockchain
  • Verify the activities that greenbonds have been put in action
  • Data validation can bring a lot of value to the impact investing community
• Importance of reporting, taxonomy, data, reporting
• Challenges
  • Lack a number of tools - Taxonomy debates should converge
  • Methodologies used to accessing climate issues is going to be the key
  • Methodologies to compute temperature
  • How to value the impact of sustainability factors
  • Large corporates are clear their journey in the area of sustainability
  • Bring sustainability solutions with SMEs
    • USOLAR, UDRIVE, UENERGY brings different parties together - Support SMEs
  • Learn from experience from issuing green bonds
  • Most funds are very generic. Smaller size thematic funds is the need of the hour
• Are investors are OK with lower returns ?
  • We have long past the stage where investors are worried about lower returns. They are looking to invest in project that are not risky from a sustainability point of view
• Distinguishing between traditional bonds and green bonds is going to disappear in the immediate term as bond issuer will by nature have sustainability or green element in their offerings

Reflections

• How are fixed income valuation models going to evolve with green bond features ?
• What are the metrics that investors are using for risk management in the context of green bonds ?

Women in Sustainable Finance & ESG Efforts

Why Women, why Sustainable Finance and why ESG are critical, given the climate change taking place today. The year 2021 will go down as one where varied segments of society tried everything under the sun to persuade the rich and the influential to commit to mitigating climate change.

The run-up to Glasgow has been relentless. G20 members met in Rome recently before deciding the fate of COP26 last week in Glasgow. Much attention is on the accelerated action towards the goals of the Paris Agreement and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Time is very limited for earth to heal itself and government action alone is not going to be enough to save earth in time.

Learn more on this hot global issue from an unbiased independent subject matter experts, change agents and advocates on climate solutions. Hear from Helene Li of GoImpact Capital Partners, Virginia Wilson of Shared Value Initiative Hong Kong and Natalie Chung of V’air Hong Kong. This session will be moderated by Osman Faiz of AMTD Digital.

Speakers and Moderator

• Natalie Chung Co-Founder, V’air Hong Kong
• Osman Faiz Chief Information & Operating Officer, AMTD Digital
• Helene Li Manager, FinTech Association of Hong Kong (FTAHK)
• Virginia Wilson Chief Executive Officer, Shared Value Initiative Hong Kong

Notes

• Huge supply demand gap in the ESG investing
• Covid exposed ESG gaps
• S&P ESG vs S&P Indices - ESG focused companies have performed well
• Risk mitigation is another feature of ESG investing
• Women are attracted towards this area
• McKinsey report - Funding in startups with female founders has massively grown
• Need stress testing , No harmonized testing across banks
• Digital platform founded in 2015 - focused on ESG related workshops
• Companies should be looking at balanced

Reflections

• ESG is becoming a viable career for many youngsters who want to help companies reach sustainability goals

Why we need to accelerate NOW to reach NetZero by 2050!

How can we accelerate our growth curve for sustainability to collectively achieve NetZero? In this session, we will focus on three pillars: Speed, Focus and Inspiration! Join us to learn how technology is a key enabler for Sustainability in Fins, WHY we ought to focus on the value levers of sustainability and how our customers are blazing the sustainability trail with us. [This session is brought to you by: Salesforce]

Speakers and Moderator

• Camillo Baratta

Notes

• Speed, focus and inspiration
• Next 5 years will be critical
• Lot of industries need to shift their business model
• Opportunity for salesforce
• Energy, Agri and Heavy industries will have to fundamentally shift to future-proof business models
• Currently sustainability projects are driven by regulation
• Four value creators
  • Attract B2B and B2C customers
  • Enhance investment returns
  • Boost employee motivation and attract talent
  • Lower energy consumption
• 30T dollars shift in wealth
  • View investing as expression of their ESG concerns. Two times more likely in opportunities that have impact on sustainability
• Every actor needs to play a role
• Sustainability cloud - a product from salesforce tracks the carbon footprint of Deloitte
• European bank leverages salesforce for ESG reporting in Institutional Banking

Reflections

• If a CRM company like salesforce is helping organizations to streamline their sustainability workflow, I am sure that a ton of enterprise software vendors will get in to this space
  • potential for data munging across various sustainability datasets
  • potential for visualization across datasets
• Interesting podcast link https://mission.org/the-data-chief/
• Data vendors will also up their efforts in providing sustainable data to their clients

Sustainable Finance Impact Series: 4. Impact Measurement

Current measurement for sustainability impact is still very narrow and unable to capture the systemic implications of climate and nature on our society and economy. Our panellists will share their views on how we should capture, measure and translate data to guide an organisation’s strategic investment and risk decisions.

Hear from Dr Simon Zadek, Finance for Biodiversity (F4B) Initiative and Professor Jeff Obbard, in this session moderated by Eu-Lin Fang, PwC Singapore.

Speakers and Moderator

• Jeff Obbard
• Simon Zadek Chair, Finance for Biodiversity (F4B) Initiative Moderator
• Eu-Lin Fang Partner, ESG Leader , PwC Singapore

Notes

• Signs of climate change - chronic and adverse
• IPCC - climate change is rapid and intensifying. Burning of fossil fuels is the main culprit
• Wide ranging CO2 reduction measures need to be put in place
• Science is there but need to put solutions in to action
• Climate tracker group estimates 2.4 degrees by end of the century, well over 1.5 degrees in the next 5 to 8 years
• Pursue the mitigation agenda in an arduous fashion
• Accountability and verification of the climate change solutions are important
• Finance is the keystone to shift the sustainability principles to actual solutions
• Global economy is not paying for the externalities
• Financial assets needs to price climate risk
• Since the pandemic started, 300B invested in fossil fuel extraction which is more than the global equivalent of money invested in clean energy
  • We are pushing climate risk in the financial sector but it is still moving in a wrong direction
• Data Framework, Metrics framework, disclosure models are all needed
• Measure nature risk is more difficult than carbon related risk
• We also have an ecological crisis
  • Lose size of forest cover , twice size of Singapore every week
  • Nature absorbs 60% of carbon emisssions. What about the rest of 40% ?
  • Half of carbon has been released since 1990
• Carbon negative concrete
• Direct air capture - C02 removal - startups looking CO2 from the atmostphere
  • $100 per tonne of CO2
  • 2T dollars cost needed based on the current solutions
• Initiative - 130T dollars to achieve net 0

Reflections

• May be there will be VCs specializing in this area in regular mom and pop VC companies as there will be a huge motivation for startups to create clean tech products
• Exposing oneself to the upside via ETFs that focus on this area might be a good way to track the companies that are doing work in this area
• Speakers talk about the importance of data scientists, fintech community to play a role in making the solutions accessible and adoptable by various players in the market

Low code in Digital core for Banking and its Ecosystems

Low code is permeating all the industries in terms of the ability to build cloud native applications and increasingly complex ones too. In Banking as it makes inroads into the Digital Channel world, it is also complimenting the emergence of Microservices and Cloud nativity and a critical element of digital core to enable banking enterprises and ecosystems become more agile and customer focused. This talk gives a quick snapshot of our Point of View. [This session is brought to you by: TATA Consultancy Services]

Speakers and Moderator

• Arun Arunachalam, Vice-President and Head, Product Management Group - TCS BaNCS, Tata Consultancy Services

Notes

• Banking ecosystems included fintechs.
• Choices + Reimagine User Journeys + Collaboration with Best in Class
• Low code - composibility and agility

Reflections

• Low code strategy - is this a new buzz word ?
• How is it different from plain simple integration with various fintech players, data vendors and other parties that play a role in banking ecosystem
• There are so many buzz words mentioned in this talk, that I just don’t get the main idea that the speaker wants to communicate

Innovation for Sustainability

Learn of the opportunities where innovation and technology can contribute to the sustainability agenda. What have they been working on in the green space and what can be done to accelerate the growth of Greentech?

Speakers and Moderator

• Bill Borden Corporate Vice President, Worldwide Financial Services , Microsoft
• Sabrina Yijie Peng President of Social Good and Green Development, Ant Group
• Kristina Kloberdanz Chief Sustainability Officer, Mastercard Moderator
• Sang Shin Director, Digital Innovation, Temasek

Notes

• Ant
  • Green responsibility - Blockchain based carbon check solution
  • Green life - Encourage low carbon activities and planting trees
  • Green finance - Main driver to promote green development. Supply chain loans
  • Carbon metrics product from Ant group
• Mastercard
  • More inclusive digital economy
  • Financial inclusion - 500 million in 2020
  • Set sustainable targets
  • 3 Billion card holders issued via 20,000 banks and issuers, used across 70,000 merchants
  • Master card carbon calculator - 20,000 banks can issue the calculator
  • Technology to solve sustainability does not yet exist
  • Challenge: Standards unification is needed. Commitments are not sufficient but actions should speak
• Microsoft
  • Views as a way to support complex issues
  • Grounding approach in science and math
  • 2030 - Cutting missions by half
  • Investment in carbon reduction technologies - $1B dollar fund
  • Empowering customers and employees
  • Insurance transparency - Measuring, Monitoring and reporting
  • Collecting data about institution is critical to know about carbon impact
  • Investment risk and resilience risk metrics are being developed in financial services domain
  • Challenge: standardization of recording data, how do we measure it and report it

Reflections

• Technology, big data, AI are all the important aspects that will play a crucial role. Is there a scope of data scientists ? Is there a scope for fintech players ? Isn’t domain expertise the most important component of creating solutions in this area ?
• Sustainability being such a large issue - is there really place for coders, hackers, builders to contribute in this space ?

Digitalising Green Trade Finance

Green Trade Finance (GTF) is vital to driving greater sustainability. UOB is part of the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s (MAS) Green Finance Industry Taskforce (GFIT), a framework to make GTF more accessible. Technology enablers and public infrastructures, SGTraDex and MAS’s Project Greenprint have critical roles to increase adoption and scalability across various industry eco-systems. [This session is brought to you by: UOB]

Speakers and Moderator

• Quek Sin Kwok, Executive Director,FinTech & Innovation Group, Monetary Authority of Singapore
• Poh Yee Ng, Managing Director & Head of Corporate Trade Sales / Financial Supply Chain Management, United Overseas Bank Limited
• Antoine Cadoux CEO, SGTraDex Services

Notes

• Why Green trade finance is relevant to corporates?
  • 35T - Merchandise trade. Singapore contributes 800B. Out of which 70B is green trade finance
  • MAS - mobilising capital for sustainable investments, support institutions as they step up sustainable projects, support measurement of the sustainable investment impact
    • Definition: Provides a common language to what activities are considered green
    • Disclosures: Enable understanding of an entity’s ESG impact and how ESG risks impact an entity
    • Data : More efficient collection and reporting to measure and manage ESG impact
      • Project Greenprint
    • ESG Data Orchestrators
      • A network of data platforms and aggregate and/or enable access to common trusted ESG data sources
    • ESG Registries
      • Network registries to record and maintain provenance of ESG certifications and verified data based on sustainability standards
• TraDex
  • Digitalize the exchange of data among various entities
  • Whether the trade is genuinely green ? is the question to ask on TraDex ?
• UOB is leading a consortium of banks to drive green trade finance projects.
• Facilitate traceability

Reflections

• Record ESG certifications on Blockchain - interesting use case
• No wonder many data vendors are excited about the developments in this space. With MAS and other industry players trying to build a green trade finance platform, there will tons of opportunities for many players to be a part of green print project

Greenifying Trade Finance

To present the recent innovations in Green Trade Finance, the new areas of opportunities for Singapore traders. [This session is brought to you by: Crédit Agricole CIB]

Speakers and Moderator

• Antoine Rose Head of Sustainable Banking, Asia-Pacific, Crédit Agricole CIB

Notes

• CIB invested 10 years ago in this field
• 20 experts across various fields
• Leading the league tables in bond markets
• Labeling - Green, Social, Sustainability, Transition
• Trade finance, Export finance, Community finance and private equity front solutions

Reflections

• Many companies such CIB are positioning themselves as agents for trade financing. CIB has a staff of 100 people. I guess banks all over the world would have similar roles and responsibilities. I really don’t know whether this part of finance is really something that excites me

Man and Machine, collaborating to achieve profit and purpose

The session showcases UOB Asset Management’s augmented ESG research leveraging artificial intelligence-machine learning (AI-ML) models. The innovation combines analyst research and AI-ML model to enable robust constructions of ESG investment portfolio. Along with that, local investment teams equipped with specialised domain knowledge are deployed to execute impactful engagement.

Speakers and Moderator

• Beng Eu Lim Senior Director, Sales, UOB Asset Management
• Victor Wong Kee Yew Senior Director & Head of UOBAM Sustainability Office, UOB Asset Management

Notes

• Net Zero carbon missions by various countries
  • Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong, Japan by 2050
• GIP - 2Billion USD to support sustainable investment projects
• SG Greenplan
• Greening of real estate in Singapore
• firms willing to pay rental premium for green buildings
• UOB - Sustainability academy to increase expertise in the company
• UOB Smart Sustainable Singapore Bond fund
• UOB Green REIT ETF launched

Reflections

• I guess I am slowly beginning to understand why banks are falling over sustainability theme. There is money to be made by extracting premiums for green investment opportunities. Whether investors will make money is something that time will tell. Most of the family owned offices, I gather, think of green bonds as fads. Will be interesting to see how this space grows

New Investment Instruments

What does the session cover? 1.Defining new instruments and how that has created a more attractive landscape

1. Investing in Blockchain and Crypto
2. Tokenised Equity, Debt and Security Tokens

Speakers and Moderator

• Micheal Casey - CoinDesk
• Darius Sit, Co-Founder & Chief Investment Officer, QCP Capital
• Hans Brown, Global Head of Enterprise Innovation, BNY Mellon
• Sam Bankman-Fried, Founder & Chief Executive Officer, FTX

Notes

• Traditional finance to Centralized finance economy to Decentralized finance
  • Tradfi
  • Cefi: New instruments but use the same kind of old infrastructure
    • Everybody can print their own money
  • DeFi: completely driven by token economics. Every thing is driven by on-chain activity. Rewards program meets central banking
  • DeFi 2.0 - Hybrid version of Cefi and DeFi
• FTX - Cefi exchange
• Some of the DeFi 2.0 has been put on hold at FTX and mostly focused on the regulation
• How can cefi and DeFi can be interlaced with traditional finance ?
• DeFi protocol does not care about the baggage of a pension fund. There is an enormous demand for bridging traditional assets to digital assets
• BNY
  • Digital assets - reshaping financial ecosystem.
• How to increase the participation rate in to cryto ?
  • DeFi does not lend itself to traditional finance type structures. Going through KYC, credit checks and onboarding is just not present. Plug and play any amount - people are empowered to do anything they want without oversight
  • there is no obvious solution to bridge traditional finance and crypto community
• Stable coins could be a good step for bridging traditional finance and DeFi
• FTX: There could be social networks on Blockchain
• There is no doubt that there is massive demand on digital assets
• Can CBDCs complement cryptocurrencies and integrate with cryptocurrencies ?
  • Lot of ways to build CDBCs but they need to question about how the Blockchain would be ? Will it be a closed Blockchain or hybrid Blockchain ?
  • Private stable coins that have been issued are under regulatory frameworks ?
  • Approach to an open architecture
• Biggest preoccupation around regulatory rebates
  • Is there an existential risk if SEC says tokens are securities ?
  • FTX: It can be existential risk for tokens. If a token is declared as a security, it can be a death sentence.
    • Goal is to get to a place where there is a workable framework. For token sets that have some security like properties.
    • Over the next few years, regulators will put in a framework once there are exchanges who are open minded and want to talk to regulators
  • DeFi 2.0 is promising - on chain asset management where investment, collateral, settlement on chain but risk management is off chain. No 2/20 like hedge funds

Reflections

• If the coming few years are going to be crucial, in which regulators are going to work with exchanges and put a good regulatory framework around it, what should be an ideal way to plan one’s future move ? Should one take a risk and plunge in to this world of digital assets, apply quant skills and see if there is a way to apply quantish skills to this new world ?
• There are definitely ventures that will make money by building bridges between the traditional world and Blockchain world ? Does it make sense to go headlong and work through them

Coinhako Privé – Seamless Digital Assets Access for HNWIs and Institutions

Explore Privé, a new platform offered by Coinhako tailored for high net-worth individuals and institutions. Providing unrivalled access to digital asset liquidity and custody, Privé enables you to diversify your portfolio into the crypto space. Built upon Coinhako’s 7 years of industry and regional crypto experience, Privé provides market-leading support for all your digital asset needs.

Speakers and Moderator

• Raghav Sood

Notes

• CoinHako founded in 2014 - digital asset wallet service provider
• $10B of volume in 2021
• 10% of Singaporeans own Crypto
• Prive' - natural progression for institutional investors
• Features
  • Multiple users access
  • 0 fee trading
  • Portfolio management
  • API trading
  • Secure custody of funds
  • Deep liquidity
• Prive earn - tailored to HNIs that High yield crypto products
• Full wealth management platform
  • Gain interest from a variety of sources
• Earn product available for retail investors
• In 2022, anticipate increased interest in ETFs, banks, regulators and governments

Reflections

• The trend in the wealth management space is offering high apr rates and large crypto investment trading platforms to HNIs. What stops from big banks in the space eat up these services like Coin Prive ? Are companies like CoinHako surviving and thriving because of lack of any regulatory guidance for such asset management services ?
• What if there is a regulatory framework put in place in the next few years ? Will it change the way things are functioning right now ?

Embedded Finance Case Study

Financial services are becoming increasingly embedded into a wide variety of software and applications. Join us to learn about these distribution models, and to understand how this trend shaping the future of financial services.

Speakers and Moderator

• Joaquin Ayuso Head of Labs, Nium
• Caesar Indra President, Traveloka
• Joel Yarbrough MD Rapyd Ventures & VP APAC, Rapyd Moderator
• Pauline Wray Co-Lead, BCG FinTech Control Tower

Notes

• Embedded Finance - coined by Bain Capital
• Stripe 2017 ($4B) -2021($91B)
• Key to understanding embedded finance - carving financial experiences away from banks in to services
• Rapyd - Helps incorporate payment in to the services
• 6 to 7 years ago, Eco systems that own buyers and sellers were becoming bigger.
• Traveloka
  • Natural expansion in Fintech. Most of the transactions were done using banks
  • Most bookings were not done via credit card in ASEAN
  • Fintech products launched in the traveloka environment
  • Customers need not leave the platform to pay for the services
• Nium
  • Tax credit prepay card
• every company will be fintech - a1z
• Different business models
  • Lot of crypto getting in to fintech space
• 4 ways of making money in paytech
  • Money through transaction processing
  • Money via Forex
  • Money via Credit
  • Advertise
• Buy Now Pay Later wave
• Pay Later customers transact 45% more than those who don’t have that option
• Ari Emanuel podcast : TAM for content is infinite

Reflections

• Wonderful points made by all the panelists. Being an entrepreneur and building something ground up, i guess, gives one a far more clearer perspective than merely reading/researching/consulting in this space

Digital Assets: From Fringe to Mainstream

In 2021, the crypto economy witnessed significant milestones, fueling the record surge of digital assets. Huobi Singapore is proud to provide an overview of where it all started, and into the new frontier future that beckons. We will also discuss the pushbacks and convictions echoed by both sides of the camps for and against digital assets, before laying out the catalysts that can truly help usher digital assets from the fringes to the mainstream. [This session is brought to you by: Huobi]

Speakers and Moderator

• Edward Chen CEO Huobi Singapore

Notes

• What is it ? Digital asset wealth management platform
• Custody, lending, asset management, SaaS
• Crypto has become mainstream
  • record surge of digital assets
  • surge in number of tokens
  • surge in number of hacks and fraud
• 77 million global users
• Projections
  • Blockchain will contribute 3.1T by 2030
  • NFTs, Metaverse, DeFi will become mainstream
• How will crypto use grow ?
  • Regulation
  • Security and safety
  • Broad adoption
  • Easy to use
  • Price stability
  • Robust risk management

Reflections

• Interesting that this company no longer operates in Singapore

Cryptocurrency exchange Huobi Global announced that it’s halting all services for its Singapore-based users only weeks after a Chinese state crackdown on cryptocurrencies forced the platform to stop its China operations.

On Tuesday evening, Huobi—the world’s sixth-largest crypto exchange by volume, according to CoinMarketCap—announced that “to comply with the laws of Singapore, we will have to include Singapore as a restricted jurisdiction. Regrettably, this means [we] can no longer offer services to Singapore-based users,” it said on its website.

The platform will close all the accounts of its Singapore users by March 31 of next year, and access to Huobi services will be “gradually phased out” starting on that date. Singapore-based users should take “immediate action” to close their active positions and withdraw all digital assets before then, Huobi said.

In Partnership with TiE: Startup stories – Blockchain & Digital Assets

The field of digital assets has experienced unprecedented growth. Join us as leading start-ups in the space share their stories and learnings in a discussion with their common investor, and industry veteran Tim Draper. How do they navigate the constantly evolving landscape? What lessons have they learnt on their path to growth and scale?

Speakers and Moderator

• Arthur Breitman from Tezos
• Yusho Liu from CoinHako
• Tim Draper

Notes

• Complementary skillsets are needed for getting a company up and running
  • Share a long term vision of crypto
• Evolution of Culture
  • You can always get better incrementally
  • Believe in the power of compounding
  • Focus on building people first company
  • As our team grew in several places, there was a need to do conscious team building
  • Culture was defined by drive to accomplish two things
    1. mission to spread entrepreneurship and venture capital investing
    2. bitcoin showed up - similar to what happened when internet showed up. It has moved the culture of a freedom and culture of trust
• Freedom is really important - case study of South Korea and North Korea
• Bitcoin build trust and does not require government. Trust is built in the software
• Key Skillsets
  • Wide range of skillsets are needed to create
  • You can hire specialists as you scale up
  • Look for people who have worked in different environments
  • Early days - you want superheros who can wear all hats
    • Find people who believe in the industry
    • Find people with drive who can make things happen
  • As we scale up, we need middle management, senior management
• Startup is more like sales , Scale up is more like marketing.
  • Sales - you know exactly directly whom you are talking
  • Marketing - it is a general package that allows people to thrive
    • Really good operating control who have controls
    • Also need people who can think creatively
• 2022 plans
  • Scaling Tezos chain, Convince people to work on chain
  • Excited about what Tezos is doing to the world
  • Tezos might potentially transform the way we do deals
  • Coinhako - create access to crypto, facilitate cryto projects
    • Singapore is going to be cryptohub
    • Full suite of crypto services serving a diverse set of clients

Reflections

• What does it mean by creating trust in the software ?
• How does one create trust programatically ?
• Is there value in learning on how to program trust ?
• How to create a smart contract ?
• What does it take to build a service on the top of ethereum network ?
• Tim Draper is all out touting crypto and backing crypto startups ? It reminds of me of TP mentioning about all the VCs moviing all in to crypto space a few years ago. It is similar to many engineers moving to ML/AI space 5 to 6 years ago

Future Trends to Watch

In the fast-paced world of financial services, it’s important to always keep one eye on the future. In this session, we dig into the forces that will shape the industry going forward, from macro-economics and the sustainability agenda, to the future of institutional investors, the impact of Web 3.0 and of decentralised finance.

Speakers and Moderator

• Dr Jeffrey Jaensubhakij
• Neil Parekh

Notes

• Gyan for retail investors: save and understand risks
• This is the best time to get in to the field of DeFi and crypto and figure out the business model that works
• Valuations are sky high - returns in the next few years are not going to be great
• Always look at 5 to 10 year returns rather than immediate returns. Most often the one year outlook are already priced in
• academic credentials rarely help you in navigating markets

Reflections

• Found Dr. Jeffrey to be extremely humble and extremely knowledgeable. Really enjoyed listening to his thoughts on investing and navigating uncertain times

Leading with Purpose

During this closing session of the SFF 2021 main agenda, Bill, Jürgen and Chuan-Jin will reflect on their perspectives and inspire a generation of purpose-driven entrepreneurs.

The session will cover:

1. Leadership in times of change
2. The role of technology in lifting shared prosperity
3. Businesses can have a purpose, and profits – How do we create more conscious entrepreneurs
4. As influential leaders how they are promoting an inclusive social culture, mental health and sustainability agenda

Speakers and Moderator

• Bill Winters
• Jürgen Klopp
• Tan Chuan-Jin

Notes

• Curiosity and Empathy are essential elements of being a good leader
• Listen to people and watch them, before you can even think of managing them
• Be busy, Be energetic, Be curious, Don’t worry too much, keep yourself on your toes, give everything you have and be ambitious
• Being enthusiastic is key to achieving joy in life

Reflections

Deal Makers' Perspectives: Path from Venture, Growth to Exit

As startup ecosystems' mature and develop, founders are increasingly looking to advisors for support on fundraising and exits. Learn the in’s and out’s from 3 highly established deal makers in the region.

Speakers and Moderator

• Gan Wee-Leong Head of Equities ASEAN, China Renaissance
• Arnaud Granger Chief Executive Officer, Managing Director & Head of Southeast Asia, Greenhill & Co. Asia (Singapore) Pte. Ltd.
• William Fung Chief Executive Officer, AMTD International Moderator
• Varun Mittal Global Emerging Markets Fintech Leader, EY

Notes

• Asian FinTech has never been a better time
• Record fund raising - Asian FinTech raised 6B USD in third quarter of 2021
  • Surpassed Europe 5.5B
• Exits - Asia accounts only 11%. Behind US
  • Increasing with rapidly maturing startups
• Key Drivers
  • Fast growing middle class
  • Large archipelagos
  • Internationally friendly market
  • Fast growing consumer spending
  • Strong government startup
  • Large unbanked population
• Starting point of inflection in south east asia
• One key risk area that can go wrong is the adherence of regulation
• Unlikely to see tech giants from china
• Entrepreneurs in East: Strong with technology but not savvy with handling investors
• Exits have been driven by M&A activity
• On M&A ASEAN unicorns are the largest drivers of exits
• Push factors : Long term bullish on China but there could be near term uncertainties. For diversifying their portfolio, investors are looking in to ASEAN
• Pull factors: Exit strategy is unclear.

The Evolution of Venture Capital: Global Learnings for SEA

What have VCs learnt from their activity across more mature markets, and what is applicable to the our region? Join us for an in depth discussion on trends and patterns that will shape ASEAN’s startup ecosystem!

Speakers and Moderator

• Helen Wong Founding Managing Partner, QR Ventures
• Koh Tuck Lye Founding Partner & Chief Executive Officer, Shunwei Capital
• Richard Lim Managing Director, GSR Ventures Moderator
• Nikhilesh Goel Co-Founder & Group Chief Executive Officer, Validus

Notes

• ASEAN - Indonesia is far advanced, Vietname is the closest second
• Copy to China to innovation in China
• As large companies exit from Indonesia, then more entrepreneurs will start big companies
• Copy to China helped build an ecosystem of entrepreneurs to start companies. 10 years later, China has a rich set of serial entrepreneurs and are starting more innovative companies
  • Alipay 17T dollar transactional volume
  • Innovation allowed usage of QR code to transact
• Entrepreneurs are not ready in the ASEAN market beside Indonesia.
  • By far Indonesia is the largest country
  • Next comes Vietnam
• Quality of startups will be better in the ASEAN region
• Alumni effect
• How is the biz scalable ?
• Always go for value add when seeking out investors
• More exits give rise to more valuation
• Consumer facing business has a lot of opportunities with mobile phone
• Food and agri sectors, AI and ML for supply chain is something that VCs are interested in
• Helen interested in funding AgTech ventures

Reflections

• What is Series C investment ? How is it different from Series A, Series B investment ?
• Is SG a right place for people wanting to start businesses ?
• What is it about Vietnam that it attracts venture capital ?
• What sort of businesses are VCs looking to invest in the ASEAN region besides in Indonesia and Vietnam

BNPL - Why is it growing so fast and who will win the consumer?

This session will cover: - Why BNPL is growing so quickly - and it’s not why you think - The shift in consumer psychology and the finance principles at play - Understanding why instalments will dominate the future Financial Inclusion and micro-lending as a money management tool - How partnerships are the key to growth - The power of Singtel Dash and Zip coming together - What’s next and who will win the consumer [This session is brought to you by: Austrade]

Speakers and Moderator

• Hamish Moline Chief Commercial Officer, Zip.co
• Gilbert Chuah Head, Financial and Lifestyle Services, Singtel

Notes

• Zip processed $6B, 55k merchants, 8m customers, 403m revenue
• Consumer credit model is unfair and is fundamentally broken
  • Unfair terms
  • lack of trust
• Evolving retail conditions
  • declining margins
  • increased competition
  • unified commerce transformation
• consumers want flexible payment options
• BNPL as a budgeting tool
• BNPL expected to reach $1T by 2025
• Singtel dash operates in 21 countries - 744 million subscribers
• Singtel Dash is all-in-one app for payments
• 53% of Dash customers in 20-39 age range
• Using dash 10 times a month
• Singtel offering robo advisory services

Reflections

• Never knew that Singtel was getting in to investment advisory space. Yes why not ? May be they will partner with some stock trading app and provide those services too. In that sense all that matters for any company is user data, analytics and ML. It might really not matter which sector they operate, which domain they operate etc
• All payment tech firms might be playing a closer look at crypto and racing to enable their merchants accept cryto
• Satisfaction of building a company is something that I guess one should experience as life is too precious to be wasted for working on some random projects and goals
• Crypto.com founder says quit your university and start building stuff

Collaborative Innovation in Action

New technologies and rapidly changing customer expectations are challenging existing business models and creating new opportunities for financial services. The solutions for adapting to these trends are broader than any one industry participant and this change can only be realised as a community. Players from different geographies, cultures and organisations will need to come together to solve these challenges, in order to deliver on the needs of the modern global economy. [This session is brought to you by: Swift]

Speakers and Moderator

• Julie Bolan Director, Business Innovation, Oceania,, SWIFT

Notes

• Swift is an industry-owned, not for profit cooperative pricing providing messaging services
• Went live in 1977
• 11,000 financial institutions, 200+ countries
• 140T USD transmitted in 2021
• 42Million pings among the partners each day
• The SWIFT network acts as an information transport network, connecting your money’s original location to its final destination via a series of banks. Your money is then transferred from country to country, passing between different financial institutions, until it reaches its endpoint

Reflections

• Swift is not a payment method but it is an organization.
• Swift does not transfer money. It transfers information.
• Read about Swift from this article and understood the difference between Nostro and Vostro account

Accelerate Financial Digitalization and Transformation by Tencent Cloud

Tencent Cloud will present to you the revolution of financial tools that can ensure an ideal experience for your customers.Our FSI clients are all over SEA. Smart Customer Service: Tencent smart customer service solution is powered by Tencent AI and NLP technologies, which is capable of handling voice calls, and providing a synthetic digital human customer service agent to interact with customers. Tencent Chatbot technology is widely used in the FSI industry. [This session is brought to you by: TENCENT]

Speakers and Moderator

• Harry Zheng Guanglei Senior Solution Architect, Tencent Cloud

Notes

• Smart Customer Service Robot
• Human Computer interaction
• Tencent Chatbot demo - audio
• Tencent Chatbot video agent demo

Reflections

• Nice usecase of how Tencent is using NLP and AI technologies to automate customer interactions

Sustainable Finance Impact Series: 3. Impact Insurance

How is the insurance industry is adapting to climate change in terms of improving accuracy in underwriting in view of increased frequency of climate disasters and unpredictable climate changes?

Join us as we discuss how are insurers are responding to the changing needs of their customers and some of the ground-breaking innovations in the insurance industry.

Hear from Claudia Salem (Allianz SE Singapore), Patrick Raaflaub (Swiss Re), and Ray Ferguson (Aviva Singlife Holdings). This session will be moderated by Eu-Lin Fang, PwC Singapore.

Speakers and Moderator

• Claudia Salem Chief Executive Officer Property & Casualty for Asia Pacific, Allianz SE Singapore Branch
• Patrick Raaflaub Group Chief Risk Officer, Swiss Re Management Ltd
• Ray Ferguson Group Chairman, Aviva Singlife Holdings Moderator
• Eu-Lin Fang Partner, ESG Leader , PwC Singapore

Notes

• How is insurance adapting to climate risk ?
  • Not relying on historical data but be forward looking
  • Stay up to date what science says and stay agile in the modeling world. Incorporate it to risk scoring techniques
  • Insured losses have gone up. Effect of climate change is overshadowed by the effect of increased exposures
  • Adapt pricing - increased frequency and do it in a refined way
  • Swiss Re - own operations are affected by physical risk and hence need to be resilient about it
  • CO2 X - Transform logistics data to use it for determining premiums
• Consulting companies are dishing out reports on sustainable finance
• We are at infancy stage in the sustainable finance area
  • Massive effort globally to understand this
  • Upskill the advisory community
  • How to allocate capital so that they are contributing to the environment ?
• Need to establish taxonomies
• Doing good is good for business is becoming the norm
• Everybody know what to do but they do not know how to do ?
• Swiss Re - economic cost of climate change report
• Innovation projects in insurance space
  • Emission reduction - as insurers, they have to contribute to developments around it
  • Innovate covers for carbon reduction
  • Aristotle project - Use AI to match the right financial advisor and clients
  • Innovation will come from business models to reduce the environmental emissions.
  • Constantly agile based on new developments in science

Reflections

• Sometimes I wonder whether it is better to work in a firm that is actually doing the relevant sustainable finance work in terms of products and services, instead of the ancillary firms such as banks, insurance companies, financial firms ? Well there are many ways to contribute to this space given one’s skillsets.But is it not better to learn and be part of the product development rather than modeling the risk, creating metrics based on data ?
• Speaker had a book on his desk - World on Sale. I have been intending to read the book for sometime. May be I will find time to read through sometime
• Looking at the insurance people talk about offering innovative products, adjusting the premiums, this area will grow massively important to insurers. I guess banks and insurance companies are already amassing resources to capitalize on the opportunity

Sustainable Travel: Reinventing the Way We Travel

The aviation industry has more than its fair share of challenges in the face of COVID-19 and the travel restrictions imposed around the world. Beyond COVID-19, the aviation industry may face a further sustainability challenge given that it contributes nearly 5% of the global warming problem, according to UNFCCC.

Speakers and Moderator

• Dieter Vranckx Chief Executive Officer, Swiss International Air Lines Moderator

• James Crabtree Executive Director, The International Institute for Strategic Studies, IISS-Asia

Notes

• Pandemic has accelerated focus on sustainability
• Sustainability is expensive - Sustainable fuel vs Kerosene
• Reduce CO2 emissions and Net 0 emissions by 2050
• First Hydrogen aircraft slated to be available in test phase in 2035
• Innovations in the airline industry
  • Aircraft engine technology - Reduce CO2 by 20%
  • Reducing noise
  • Sustainable fuels
    • Biofuels
    • Synthetic fuels will make a big difference
      • Swiss startup creating synthetic fuel
  • Operational efficiency - planning with google to improve the aircraft rotations, efficiency of fleet
• Role of business travel will change
• Need for travel is there. How can we make travel sustainable ?
  • Investment by consumers, airlines and government
• Airline has a lot of data and we are beginning to use the data and analytics, to run the company

Reflections

• By setting targets, it looks like airline is another industry that will massively work on sustainability target
• CEO was mentioning about using data and this is similar to the findings mentioned in the book from HBR

Sustainability and Green Finance: In Conversation with Philipp Rickenbacher

Investors' values have shifted and there is now more awareness of sustainability topics than ever. And while in the past sustainable investing was relying on institutional money, private investors are now joining the ESG space as well. In this session, we discuss the role of the financial industry in driving forward the global sustainability agenda.

Speakers and Moderator

• Philipp Rickenbacher Chief Executive Officer, Julius Baer Moderator
• Manisha Tank TV Anchor &

Notes

• Sustainability entails long term of view
• Important to have reliable data and have experts to understand the data
• Three main problems
  • Measure the status quo - Who is polluting ? Who are the major culprits ? Need to have better measure
  • Measure the transformation - more difficult
  • Data and Sustainability is the core area that needs to b
• Collaborative exercise
• Need for talent and expertise in this field
• Web 3.0 is not going to do away with banks and regulators

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What the BNPL is Visa doing with Instalments?

New instalment fintech players have entered the unsecured credit space, offering during-purchase instalments to consumers in the face-to-face and online space. How can networks like Visa help expand access to this new (or is it old?) way for consumers to better manage their money? In this session we’ll briefly show how Visa’s solution works and talk with one of our key partners in launching the solution in Malaysia in October this year! [This session is brought to you by: VISA]

Speakers and Moderator

• Conor Lynch Head of Consumer Solutions, Visa Inc

Notes

• Fintech lead services has exploded in the last 5 years
• Good proportion of lending is already based on network based credentials
• BNPL is having its time again because of technology advancements
• Installments is already a big mechanism for consumer credit
  • instore finance
  • network credentials
• 2/3rd of finance is not on network based finance
• Network based credentials provide 1/3 of the financing needs
• 70% of AP installments are not based on credit cards
• During purchase usecase is the one that is most exciting
• Visa has an offering targeting this usecase

Healthtech in the Pandemic

Our speakers will discuss about the pandemic’s impact on our health and readiness for longevity, and using digital health tools to help people live healthier, longer lives as we get Ready for 100. We will provide insights into Health@Pulse, our health ecosystem on Pulse, our digital health and wellness app as well as share how we leverage technologies and partnerships to provide affordable and accessible healthcare to customers. [This session is brought to you by: Prudential]

Speakers and Moderator

• Stephen Barnham Chief Officer, Health@Pulse, Prudential Corporation Asia, Prudential Corporation Asia
• Yit Ming Liaw Chief Executive Officer, Smarter Health

Notes

The talk was all about promoting the new pulse platform from Prudential; a one-stop shop app for all its customers to obtain

• tele medicine function
• health checker function
• AI powered symptom checker
• Community features

The digital secret sauce to reach more consumers globally

A suite of payment and marketing solutions is supporting e-wallet operators to help local merchants reach consumers globally even as travel is curtailed amid the pandemic. Hear from Ant Group owner and operator of leading digital payment platform Alipay on the secret sauce that is making this possible. Presented by Cheng Guoming, Ant Group.

Speakers and Moderator

• Cheng Guoming General Manager of Alipay+ Global Partnership, Ant Group

Notes

• Alipay+ opened up its payment platform for third party providers across the world
• Interesting to note that a company with 10,000 employees can have such a massive impact in China and rest of the Asia with its focus on data, analytics and AI platform

Reflections

• Alipay with its QR code technology revolutionalized consumer facing payment problem
• Alipay+ is doing the same in the B2B space and B2C space

Personalized Videos - The Key To Redefining Customer Experience In Finance

Web 2.0 enabled banks to give basic banking services via mobile apps. In-person meetings and sending complex PDF documents was the way for explaining complex financial products and understanding customers. Post pandemic, there’s a need for digital platforms that offer data-driven personalised interactions with customers and constantly learn from their behaviours. This is the key to scaling up. [This session is brought to you by: Amigobulls Inc]

Speakers and Moderator

• Poorna Nayak Director, Amigobulls Inc

Notes

• Enrich Video creates personalized videos that gives a portfolio update to a client
• New product recommendations
• Upsell to your engaged clients
• DIY feature is also available
• HNI clients
• IIFL Wealth - Video Portfolio update

In Partnership with World Economic Forum: Technology and Systemic Risk in Financial Services

Technology and innovation continue to have a bold and positive impact on financial services. At the same time, the acceleration of technologies in FS is beginning to surface new systemic risks. Appropriate mitigation to these risks will require action from industry players and the public sector alike, at the individual level and collaboratively.

What are the developing key risks stemming from the increased use of technologies and how can multi-stakeholder cooperation mitigation these risks? Who holds the greatest responsibility in addressing the risks?

In this session in partnership with World Economic Forum, hear from Michael Leibrock (DTCC), Dr Ren Zhang (Amazon), and Vincent Loy (MAS). This session will be moderated by Drew Propson, World Economic Forum.

Speakers and Moderator

• Ren Zhang Former Chief Data Scientist, BMO Financial, Head of AI CoE
• Vincent Loy Assistant Managing Director, Monetary Authority of Singapore
• Michael Leibrock Managing Director, Credit and Systemic Risk, DTCC Moderator
• Drew Propson Head of Technology and Innovation in Financial Services, World Economic Forum

Notes

The speakers brought out many interesting points in the context of systemic risks emerging from the existing and new technologies that are being adopted by institutions

• Technology driven risks
  • Eco system risk that spans financial institutions, their partners, public and private sector enterprises
  • Risk from adopting cloud and not following adequate practices
  • Ecosystem risk includes third party and cloud
  • Whether FI understands the technology that is being used
  • Exacerbate risks because of speed
  • Application of AI can create algos with no transparency
  • Cybersecurity
  • Regulatory restrictions might impede tech advancements
  • Right talent needed in FSI
• Something that is going to hit short term
  • Cybersecurity with number of access points going up
  • Inflation risk causing supply chain issues
  • Many other sectors that FSI depends on but the regulators might not have control on those sectors
  • Data flow across countries
  • Globalization vs. localization
    • Are companies going to embrace globalization or try to work on being independent
• Mitigate the climate risk
  • Technology is a big factor and FSI is still not prepared to understand this issue
  • System development life cycle - how to incorporate climate risk
• Collaborative solutions
  • Need to move away from internal data silos to data exchanges where companies can exchange data and information in a secure way - Snowflakes use case
  • Regulation cannot front run Innovation and Digitization efforts; work with other partners and create breeding ground for more innovation
  • Low risk area - Regulators can allow innovation
  • MAS Sandbox
  • Work on POCs
• Climate risk is going to be an interesting type of risk where FSI should keep an eye on the research breakthroughs in this area
• DLT has a potential to make considerable change in reducing tech risk
• Chinese proverb - whoever starts it should end it. Technology risk should be mitigated by technology
• Data, Machine learning and AI will be key in understanding systemic risk components
  • Data capturing is yet not there
  • How do we use unstructured data to get early warning signals ?
• Use of DLT in CDS tracking
• Monitoring risk on real time basis
• Technology is a tool but the key is collaboration
• Green FinTech and DLT are exciting technologies that might be helpful in mitigating risk

Unicorn Case Studies in FinTech

Together with moderator Paul Ng of EDBI, panellists Charles Song (Linklogis), Jefferson Chen (Advance Intelligence Group), and Niraan De Silva (VNLife) will will explore scaling considerations and processes, deployment of funds, hiring and culture.

• Speakers and Moderator

  • Charles Song Chairman & Chief Executive Officer, Linklogis
  • Jefferson Chen Chairman & Chief Executive Officer, Advance Intelligence Group
  • Niraan De Silva Chief Executive Officer, VNLIFE - Moderator
  • Paul Ng Managing Partner, EDBI Pte Ltd

• Notes

  • Linklogis
    • founded in 2016 addressing supply chain finance related solutions
    • use of AI ,Blockchain, cloud computing to transform supply chain
    • Market leader in China
    • Listed in HK
    • Long term plan
      • Leading service provider in supply chain space
      • Focus Asia based exporters
      • Obtained Banking license in Singapore
      • Setting up labs for creating a trade related stable cryto currency
    • Focus on supply chain and not get distracted
    • STAR - Strategy, Team/Talents, Action and Review
    • Flat Organization - Every Monday communication
    • 2 cents
      • Really get to know what the customer really wants. Don’t start the product from an internal view.
      • Pay lot of attention to liquidity and working capital - Too quick expansion and you might die quickly
  • VNLIFE
    • Payment Tech
    • Focus on
      • Digital banking services in Vietnam, Cambodia
      • QR Cashless operator in Vietnam
      • Domestic travel - Online largest domestic travel platform in Vietnam
      • New Retail - Range of software solutions for small and medium merchants
    • For talent - VNLife is looking to Singapore
    • 4500 employees based out Vietnam
    • Lead by example
    • 2 cents
      • Relationships matter - meet people and build relations
      • Understand customer
  • AIG
    • Use AI to disrupt financial and retail sectors
    • Started eKYC services and Fraud analytics services - 5 million API calls daily
    • Operator Atomi BNPL platform - 20 million customers
    • founding team of 10 people to 2000 people currently employed
    • Data centric organization
    • Learning new language in the region - iPhone system language - Bahasa Indonesia
    • Reinvent and Pivot quickly
    • 2 cents
      • Always think of end game and work backwards
      • Crazy vision and Crazy execution

Shaping our Digital Future

Technology-enabled inflections are disrupting industries faster than ever before, and if anything, COVID-19 has further accelerated these changes. As technologies such as 5G, AI, IoT and blockchain coalesce, and efforts increase to decarbonise, we are at the tipping point of a new phase in the web’s evolution. Web 3.0 will play a transformative role in our digital economy. So what will an even smarter and more connected world be like? How do we find the right balance around digital convenience and data security as we head into the next tech frontier?

Join Mr Chia Song Hwee, Deputy Chief Executive Officer of Singapore headquartered global investment company, Temasek, in a session where he’ll share Temasek’s views on the macro-trends of technology and digitisation, the opportunities and challenges Temasek sees in a tech-enabled world, how to find the right balance in a “digital dichotomy” and navigate the risks and challenges together This session will be moderated by Neil Parekh, Tikehau Investment Management Asia.

Speakers and Moderator

• Chia Song Hwee Deputy Chief Executive Officer, Temasek Moderator
• Neil Parekh Head of Asia, Australia & New Zealand, Tikehau Investment Management Asia

Notes

• No single individual or organization can solve the sustainability problem. It has be done collaboratively
• Technology investment is needed in this area
• Sustainable financing - need to be creative - returns need not fit the mandate of many investment managers
• Temasek has an arrangement with HSBC to create a platform for sustainable finance
• Need a public and private sector collaboration in the field of Sustainable finance
• Pure project financing approach without the technology innovation is not going to work
• Temasek believes that digitization is a mega-trend that will happen. Technology brought out by digitization has impact across geographies, sectors
• Web 3.0 is an important element of digitization because inherently it has the elements of being smart, autonomous and open. With these elements, it is hard to stop. It is a fertile ground for innovation to take place
• Significant resources set up in Temasek for AI, ML, Blockchain, 5G
• How to make sure that the portfolio is “future proof” ?
• Temasek has been actively reshaping the portfolio
  • Financial services 24% portfolio end of 2020
  • 10 years ago 90% was in financial services but it has massively changed
  • Underlying portfolio has changed a lot
• Horizontal technologies like AI ML are so powerful so that it cannot be captured in a sector
• Temasek wants to learn the technology itself and hence created two teams - Blockchain and AI
  • They are mandated to develop capabilities
  • Work with partners
  • Build new businesses with venture building
  • Build eco system via a network of early stage investing
• Developments in the last 2 years
  • Acadium venture with collaboration with NUS - creating a utility platform that address challenges in the financial sector
    • Monitoring tools in the ESG sector
    • Monitoring other forms of financial risks
  • Collaboration with DBS and JPM to build a network that helps in cross border settlement
  • MarketNote - Joint venture between SGX and Temasek. Platform for digital asset issuance from end to end
    • Pilots done for bond issuance
    • Onboarding 10 international banks
  • Affinity
    • Create Self Sovereign Identity
    • Technology building can help in international travel issues
    • 50 standards from 30 countries on credential verification of vaccine tests
  • JV with an Indian company to create a market place where employer and employee come together - space is semi-skilled workers
    • all the credentials of these semi-skilled workers need to be verified
  • Potential of Web 3.0 and decentralized tech
    • Bring technology not in the virtual space but solving problems in the real world
• Volatile Uncertain Complex Ambiguous world - VUCA
• Digitalization will create a lot of opportunities
• Cybersecurity has become very important
  • No single company can handle it
• Operating entity to create a security focused company by collaborating with others
  • Create synergies across portfolio companies
• Ethics and Governance
  • Regulate but not over regulate
  • Don’t need more new laws but needs to be refreshed
  • Light touch regulation
• Digital Dichotomy
• Teams formed around Blockchain and AI are working with traditional financial teams and hence spreading the enthusiasm around these technologies across various teams
• Climate Change
  • No single country , org, technology can help
  • It is a collaborative effort
• Get in to companies that are developing new technologies
• Common thread
  • Collaboration even in the areas of where we compete
• Temasek will invest in blue, green and grey companies
• Tailwinds
  • Financial inclusion
  • Equal opportunity

Roundtable in Partnership with Ecosystm: Scaling Sustainable Finance for a Green Recovery

The market for sustainable finance is rapidly growing in response to the climate emergency. Despite impressive recent growth, the sustainable finance market has a long road ahead to reach maturity. It faces competing initiatives, uneven coverage by geography and asset class, misalignment of definitions and a mismatch between supply and demand. Moreover, all around the world, countries are still facing social and economic fallout from the global pandemic, and rebuilding our economies in a post-Covid-19 era has never been more urgent. How can the financial sector adequately respond to these global concerns? What is the role of finance in the green recovery and how can public and private sectors collaborate to scale credible ESG investments? Our experts discuss the most innovative financial products and instruments that aim to deliver social and environmental benefits alongside attractive returns. Moderated by Ecosystm’s Amit Gupta, hear from Marty Dropkin (FIL Asia), R. Raghunathan (WWF-Singapore), Sasja Beslik (SDG Impact Japan), and Zoë Knight (HSBC) in this session held in partnership with Ecosystm.

Speakers and Moderator

• R. Raghunathan Chief Executive Officer, WWF-Singapore
• Marty Dropkin Head of Asian Fixed Income & Hong Kong Investment, FIL Asia Holding Pte Limited
• Sasja Beslik Head of Sustainability , SDG Impact Japan
• Zoë Knight Managing Director & Group Head of the HSBC Centre of Sustainable Finance, HSBC Moderator
• Amit Gupta Chief Executive Officer & President, Ecosystm and TiE Singapore

Notes

• HSBC
  • Becoming Net 0 in Operational perspective
  • Supporting clients perspective
  • Support in financing project
  • $750B - $1T committed for the next 10 years
  • Finance to accelerate finance in the sustainable infrastructure
  • Partnering with Temasek
  • Real emissions reduction
    • Understanding what capital is being deployed for
    • transparency around labeling - there is a mechanism to show for a corporate that it is doing projects in the green area
    • credibility factor will become very important
  • Data is fundamental
    • Life cycle of the existing facility
    • Best way of exiting early or supporting long term
    • Which locations to prioritize ?
    • Which technologies or projects to exit ?
    • Risk of lack of integrity if there is lack of data
• Sasja
  • New challenges to sustainable finance products - It will entail engineering
  • Complexity is going to improvement - pathways, end goal clarity
  • Current offerings to sustainable investment are not sufficient
    • As a toolbox, it is shallow in terms of what they can do
  • New type of offerings are needed
  • Need alternative sustainable data
  • Need forward looking data
  • Most of the data are based on backward looking data
  • Need data that are certified
  • Different sectors will have different biz models. Cooperate is the way to go
  • Transition is going to cost investors and corporates
  • So far it has been about compliance - Now we are talking about effect
• Marty
  • It is not about the quantity of investments but it is all about the quality of investments
  • Net 0 by 2050
  • Targets are merely words unless you put stuff in action
  • Holding issuers up to right standards
  • Making sure that we are keeping aggressive targets in the green bonds
  • Challenge is the timing - How do we move fast enough ?
  • Engagement is the key
  • Management commitment is the key
  • One asset manager cannot do the job.
  • Types of offerings are going to change and Types of metrics are going to change
  • End investors requirements are driving the change
• WWF
  • Pledge to reduce commissions
    • Backed by science
    • How do we promote sustainable land use ?
  • Lot of finance wanting to flow in to sustainable finance. It is not easy to curate the projects because the standards are not clear
  • Tangible progress is not happening on the ground even though money is flowing in to these projects
  • Sustainable assessment report. At a high level, there is a lot of support towards sustainable goals. What is lacking is the actual channeling of funds to sustainable project
  • Only 24% of the banks disclose climate strategy public
  • Tech will play a big role
  • Human commitment and technology
  • 4000 SMEs in Singapore
    • Focus on emissions is a lot of effort
    • Creating awareness
    • handholding
    • finance
  • Next 20 - 30 years - scale of transformation is going to be huge
  • Palmoil is used in many goods
    • How do we distinguish between sustainable palm oil vs one that is not ?
    • Traceability is difficult
• Definitions, Data and Regulations are key

In Partnership with Milken: Adapt to Survive… and Flourish

“Adapt to survive” is a common adage among companies. But the exponential digitalization of the economy requires companies to adapt again and again, faster and faster, in order to remain innovative, relevant, and competitive. While hyper-connectivity, access to greater amounts of data, and exposure to more markets have provided competitive advantages, they have also provided more avenues to elevate important societal concerns: climate change, ESG considerations, and the health and well-being of communities. How are asset owners and managers adapting their institutions to benefit their partners and cultivate more inclusive societies? In this session held in partnership with Milken, hear from Sue Brake (Future Fund), André Esteves (Franklin Resources), Jenny Johnson (CBAM Partners), and Don Young (BTG Pactual). This session will be moderated by Milken Institute chairman Michael Milken.

Speakers and Moderator

• Sue Brake Chief Investment Officer, Future Fund Management Agency
• Jenny Johnson President & Chief Executive Officer, Franklin Resources, Inc.
• Andre Esteves Senior Partner, BTG Pactual
• Don Young Co-Founder & Partner, CBAM Partners Moderator
• Michael Milken Chairman, Milken Institute

Notes

• Proximity was not possible in Pandemic and it created problems in many asset management companies
• Great Resignation
• Empathy is key in times of Pandemic
• Future Fund Management has a sizable investment in alternative assets
  • Not just overlay alpha on beta
  • Take a total portfolio approach
  • Try and stop people working too much
• Franklin
  • 1.5T AUM
  • Asset managers need to be as good with technology as one working in Google
  • Micro signal detection - need AI and ML
  • Tokenization - diversified portfolio for $5
  • Take longer view
  • 30% of the time spent on disruptive technologies
    • Blockchain
    • Tokenization
  • Hard for an organization to fail fast
  • Desktop video - 70% is non verbal communication
  • Shift from pandemic environment was not difficult
  • Team of 70 developers working on tokenized money market fund working across the world and none of them share the same office
  • People initially want local securities and then they look for international securities
  • Bullish on Blockchain and Tokenization
• BTG
  • Manages money
  • Funds Sustainable finance projects
  • Runs as Reforestation fund - $1B - $3B funds
    • Buy degraded areas and plan half of it as commercial forests and half of it as original forest
    • engage the community - planting and maintenance of the forests
    • 500,000 hectares of degraded forest is covered
    • Promoting reforestation
  • Providing firms to move to the next level
  • Ibanks in Brazil have a different structure from wall street firms
  • Ibankers have a Skin in the game in Brazil
• CBAM
  • Have a portfolio that is decorrelated across sectors
  • Investors are looking at companies from ESG links
  • Passive managements has had its day. Now there is no alternative. You need to do work and pick companies
  • 8% in USA are millionaires and 28% of US have networth < 10k USD