Though Bitcoin is still deep in the valley of disillusion, innovators continue to find new ways to meet investor needs with Blockchain. In this episode we speak with two people at the frontline of capital markets, digital assets and disruption. Not yet breaking banks, but certainly keeping them on their toes.

Guests:

Angelina Kwan, Senior Adviser, IMC Asia Pacific

Aaron Gwak, CEO and Co-founder, Libeara

Produced by Charis Palmer, with sound engineering by Kevin Hirshorn. Music credit Raz Burg.

StraitsX is the issuer of the world’s first Singapore Dollar stablecoin, XSGD, and XIDR, the StraitsX Indonesian Rupiah stablecoin, and is also a Major Payment Institution in Singapore, enabling account holders to manage payments as well as connect their accounts to digital asset platforms.

Host Simon Spencer chats with co-founder Tianwei on how StraitsX was born, the future of money in a Web 3 world, and the role of stablecoins in real-time payments going beyond borders.

Hosted by Simon Spencer and produced by Charis Palmer, with sound engineering by Kevin Hirshorn.

With Asian markets making the leap into open banking and open finance, there’s new talk of cross-border open banking and open finance. We sat down with opn payments and open banking experts Lauren Jones and Nilixa Devlukia at Money 20/20 Asia to discuss lessons for new markets considering open banking, use cases for cross-border open banking and the rails that need to be in place to truly empower consumers.

Guests:

Nilixa Devlukia is the Chair of the Open Finance Association and founder of Payments Solved, a regulatory consultancy advising on the regulatory framework for CBDC, crypto assets, open banking, and payment services. She’s a lawyer by training and has worked both on the banking side at Barclays, but also on the regulatory side at the Financial Conduct Authority, and other regulatory bodies.

Lauren Jones is SVP Global Advisory at UK-based open banking and tech company Konsentus. She was formally Head of Standards at Payments UK  where she was responsible for the UK’s standards policy on behalf of banks, government, and the wider industry. So it’s no surprise she’s a self-proclaimed regulation geek

Produced by Charis Palmer, with sound engineering by Kevin Hirshorn.

Sometimes it takes out of the box thinking to get people to make the move from cash to digital money. 

And if there is one person who has had to think deeply around this issue, it’s Jojo Malolos, currently the CEO of Philippines payment service PayMongo and before that founded digital bank GoTyme.

But so many people start the journey at the easy bit, in the middle: how to get people who already have money to use cards or digital wallets. Jojo starts at the much more difficult extreme, with people who are unbanked because they have no money at all.

We travel through the journey of providing a basic income to people so they have enough money to open a bank account, through to how to encourage people to take the leap from the under-mattress stash to digital money.Produced by Rachel Williamson and Charis Palmer, with sound engineering by Kevin Hirshorn. 

The team from Breaking Banks Asia meet forward thinkers to sum up last week’s Money 20/20 Asia conference with a focus on the investment outlook for startups and fintechs, the key themes coming out of the conference and how banks and their competitors are teaming up to innovate.

Guests:

– Scarlett Sieber, Chief Strategy and Growth Officer at Money20/20

– Dennis Pratistha, Chief Investment Officer, Mandiri Capital Indonesia

– Tim Poskitt, Fintech Managing Director – APAC, Startupbootcamp

Produced by Rachel Williamson and Charis Palmer, with sound engineering by Kevin Hirshorn. 

In this second part of our series on cash, cards and digital wallets, we shift our focus to the challenges and opportunities of an entirely digital payments world and look to the innovation happening beyond consumer payments. 

We start with the legacy of India’s controversial 2016 demonetisation program, explore the role of central banks in cutting back cash, and investigate the future of cross border payments, where things are heating up.

Guests:

Monica Jasuja, Ambassador, Emerging Payments Association Asia

Anthony Thomas, Non-executive Chairman, MoMo; MD, Fintech, Delivery Hero

Brad Pragnell, Principal, 34 South 45 North

Richard Holden, Professor of Economics, UNSW Business School

Produced by Charis Palmer and Rachel Williamson, with sound engineering by Kevin Hirshorn. Music credits to Raz Burg, Mahesh Vinayakram and BalloonPlanet. 

Debanking is a real problem for fintechs operating in Australia. Local companies and foreign intrants alike are not immune to a 30-minutes-to-midnight text saying “your accounts will be closed from tomorrow”. 

Stuart Stoyan, founder of Moneyplace and former chair of Fintech Australia, is in no mood for making nice after five years of inaction from governments and regulators and feeling the humiliation himself of being told you can’t be trusted with your customers’ money, or data. 

We discuss who’s been broken up with via text and ghosted, the chilling effect on doing business as a fintech in Australia, and Stoyan’s views on the real reasons why banks have had to be told by the top finance cop, “don’t be dicks”. 

Produced by Rachel Williamson and Charis Palmer, with sound engineering by Kevin Hirshorn. Music credits to Raz Burg and BalloonPlanet.

In Part 1 of this two-part show we explore the resilience of cash for payments.

From cards and digital wallets to superapps and digital currency, we ask the experts what’s the killer app to kill cash in Asia, and what would mass uptake of global digital payments mean for financial inclusion in our region.

Guests:

Anthony Thomas, MoMo

Jason Bryce, Cash Welcome

Brad Pragnell, 34 South 45 North

Monica Jasuja, Emerging Payments Association Asia

Produced by Charis Palmer and Rachel Williamson with sound engineering by Kevin Hirshorn. Music credits to Charlie Ryan, Mahesh Vinayakram and BalloonPlanet.

There’s a story told by the World Bank that in 2009 more people in the Philippines had a mobile phone than a bank account – despite there still being some 450 rural banks alone in the country. Today, that story might be apocryphal and it also doesn’t mean Filipinos don’t have incredibly complex financial lives as GCash, employer loans, remittances, cash, and QR payments might all be used for income within a single family. 

Netbank cofounder and Philippines banking and fintech investor Gus Poston says organising and simplifying the complicated patchwork of Filipinos’ financial realities is one of the biggest fintech opportunities in the country. 

Produced by Rachel Williamson and Charis Palmer, with sound engineering by Kevin Hirshorn. Music credits to Raz Burg and BalloonPlanet. 

Regtech is the unloved tech cousin of the fintech world. It’s the one which follows the rules and makes sure everyone else does too. But in an industry where not following the rules leads to some of the most spectacular catastrophes in history, it’s no surprise that it’s a sector on the rise — how could it not be when it’s the darling of banking regulators? 

Deborah Young is the CEO of the RegTech Association, and is responsible for shepherding the different arms of the sector into one direction. She says it’s growing at a rate of knots as trust and transparency become catch cries for regulators and consumers alike.