DigFin VOX

Bancassurance is all about selling insurance products through banks. The banking channel has become extremely important to insurers throughout Asia. We are seeing the first steps toward digitizing bancassurance, which means end-to-end automation and personalization of the selling of insurance products to bank customers.

George Kesselman, Singapore-based founder of Asia InsurTech Association, tells Jame DiBiasio why digitizing bancassurance is now on the table, and what that means for making products, targeting new business segments, and the balance of power between banks and insurance companies.

• Timecodes:
• 0:00 – George Kesselman, Asia InsurTech Association
• 1:56 – The beginning of digitized bancassurance
• 3:27 – Simple versus complex products, offline to online
• 5:17 – Is digital insurance bought or sold?
• 7:58 – How banks acquire data and share it with insurers
• 11:48 – Banks are realizing the full business potential of insurance
• 14:28 – Widening the product suite to go digital
• 16:29 – Whose tech stack dominates the relationship
• 17:59 – Bundling insurance with lending products, targeting SMEs
• 20:17 – Data governance and responsibilities
• 21:23 – Balancing of power between banks and insurers
• 24:05 – Opportunities for second-tier and new insurers
• 25:39 – Is there a role for insurtechs in distribution?
• 26:52 – Which Asia-Pacific markets are fastest, or slowest, to digitize bancassurance

DigFin teamed up with Guillaume Huet to explore how ChatGPT can help fintechs with business ideas.

Guillaume Huet is an A.I. and data specialist and consultant.

We asked ChatGPT to recommend the optimal business model if we were to launch a fintech startup today, with the goal of reaching $100 million in annual revenues within five years.

Huet used his prompt process to get a deeper, more insightful response. Along the way we learned more about how language-learning models work, and discussed many of the ideas that it presented us.

• Timecodes:
• 0:00 - Guillaume Huet and our project
• 2:09 - Using language-learning models and external data
• 3:36 - Guillaume's solution to apply GPT to our goal
• 6:34 - Creating personas within GPT to interrogate our model
• 9:20 - Promising if mixed results, and what to expect
• 11:48 - Some of the fintech themes that GPT raised
• 13:03 - What to make of answers that surprise
• 14:44 - GPT's ideas about revenue models, like automating investment banking
• 16:42 - GPT's suggestions for using emerging technologies, eg quantum computing
• 19:23 - Jame's persona within the GPT asks some bizarre questions
• 22:08 - GPT's thought process behind persistent themes, eg open banking
• 24:42 - Predictive failure analysis and other new ideas
• 27:57 - AR/VR in capital markets and other glimpses of the future

Fintechs often need to change business strategy to survive. Co-founders Victor Lang and Ray Wyand discuss how they realized their earlier versions of their fintech, Gini, was not working – and how they eventually found a product that could scale.

Wyand and Lang tell Jame DiBiasio the issues they have faced in both B2C and B2B markets, the challenges of going market by market, and what kind of revenues a VC-backed startup has to aim for.

They also share how they have worked with their investors, the solution they have found, and new challenges around going global from a base in Hong Kong.

• Timecodes:
• 0:00 – Victor Lang and Ray Wyand, gini
• 1:07 – From open banking in B2C to the “death zone”
• 3:15 – The hard path of B2B and trying to shorten sales cycles
• 5:14 – Can startups control their own destiny?
• 7:01 – Finding a path to revenues and scale
• 8:08 – Being ready to sell globally as a fintech
• 9:49 – Selling data insights to the VC industry
• 14:49 – When to ask investors for help, and what to ask for
• 18:23 – How to defend your idea against the competition
• 21:04 – Gini’s journey to eventual big-time revenues
• 23:30 – The challenges of going global

Maaike Steinebach is founder of Femtech Futures, a Hong Kong-based venture investment firm supporting startups in the tech space dedicated to women’s health and wellbeing.

Steinebach tells Jame DiBiasio about her journey from fintech to femtech, and how they are similar. She discusses the opportunity set, including backing B2B and B2C startups, and where she sees the space headed.

She puts femtech into the context of Web3, data sovereignty, and digital identity – particularly in the context of Asia’s many societies.

• Timecodes:
• 0:00 – Maaike Steinebach, Femtech Futures
• 2:15 – From fintech to femtech: Maaike’s journey
• 3:56 – Democratization and equal access to healthcare
• 5:49 – Leading venture investment into femtech
• 9:14 – The corporate landscape: employers, big pharma
• 9:56 – B2B business models versus B2C in femtech
• 13:34 – Driving market awareness and creating B2B opportunities
• 15:42 – Femtech’s place within the fintech universe
• 17:42 – Data sharing and open finance
• 18:20 – Web3, data sovereignty and digital identity
• 22:14 – Gamification and Web3 experiences for women
• 23:12 – Femtech in Asia and women’s health as software

Paul Harapin is APAC leader at payments fintech Stripe.

He discusses two topics: how Stripe is leveraging artificial intelligence, and its roadmap in Asia Pacific.

Harapin tells DigFin‘s Jame DiBiasio that Stripe is incorporating ChatGPT and other language-learning models. This is partly to support clients such as ChatGPT’s creator, OpenAI, but also to help derive better outcomes in Stripe’s business.

Following layoffs at the company in the wake of the tech crash, Harapin outlines Stripe’s priorities in Asia and where the company sees innovation from the region making its way to other parts of the world.

• Timecodes:
• 0:00 – Paul Harapin, Stripe
• 1:16 – Stripe’s strategy for artificial intelligence
• 4:38 – What AI companies are doing in the payments space
• 6:11 – Managing risks of ChatGPT
• 7:33 – The impact AI may have on payments processing
• 9:39 – The risks as AI gets more powerful
• 11:20 – Stripe’s valuation rollercoaster, where it’s cutting, where it’s investing
• 17:03 – Cross-border expansion in Asia
• 17:44 – Asia’s importance to the Stripe business
• 19:18 – Asia’s different competitive landscape for Stripe
• 22:36 – Innovations from Asia that can go global

Gourab Mukherjee is co-founder and CEO of Singapore-based insurtech Aktivo Labs. Aktivo provides wellness apps to insurance companies and reinsurers that are meant to help change people’s behavior.

As Mukherjee explains to Jame DiBiasio, about 30% of longevity is within people’s control. Smoking, substance abuse and poor diet, versus good diets, exercise, and getting a decent night’s sleep all impact our health. And digital technology is getting better at turning that into scores that insurers use to price policies.

But are these apps really changing behavior? Are they personalized enough to be effective? As the reward the virtuous, are they making inequality worse, particularly in emerging markets? Mukherjee fields these and other questions about wellness and insurtech.

• Timecodes:
• 0:00 – Gourab Mukherjee, Aktivo
• 1:37 – Longevity and the challenges of “healthspans”
• 3:17 – Demographics of health and at-risk populations in emerging markets
• 5:19 – Impact of Covid-19 on the wellness industry
• 6:13 – Do health apps change user behavior – at scale?
• 9:49 – Personalization and creating scores for individuals
• 14:51 – How insurance companies and reinsurers use these apps
• 17:51 – The challenges of socio-economic inequality and insurance premiums
• 20:43 – Integrity of data and gaming the system
• 22:30 – Aktivo’s funding, and moving from startup to sustainable business

Naveen Mallela of JP Morgan explains how tokenized deposits will enable commercial banking on blockchain.

Emmanuel Daniel is author of "The Great Transition: The Personalization of Finance is Here".

He discusses the themes of his book (reviewed here) detailing how technology renders financial intermediaries unprofitable, and the need for both banks and fintechs to reassess what value they deliver to customers.

"ED" is founder of The Asian Banker, a Singapore-based business magazine for consumer and corporate banks. He has been delivering forward-looking speeches at his events for years and has now encapsulated his thinking into "The Great Transition".

He speaks with Jame DiBiasio about why personalization and data are finally dragging financial services into the Information Age and what that means for products, starting with the most basic of all, the bank deposit account.

• Timecodes:
• 0:00 - Emmanuel Daniel and writing his book
• 2:05 - How the Information Age is empowering individuals
• 4:43 - Personalization and its data, and how fintechs become disrupted themselves
• 9:52 - Innovating financial products and the financialization of just about everything
• 14:14 - Disintermediating bank deposit accounts away from banks
• 19:27 - Turning digital wallets into tokens and the utilization of deposits
• 22:41 - The corruption of B2B fintech
• 25:18 - The speed and direction of change, problems platforms, and reimagining value propositions
• 28:10 - M&A, marketing, and creating an enduring business in financial services

Alice Chen and Julian Kwan are co-founders of InvestaX, a Singapore-based fintech focused on digital-asset tokenization.

Chen and Kwan discuss the evolution of tokenization, as a concept and a real-world activity, and how that is different from crypto markets. They discuss the future of financial intermediaries and the role of smart contracts.

They also talk about Asia’s return to the spotlight in wake of regulatory battles over crypto in the US, and what should happen next to help tokenization become a mainstream reality.

• Timecodes:
• 0:00 – Julian Kwan and Alice Chen
• 1:45 – Founding InvestaX and bridging TradFi and DeFi
• 4:15 – Selecting a domicile for a tokenization startup
• 7:53 – What is tokenization?
• 9:03 – Tokenized assets versus derivatives
• 11:33 – A brief history of tokenization
• 16:37 – Eliminating intermediaries in the post-FTX world
• 20:24 – Are smart contracts “ready for prime time?”
• 23:32 – Opportunities in Asia Pacific
• 27:09 – Importance of CBDCs and stablecoins
• 29:56 – Working together

Dušan Stojanović and his colleagues at True Global Ventures invest in blockchain and artificial-intelligence companies, backing many businesses in Web3 and metaverse-themed businesses.

He spoke with Jame DiBiasio about the convergence of generative AI models (such as ChatGPT) and Web3 businesses as a medium-term play. In the short term he is investing in AI businesses that sell to non-tech companies.

Stojanović talks about how startups are faring against giant corporations, data uses, and how the tools of AI are transforming the business of venture capital.

• Timecodes
• 0:00 – Dušan Stojanović, True Global Ventures
• 2:40 – Framing a medium-term focus on investment themes
• 4:18 – Why did the AI+ blockchain theme not work in recent years?
• 6:41 – How can VC and startups compete in AI versus corporate giants?
• 8:50 – Real-world applications for various industries
• 11:55 – Finance industry issues around data, security, sovereignty
• 14:31 – Decentralized data in Web3 versus controlling big data sets
• 18:25 – Inserting generative AI into Web3 business models
• 23:11 – Governance in Web3 and metaverse spaces
• 26:39 – The impact of generative AI on Web3 and traditional businesses
• 28:52 – And its impact on the VC industry and investment decisions