eXponential Finance

We hosted a presentation & discussion with three of the editors and contributors of the "Transforming Japanese Business - Rising to the Digital Challenge" book that was published in early 2020 by Springer, with the authors sharing their individual perspective as follows:

- Will Baber: The State of Digital Transformation in Japan

- Kieran Gane: The Digital Organization

- Raja Karim: Transformation in the Face of Legacy Constraints

If you would like to read further, you can find the book here: https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811503269

Speaker Profiles 

Will Baber has combined education with business throughout his career. His professional experience has included economic development in the State of Maryland, language services in the Washington, DC, area, supporting business starters in Japan, and teaching business students in Japan, Europe, and Canada. He taught English in the Economics and Business Administration Departments of Ritsumeikan University, Japan, before joining the Graduate School of Management at Kyoto University, where he is an associate professor, in addition to holding courses at University of Vienna and University of Jyväskylä.

Produced in collaboration with Tokyo FinTech. If you have an interesting story to share with our audience, and would like to appear on the podcast, please contact us via [email protected]

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John Ho is the Head of Legal - Financial Markets at Standard Chartered Bank. We often talk about all things FinTech across Asia, and beyond.

- What categories of CBDCs are there?

- What is the current regulatory view on CBDCs?

- What type of proof-of-concepts or pilot implementations do we see across the globe?

- What is our perspective on the Chinese Digital Currency/Electronic Payments (DCEP)?

We hope to host further FinTech Tandem sessions in the future. Please follow us!

Produced in collaboration with Tokyo FinTech. If you have an interesting story to share with our audience, and would like to appear on the podcast, please contact us via [email protected]

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Rolands is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Nordigen, an open banking data analytics platform in Riga, Latvia, that help banks, lenders and FinTechs to use open banking data to build more powerful applications in lending, personal finance and other verticals. Nordigen has obtained an Account Information Service Provider (AISP) license and is ISO27001 certified.

We talk about the origins of access to bank account data long before Open Banking regulation came into force, what the landscape in Europe looks like currently, and how Nordigen has followed their clients around the globe, deploying their highly specialized technology in countries as far as Brazil, Mexico and New Zealand. Rolands also draws out a vision for "open finance" and "open everything" that - following the Australian example - he sees developing in the future. Please forgive me for not resisting the urge to cover some history between Riga and Hamburg, my home town, which goes back more than 700 years with the Hanseatic League. 

Produced in collaboration with Tokyo FinTech. If you have an interesting story to share with our audience, and would like to appear on the podcast, please contact us via [email protected]

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Max Kordek is the Co-Founder and CEO of Lisk, a blockchain platform for decentralized applications established in 2016 together with his Co-Founder Oliver Beddows, who is the CTO. Lisk was one of the earliest pioneers of Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus algorithms, specifically Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS), as well as drawing out the vision of blockchain inter-operability through sidechains. Lisk is reaching the end of the current implementation roadmap with the SDK in version 5.0 having been marked as "development complete". 

Max talks to us about the various new products (e.g., Lisk Service) and functionalities under development and the state of research (for the latter, in particular the specification of inter-operability), the compelling proof-of-concept Dapps the community is developing, supported by the Lisk Builders Program, and the Lisk Centers in Utrecht, Tokyo (at Binarystar in Ginza) and Berlin, with the Berlin opening (virtual) event scheduled for November 20. 

Produced in collaboration with Tokyo FinTech. If you have an interesting story to share with our audience, and would like to appear on the podcast, please contact us via [email protected]

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Sophie Meralli joined the Japan Ventures team at Eight Roads at the beginning of 2020, focusing on Enterprise Tech and FinTech investments. Previously, she has worked at Innospark Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm in Boston. Originally trained and qualified as a CPA, Sophie was used to financial analysis, before taking her MBA at MIT's Sloan School of Business. Joining the AI-focused Innospark meant changing her mindset to discovering new technologies led by bold and passionate founding teams.

Also while at MIT, Sophie worked with the Digital Currency Initiative, and wrote her first academic paper, which got recently published. "Privacy-preserving analytics for the securitization market: a zero-knowledge distributed ledger technology application" analyzes current bottlenecks in the asset-backed securities industry, and suggests ways how zkABS, a solution built leveraging MIT's zkLedger, can provide an efficient, industry-wide solution. You can find the paper here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40854-020-0172-y

Produced in collaboration with Tokyo FinTech. If you have an interesting story to share with our audience, and would like to appear on the podcast, please contact us via [email protected]

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As the CEO of LumenLab, MetLife Asia’s innovation centre, Zia has spent the last six years steering the company’s innovation agenda across the region and around the world, with a passion for finding new ways to help the under-served. Globally, LumenLab delivered over 70 projects and won many awards addressing the health, aging, and wealth needs of Asia-based consumers. Zia was also the Chairperson for Diversity & Inclusion for Asia. 

Before insurance, Zia spent 22 years in the software and tech/telecoms industry with a couple of exits including FAST (sold to Microsoft). Zia has been a frequent keynote speaker on matters relating to inclusion and innovation at WEF Davos, IIF, Global Summit for Women, Milken, InsurTech Connect, and elsewhere. Much of his inspiration for new thinking sprouted on the two campuses where he studied, Stanford and MIT. 

As a writer, he has written about parenting, probability, travel, culture, and hockey. Zia is on the Board of the Energy Market Authority of Singapore and a Fellow in the Aspen Institute’s First Mover fellowship.

Zia shares the lessons learned for Insurers and InsurTechs from his time leading LumenLab, discusses what the future of insurance might look like, and how he is transitioning into his new role in building an ESG advisory & investment business as the Managing Partner of Beaver Lake Capital.

Produced in collaboration with Tokyo FinTech. If you have an interesting story to share with our audience, and would like to appear on the podcast, please contact us via [email protected]

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Mirko Ross is the Chief Executive Officer of asvin, an early German startup developing solutions for a trusted and secure Internet of Things (IoT). A recognized cybersecurity expert, Mirko is a Member of the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) IoT Security Expert Group, and a Co-Chair of the Alliance Internet of Things Innovation (AIOTI) Distributed Ledger Working Group. Our shared believe is that ultimately, the volume of machine-to-machine (M2M) commerce will exceed traditional (human-to-human or human-to-machine) payments, so it is imperative to provide an infrastructure that cannot be compromised.  

asvin.io provides a blockchain-secured update solution for M2M commerce and the IoT, for both the embedded device controller (edge devices) and for server-side device applications in the cloud. Today, unpatched vulnerabilities on IoT devices provide an attach vector for malicious actors and a door opener for vulnerabilities such as DDoS attacks, ransomware, hacking and data theft. Updating unsecure M2M commerce and IoT systems is analogous to applying medicine to sick patients. There is a growing need for continuously healing infected or unsecure devices in the Internet of Things

I had the pleasure to represent asvin at the Financial Innovation Business Conference (FIBC) in 2019, where the company was recognized with the Special Judges' Award. You can view the presentation online: https://fibc.info/2019-asvin/

Produced in collaboration with Tokyo FinTech. If you have an interesting story to share with our audience, and would like to appear on the podcast, please contact us via [email protected]

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Matthew Chan is the Head of Public Policy, Regulatory Affairs & Sustainable Finance (APAC) at the Asia Securities Industry & Financial Markets Association (ASIFMA), an independent, regional trade association with over 130 member firms comprising a diverse range of leading financial institutions from both the buy and sell side.

ASIFMA, jointly with Oliver Wyman, recently published a well-researched paper on market fragmentation in Asia. The paper projects growth of APAC capital markets at a rate triple the rest of the world, so that by 2030, they will make up 50% of global activity. With regional economic growth and stability relying on capital advancement, it is important to identify drivers of fragmentation (lack of standards, extraterritorial policies, localization & ringfencing, inconsistent implementation) that may lead to unintended consequences, and engage with the various policymaking bodies to achieve a better outcome. The full paper is accessible from the ASIFMA website: https://www.asifma.org/research/addressing-market-fragmentation-through-the-policymaking-lifecycle/

Produced in collaboration with Tokyo FinTech. If you have an interesting story to share with our audience, and would like to appear on the podcast, please contact us via [email protected]

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Henry Chong is the Chief Executive Officer of the Fusang Group. At Fusang, Henry is responsible for the group’s overall strategic direction & mission. He works closely with global institutional investors and financial regulators to bring professionalism and structure to the industry, and is a regular keynote speaker on the subject of digital assets. He is also a member of the University of Oxford’s research group on digital assets law and regulation.

Fusang has evolved out of Portcullis, a family business, and Asia's biggest independent group of trust companies, a one-stop shop for corporate, trustee and fund administration services to high-net-worth individuals, family offices, philanthropies, private banks, and investment managers.

In our conversation, Henry takes the position that after the ICO and IEO waves of years past, the security token wave has not really arrived yet, and that there is "the most colossal hype/execution mismatch that I have ever seen." With Fusang, Henry is focused on building the foundational infrastructure ("the plumbing") that is required to set off that wave. Henry draws out a vision of a sustainable stakeholder capitalism where brands reward their customers and employees directly with equity, and the dividing line between customers and shareholders is eliminated, in order to create true loyalty through ownership rather than "points". With that, Henry also argues that while dis-intermediation is coming to financial services like any e-commerce business before, decentralization will run into a regulatory wall. 

Produced in collaboration with Tokyo FinTech. If you have an interesting story to share with our audience, and would like to appear on the podcast, please contact us via [email protected]

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Mattia Fiorentini is the Head of Machine Learning and Quantum Algorithms at Cambridge Quantum Computing, a world leading independent quantum computing software company, with operations in US, Europe & Japan, and more than 60 scientists including 35+ PHD’s, in Quantum Computing (“QC”), Chemistry, Molecular Electronics, Physics, Maths, Computer Science, and Nanoscience. 

CQC builds tools for the commercialisation of quantum technologies whose long-term impact will be profound. CQC design solutions that benefit from quantum computing even in its earliest forms and allow the most effective access to these solutions for the widest variety of corporate and government users.

With Mattia, we discuss the current state of quantum computing, commercial approaches that are viable today, especially in Finance, what a hybrid approach leveraging both quantum and classical computing looks like, and why CQC's approach of a private research "think tank" combined with a startup culture focused on commercialization is the right approach to drive this technology forward. Oh yes, we are also discussing the impact of quantum computing on blockchain security. 

Produced in collaboration with Tokyo FinTech. If you have an interesting story to share with our audience, and would like to appear on the podcast, please contact us via [email protected]

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