eXponential Finance

Hena Mehta is the Founder & CEO of Basis, a first-of-its-kind company focused on the financial independence of (initially) Indian women. Basis is building a digital platform powered by tailored financial content, engaged communities and curated services and products for women.

Hena talks about her own experience as the motivation behind Basis, the target market of professional, well-educated, young women in India's metropolitan areas, and how conversations about money differ depending on whether men are present or not. Hena explains why the Indian market is considered so complex. We also take a look at the Indian startup ecosystem, and the changes that can be observed from the IT service providers of old to the new, emerging product-based startups.  

Basis is a SEBI Registered Investment Adviser: https://www.getbasis.co/

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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Viking alert! Gustaf Hård af Segerstad and Johan Lindskog are the podcast host for Fintechpodden, one of the leading shows in the Nordics. What better people to talk to about the Swedish and Nordics FinTech ecosystem overall? 

Gustaf and Johan talk about the cashless society, how the government has made small interventions to introduce a little bit of friction back into the purchasing process to protect people from taking on too much debt, how open banking and its extension to other industries drives transparency and innovative business models, and what the Swedish central bank is doing about evaluating digital currencies. 

You can find Fintechpodden on Anchor or any other major podcasting platform: https://anchor.fm/fintechpodden

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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Ranked multiple times among the Top 100 Women in FinTech globally, and one of the absolute top voices for FinTech in Malaysia, Jenna is the Co-Founder of FortNynja, a cyber security startup. Previously, she was responsible, as part of the digital government initiative, for drafting the FinTech strategy for Malaysia. Jenna is passionate about making Fintech education available more broadly, and is one of the initiators of the E-Fintech School, which will run during July for 100 participants across the APAC region. Registrations are open until June 15 at the following link: https://efintechschool.peatix.com/ Participation is free once you get selected, however, you will need to post a bond that will get refunded upon completion of the program. 

On this podcast, Jenna talks about the focus for the FinTech ecosystem in Malaysia (serving the underbanked rather than the unbanked at this point), the benefits of diversity across the Malay, Chinese and Indian populations, the ease of doing business in Malaysia and its unique position next to Singapore, and in the center of one of the most dynamic regions in the world. We also come to the conclusion that there is no way you can avoid putting on weight during your initial stay as the variety and quality of food is simply amazing. 

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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David is the Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Symphony, the secure collaboration platform focused on global markets. David’s ideas have influenced the major trends in consumer and enterprise communications and most recently secure collaboration technologies over the past two decades. He founded and ran Microsoft’s unified communications products (Skype for Business) and as Global Head of Collaboration Services at Thomson Reuters, introduced the first consumer-to-business federated communications to the financial services industry. After the sale of Skype to Microsoft where he was the GM of Skype’s Enterprise Business, David founded and sold Perzo before founding Symphony.

We had the honor to welcome David for a surprise visit at the Tokyo FinTech Meetup in August 2018, so in this conversation, we embarking on the Symphony journey since then. We discuss Symphony's differentiation as a network across companies, rather than inside a company (where Microsoft Teams and Slack might be extensively used), the importance of synchronization of information in a decentralized environment, the differences in integrating with WeChat and WhatsApp and why localization in Japanese language was so difficult (that's the geeky part of the conversation). From there, we are looking into the future of workflow productivity using Symphony, and the emergence of an enterprise intelligence platform. David concludes with his personal advice to entrepreneurs, and those who want to become one. 

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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Assaf Marco is a General Manager and leading the Product Strategy team at Sompo Cyber Security, a fully owned subsidiary of one of the three Japanese Mega Insurers. As such, Assaf is responsible for pre-sales, marketing and technical services development. Prior to his current position, Assaf had served in the Israeli Embassy in Japan as a Senior Commercial Officer promoting and developing the Japanese market for the Israeli security industry and took key part in strengthening the partnership between Israel and Japan in the homeland security and cyber security fields. Assaf shares his perspective on the global cyber security landscape, the level of preparedness in Japan, and how he has managed to bridge the cultures throughout his careers. We also touch upon the current working-from-home situation, which Sompo has fully embraced, to the moderator's surpise :-) 

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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Kristof is a passionate serial entrepreneur with six exits under his belt. He believes that respect & transparency is the basis for solid business, and that doing good for the world & providing return for investors can co-exist.  One of the most exciting, and best hidden secrets so far, the ThreeFold Foundation builds the infrastructure for the new internet, and internet that empowers equality, autonomy and sustainability. 

Equality - ThreeFold's peer-to-peer Internet is available everywhere and owned by everyone - across geographical and cultural borders. Everyone has equal chances to learn, partake and succeed. 

Autonomy - ThreeFold is democratized, neutral, and secure to provide freedom to all its stakeholders. Everyone is digitally autonomous and owns their data just like they would own their physical experiences. 

Sustainabilty - ThreeFold believes in environmental consciousness.  All Network, hardware and software components that constitute the ThreeFold Grid are optimized around energy-efficiency and carbon neutrality. 

Millennial health warning: These are two old guys discussing new technology. We could not help but drift back to our youth, so there is mentioning of a Commodore 64 computer, and phone books. If you do not know what these things are, just ignore those passages.  

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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Martin is the Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Upvest, a FinTech startup providing the first pan-European securities account API. Upvest is a BAFIN-licensed (the German financial services regulator) custodian and enables any neo broker to offer securities accounts to their end users instantly in their apps.

We talk to Martin about:

- His journey from venture capitalist early in his career to founder

- Why good founders pivot fast

- The importance of choosing the right customers 

- The economics of issuance on custody in a regulated blockchain business model vs "the old world"

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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Mikaal is the SVP, International at SoFi, a finance company based in San Francisco that offers a range of lending and wealth management services to Millennials, after 8 Securities, which he founded and was the Chief Executive Officer of, got acquired in April. This was SoFi's first international acquisition. 

Launched in 2012 in Hong Kong with zero-commission securities trading as the proposition (so this was even one year before Robinhood, commonly seen as the North Star of zero-fee trading, started), 8 Securities shortly afterwards launched an operation in Japan. Mikaal shares his experience of working across two cultures, and what he sees as the differences in working style, product development and market acceptance. 

There is plenty of good advice for FinTech founders looking at either jurisdiction, and of course we are also discussing what the future will bring with SoFi's international expansion (spoiler alert: it might just resemble some of Mikaal's prior experience heading E-Trade's business outside of the 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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Chintai started off as a community contribution by EOS42, one of the early EOS block producers, to provide an effective marketplace for token leasing. On EOS, the tokens that you hold allow you to use bandwidth on the network. Rather than tying up your capital by purchasing token, Chintai supports the idea that you can just lease them (for a fee, of course). 

Since presenting at the Tokyo FinTech Meetup for the first time in April 2018, David and his team have generalized the Chintai technology and turned the company into a B2B FinTech service provider for issuance, management, and secondary trading of tokenized securities. Their high performance products, which at this point are technology-agnostic, help financial entities dramatically reduce overhead by automating compliance, reporting, advanced payments, collateral handling, and more.

Chintai is in the process of - together with its partners - procuring access to the regulatory sandbox operated by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). 

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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Parissa Haghirian is Professor of Japanese Management at Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan. She has lived and worked in Japan since 2004 and is an internationally renowned expert in international management practices with a focus on Japan. Professor Haghirian earned an MA in Japanese Studies from the University of Vienna in 1999 followed by an MA and PhD in Business Administration from the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration in 2000 and 2003 respectively.

Together with her students, she has compiled the book "Japanese Management Concepts You Should Know", which is available for download from her website: https://www.haghirian.com/ 

In our podcast, we discuss what defines the Japanese management system, how it differs from Western management, and in fact "demystify" Japanese management; we debate examples of successful Western managers in Japan, the role of women in Japanese business, and how the Japanese governments' pandemic response is (or is not) an expression of the Japanese management style. 

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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