Sebastien Gaudin of insurtech The CareVoice discusses how insurers are engaging digitally – and about his $10m funding raise.

Kalidas Ghose of UNO Digital Bank discusses the latest fund-raise and challenges in the Philippines.

Laurent Ischi of Tradeweb describes how automation is expanding opportunities in trading Asia bonds.

Jacqueline Pang of Artius and Claus Christensen of Know Your Customer talk regtech developments for 2024.

Octopus CEO Tim Ying talks about new pain points to solve, from cross-border payments to personal finance.

Raha Adrit of CoverGo discusses how insurers’ needs for digitalization are changing, along with the tech.

Julian Anderson, co-founder of Divit, talks about combining merchant acquiring with real-time payments.

Florian Spiegl of Evident Capital discusses why asset tokenization is on the rise.

The co-founders of Hong Kong personal-finance app Planto discuss how they’ve expanded to B2B.

Herston Powers is co-founder and partner at 1982 Ventures, a Singapore-based venture capital firm that focuses on fintech.

Herston says now is a great time for seed investing into new fintech companies in Southeast Asia. He is backing the next wave of founders, many coming out of the region's giant e-commerce businesses.

He discusses what sectors of fintech are attractive, the state of fund-raising in today's tough macro environment, and the future of IPO opportunities.

Timecodes:

0:00 - Herston Powers, 1982 Ventures

1:03 - Founding a VC company focused on fintech

5:15 - The growth thesis for Southeast Asian fintech startups

8:36 - Innovation versus regulatory arbitrage

10:39 - Managing the costs of financial compliance

11:45 - What differentiates today's fintech founders

14:46 - Which financial services verticals are promising

20:00 - Helping portfolio companies navigate surprises

22:13 - Fund raising from LPs

25:17 - Valuations

26:36 - Exit opportunities

28:11 - IPO prospects in Asia and the US

Sell-side firms are coming to grips with fees and expenses by gaining visibility over their trading costs.

Sam Rhee, co-founder of Endowus, discusses fund raising, growth versus profits, and disrupting private banks.

PropTech venture investor Ariel Shtarkman talks ESG, wealthtech and tokenization in Asia real estate.

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.