India’s lending network for small businesses has increasingly become reliant on the growing sector of non bank lenders; the non bank market has been steadily increasing loan books by 25 percent per year as bank lending has not increased according to data from Edelweiss Financial Services; access to non traditional forms of data has helped non banks to be able to better asses borrower risk instead of using income taxes which were seen an unreliable. Source.
Ping An Technology and SparkLabs Group will team up to form Ping An Fintech Accelerator; the program will encourage companies to apply from around the world and the first batch will target 10 companies; CEO of Ping An Technology, Ericson Chan, said to Crowdfund Insider, “We are excited to partner with SparkLabs to collaborate with FinTech companies from around the globe. Ping An Technology is the incubator of new technologies for Ping An Group. This accelerator forms a critical part of our incubation ecosystem.” Source.
Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck was hacked and saw the theft of $543mn worth of customer holdings; the Japanese regulator, FSA, said it was concerned that most of the funds were kept in hot wallets online, instead of cold wallets offline; seeing that this is not the first hack of a hot wallet model the regulators might start mandating customer funds be held offline; nothing has been passed yet but the more thefts we see the more regulators will look to try and mitigate future issues. Source.
Paytm is looking to expand beyond their Indian roots and Canada is their first test case; “Paytm Canada is our beta test, or our warhead to get an entry into new geography beyond India,” said founder and CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma to TearSheet; while their bill pay products help top build customers their big revenue driver is when businesses pay them fees to accept payments; the current test case in Canada has Paytm signing up thousands of Canadian companies where they incentivize customers to pay bills with cash back offers; having a large Indian population in Canada has helped the company gain early success, but expanding to markets like the US is a different type of challenge. Source.
KPMG reports that fintech investment in Asia was $3.85bn in 2017, a significant drop from the more than $10bn invested in 2016; China was the biggest reason for the drop as the country saw only $1.3bn of investment in 2017; “Increasing government controls and regulations over fintech in China have kept many investors on the bench during 2017,” the report explained; one optimistic data point was corporate investment jumped in Q4 to 31 percent of overall deals. Source.
Southeast Asia’s largest bank, DBS Bank, has been one of the most innovative and profitable; while presenting at a Credit Suisse investment conference DBS CFO Chng Sok Hui said they could raise the return on equity to 14.5 percent; the digital customers are three times as valuable to the bottom line of the bank; DBS has implemented chatbots and other innovative technologies to improve the digital experience for a customer who is increasingly using their phones to bank. Source.
The company plans to shut down all operations in Japan by end of June 2018; overseas Japanese investors who use domestic banks will still have access to trading activities in the local market; cost and resources were the main drivers behind the decision. Source.
AltFi sat down with Revolut’s Rishi Stocker who is leading their effort to expand into Japan; Revolut has found the Japanese market to be more challenging than initially hoped; key issues include regulators want a local presence and for the fintech to hire someone with on the ground expertise; they also want to ensure their product targets the right customer in Japan. Source.
BBVA has invested in Sinovation Ventures as the fund can help to strike partnerships for the bank and they see the potential for strong return on investment; the focus on AI is helping the bank to keep innovating and offer mor potential services across their different regions. Source.