Fintech in Asia Pacific 2018 with Zennon Kapron

Zennon Kapron, founder of Kapron Asia and China Fintech joined us to conclude the two part conversation on Fintech in Asia Pacific. In this episode, Zennon continued the conversation on fintech outside of China, starting from the recent aggressive expansion of Tencent & Ant Financial in Southeast Asia, the evolution of digital payments in an open market with the other major players such as Visa, Mastercard & Paypal and the current boom and bust of ICOs in the cryptocurrency and blockchain markets in Asia.

Here are the interesting show notes and links to the discussion (with time-stamps included):

• Zennon Kapron (@chinafintech, @kapronasia, LinkedIn, Wechat:zennon ), Founder and Director of Kapron Asia & China Fintech [0:38]
• Fintech in Asia Pacific [0:38]
  • Can you talk about the key developments in Fintech specific to Asia Pacific outside China? [0:59]
    • Digital Payments and banking services
      • Specifically, Alipay and Tenpay has been aggressive in Southeast Asia, enabling local users to link their credit cards to the apps, where do you see this space evolves? [1:10]
      • How would the local giants such as Development Bank of Singapore (DBS) with their digital bank concept, the foreign players (Paypal, Mastercard, Visa) battle the onslaught of the Chinese tech giants? [4:04]
      • Do you see the payment infrastructure built by Tencent and Ant Financial (under Alibaba) which works for China is now portable and will win over Visa and Mastercard in the emerging markets such as Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand? [7:25]
      • The difficulty for Visa, Mastercard and Paypal to tackle the payment infrastructure advantage from Tenpay and Ant Financial in emerging markets.[9:39]
    • P2P lending and robo-advisors in Asia Pacific 
      • Have you seen any activity by similar companies in the P2P lending and robo-advisors space in the Asia Pacific market? [13:29]
    • Cryptocurrency and Blockchain technology in Asia Pacific [15:10]
      • Can you briefly discuss what an initial coin offering (ICO) is? [15:30]
      • Are the ICOs creating a bubble in the fintech market specifically to blockchain technology or are there credible ones which deter us from thinking that it’s a bubble otherwise? [16:30]
      • The cryptocurrency & blockchain are in the early stages and similar to the time where people are purchasing URLs in 1993 to 1995, before we see a killer app. With the development of the blockchain at the moment, do we see that the market is advancing? [20:13]
      • It seems that blockchain technology are still in its infancy, for example, Estonia and Israel startups have applied blockchain to cybersecurity, and the computing infrastructure of processing a transaction is still not fast enough, what are your thoughts on that? [23:43]
      • Why the bitcoin value cannot be zero and its implications on the digitization of cash [26:35]
  • Closing [29:51]
    • Can you recommend a book, movie, podcast or anything that have impacted your work or personal life recently? [30:10]
      • Zennon’s recommendation: “The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia” by Peter Hopkirk
      • BL’s recommendation: “Cracking the China conundrum: Why conventional economic wisdom is wrong” by Zhang Yukon
    • How do my audience find you? [31:45]

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The show is hosted by Bernard Leong (@bernardleong & weibo) and are sponsored by Ideal Workspace (Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn) with their new Altizen Desk on Indiegogo (Twitter, Facebook, Medium). Also check out Ideal Workspace’s new standing desk, Altizen and sign up for their mailing list. Sound credits for the intro music: Taro Iwashiro, “The Beginning” from Red Cliff Soundtrack.