Whilst people have been focusing on the local broo-hah-ha of Brexit and worrying about whether Paris will steal London's FinTech crown, another competitor has been quietly getting on with its plans for dominance.
Singapore boasts the worlds largest Fintech Exhibition and has been building relationships with other ASEAN countries and organisations. The most tangible evidence of this is a pact with Hong Kong to build blockchain supported trading mechanisms between their financial trading exchanges, with over 20 banks already signed up to participate. This promises to be a classic implementation of Blockchain doing what it is good for, whilst keeping within the current scalability challenges of Blockchain's distributed ledger approach.
Interestingly enough, singapore sees great opportunities for Fintech as Asia currently has what is referred to as a massively unbanked population, i.e. one where most people don't have bank accounts. This is probably a once in a lifetime opportunity for banks to gain a massive increase in customers and lock them into their ecosystem if they pitch it right. The consumer based lifestyle opportunities that digital products offer are only fully addressable if consumers have an electronically based payment means available to them. So there's a choice for them: banks or crypto currencies.
Who wins out in this market where consumers are notoriously suspicious of banks, but authorities want to clamp down and regulate crypto currencies is anyone's guess. But there seems to be lots of opportunity.
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