Eight fintech startups in Accenture’s third annual FinTech Innovation Lab Asia-Pacific, some of them already with a significant customer base, will work with Asia-based financial executives and receive senior level mentoring as they learn what global financial firms want from technology.
“Most financial institutions are grappling with how to become more efficient, cut costs, comply with regulators and simultaneously increase their interaction with customers,” said Jon Allaway, senior managing director of financial services at Accenture.
Continuing a trend in fintech innovation labs across Europe, North America and Asia, most of the entrants are promoting products that fill gaps in exiting financial services firms’ technology rather than aiming to become a digital competitor.
“This year’s group of fintech startups have collaborative solutions that will help financial services companies streamline their businesses,” said Allaway. “Their fintech ranges from ways to collect and manage know-your-client data for SMEs, to predictive investment analytics solutions to ways to improve IT efficiency. Not all of it, at first blush, would be terribly exciting to the average person on the street, but they are very useful, nitty-gritty solutions that can genuinely help financial services providers become more efficient, which in the end is good for the everyday customer.”
The participating financial institutions come from North America, Europe and Asia and include Bank of America Merrill Lynch, BNP Paribas, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, China CITIC Bank International, Siam Commercial Bank and Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group.
Not all of the companies in the innovation lab are from Asia. ChartIQ, which offers financial chart and data visualization products in HTML5, is based in Charlottesville, VA and serves more than 125 customers from offices in New York, London and Cyprus. Firms from other parts of the world that are trying to expand into Asian markets find the lab provides a useful introduction. Even companies with an existing customer base find the program useful to gain access to senior banking executives who are often difficult to identify, much less reach for an appointment.
HedgeSPA grew out of Bernard Lee’s PhD dissertation at the Imperial College London. After taking up an academic appointment at the Singapore Management University, he won a grant from the Prime Minister’s Office to start HedgeSPA. The company has expanded on his research and made its analytics available through the cloud.
Although Seerene is based in Berlin, it will participate in the Hong Kong lab to further develop its tools to improve technical efficiency in large enterprises. The company says its software can help drive IT change, balance productivity and innovation while massively reducing risk and increasing transparency.
Regulation and fraud prevention continue to play a major role in fintech development. KYC-Chain brings together biometrics and blockchain technology to improve the process of onboarding new clients, while SIORK uses Chinese character-based fuzzy logic and artificial intelligence to analyze raw data such as customer names and unstructured messages written in Chinese characters.
On the wealth management front, Lattice has a view-driven portfolio optimizer that allows a user to establish an investment objective and implement a balanced portfolio in one click. Privé Managers promotes its bionic advisory engine which lets financial institutions offer a combination of robo advisors and human guidance.
TNG Wallet provides an e-wallet for payment to merchants, other individuals and bank withdrawals at a low cost with the top-up facilities through convenience stores, ATMs and online banking platforms.
Fintech investment in Asia-Pacific has surpassed North America, led by some big investments in a few Chinese companies, according to Accenture, although deal volume remains higher in North America and Europe. Total investment in Chinese fintech reached $9.62 billion by July 31, more than double the level of all of 2015.
Alibaba’s Ant subsidiary, which operates the online payments platform Alipay, raised $4.5 million in the spring, while Ping An-backed Lufax raised $1.2 billion and China’s second largest ecommerce company, JD.com, raised $1 billion.
“China’s established companies, rather than nascent startups, are at the forefront of the fintech trend in the region,” said Beat Monnerat, Accenture senior managing director for financial services in Asia-Pacific.
“The fintech trend in China continues to skew toward online payments and lending, including peer-to-peer (P2P), which is creating market-share dilution for banks,” added Albert Chan, managing director of financial services for Accenture in China.
