Asia


Old world aces new world

With sizeable market shares, China’s mobile payments giants Alipay and WeChat Pay are seeking international expansion. What’s next for the tech giants?

Deutsche Bank unveils first paperless import payment solution in India

Deutsche Bank has launched the “first” paperless import payment solution in India with its TradePay system. TradePay uses the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) Import Data Processing and Monitoring System (IDPMS) to verify import payments by checking them against details made available by the client on the system, “eliminating the need for clients to share […]

Standard Chartered gets personalised for investment ideas in Asia

This time it’s personal. Standard Chartered has launched a digital wealth management tool that can customise investment ideas in a lively and rapid manner. Called Personalised Investment Ideas (PII), the idea is to help “priority banking” clients respond faster to market opportunities with automated investment ideas based on considerations such as their risk profile and […]

Fintech funding round-up: 13 October 2017

Mongolia gets a mention in this concise fintech funding round-up. Features OakNorth Bank, AND Global and TransFICC. UK challenger OakNorth Bank has secured £154 million investment as it looks to lend a further £1.5 billion to businesses in the country in 2018, and then attempt to move on globally. The funding came from the Clermont […]

India’s fintech valley gets pally with Mastercard for smart city plan

Mastercard has partnered with the Andhra Pradesh government in India to bring its digital payments into the Fintech Valley Vizag’s smart city plan. Under the agreement, Mastercard will help Andhra Pradesh in its ambitions to be a cashless society and develop the city concept. Mastercard president and CEO Ajay Banga says it can do this […]

Utkarsh Small Finance Bank goes live with Intellect’s core banking system

Utkarsh Small Finance Bank, a microfinance institution in India, has rolled out Intellect Design Arena’s core banking system. The bank received its licence last year, and according to Intellect, one of the key requirements for Utkarsh was to have a joint liability group solution that would enable it to provide group loans to the microfinance […]

Fintechs – friends or foes?

Visa employees have a saying that “cash is our biggest competitor.” Mightier threats, however, are looming.

CFTE Supercharger-s fintech learning in Asia

The Centre for Finance, Technology and Entrepreneurship (CFTE) has teamed up with SuperCharger, a fintech accelerator in Asia with offices in Hong Kong and Malaysia, to help its students learning with CFTE. UK-based CFTE cites SuperCharger’s accelerator programmes – which offer a B2B sales focus, closing 14 commercial proofs of concept (PoCs) in 12 weeks […]

Bank of Baroda teams with Amazon for SME lending

India’s second largest bank, Bank of Baroda, has got itself an “exclusive” micro lending partnership with Amazon. The bank says through this partnership it is running a process for underwriting Amazon sellers “who would traditionally not be able to procure a line at formal financial institutions”. The deal is part of the bank’s ambitions to […]

Google Gets into Digital Payments Fray in India

Google is expected to launch a mobile payments app in India next week. Google Tez, which means “fast” in Hindi will reportedly support Android Pay as well as the government-backed Unified Payments Interface and other consumer payment services including Paytm and MobiKwik.

Symphony Communication Services makes its Asia debut

Hong Kong-headquartered capital markets and investment group CLSA has deployed Symphony Communication Services collaboration platform across its entire business. The roll-out of Symphony to CLSA’s 1,900 employees is its largest deployment to date by an Asia-headquartered firm. CLSA joins a community who connect on Symphony, comprised of over 220,000 corporate users from 190 firms. CLSA […]

Infosys CEO quits after personal attacks

Infosys’ MD and CEO has resigned, citing a continuous stream of distractions and disruptions, and personal and negative attacks on his performance. In his notice of resignation, Dr Vishal Sikka, complained of “false, baseless, malicious and increasingly personal attacks” from the company’s founders. Sikka’s exit pushed Infosys shares down around 8% – and follows a […]

India Payments Roundup: Paytm, Amazon and Flipkart

The battle for e-commerce and payments domination is on in India. Paytm, an e-payment/e-commerce brand and payments bank, is bringing the QR code scanning habit to the Indian masses, while rival Flipkart has raised $2.5 billion from Japan’s SoftBank and Amazon has launched its digital wallet.

PayPal launches two innovation labs in India

PayPal has set up two innovation labs in India – based out of the company’s tech centres in Chennai and Bangalore – to help the country’s fintech start-ups grow.

CFTE brings fintech education initiative to Asia with MAS

UK-based Centre for Finance, Technology and Entrepreneurship (CFTE) is looking to expand to Asia and plans to set up its first international hub in Singapore. The newly launched organisation says it “has been working closely with the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to formalise plans to expand CFTE’s education initiative to ASEAN”.

Paytm to add messaging capabilities to rival WhatsApp

India’s most popular electronic wallet and payments bank Paytm is gearing up to add messaging capabilities to its mobile app. Experts believe this is in response to WhatsApp’s plans to add a payments piece to its platform. With mobile payments growing rapidly in India post demonetisation, Paytm is expected to quickly double its user base […]

India consolidates bill payment system

Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the country’s central bank and regulator, has given National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) the go-ahead to consolidate payment of local utility and services bills.

Reserve Bank of India unleashes account number portability

Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the country’s central bank and regulator, has asked banks in the country to work towards implementing a system that allows users to port their account from one bank to another, without changing the account number.

The Monday mindset: 31 July 2017

Fintech zeitgeist! Every Monday, we might look back at last week; look ahead to this week; share a few thoughts (our own or others); or discuss anything that catches our eye. This week, Soumik Roy, a digital marketing and technology specialist, brings us his perspective from within India – and all about the UI and […]

New Indian SME digital bank Open readies for launch

India’s SME-focused digital challenger bank Open is getting ready for its mid-August launch with a round of seed funding. Open calls itself “Asia’s first SME neo-banking start-up” and is using the same business model as Tide in the UK and Finnish start-up Holvi (recently acquired by BBVA). With its launch date in sight, the bank […]

Infosys profit delicately declines

Excitement is thin on the ground as the net profit for India-based Infosys dipped ever so gently in its latest financial results. For the quarter ended 30 June 2017, the financial systems vendor announced that Q1 net profit was $541 million, a quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) decline of 0.4%. Although for year-on-year (YoY), it displayed growth of […]

The Monday mindset: 10 July 2017

Fintech zeitgeist! Every Monday, we might look back at last week; look ahead to this week; share a few thoughts (our own or others); or discuss anything that catches our eye. This week, Soumik Roy discusses India’s Goods and Service Tax (GST) and whether it’s an opportunity for fintech firms. First discussed by a committee […]

Indian Domestic Networks Report Positive Growth

The National Payments Corporation of India is reporting positive momentum for transactions across its domestic payment networks for the fiscal first quarter of 2018. Its goal is to hit 11 billion transactions by the end of the fiscal year. 

Azerbaijan adopts Bloomberg auction platform for FX

The Central Bank of Azerbaijan has chosen to conduct its auctions for foreign exchange (FX) instruments and deposits through Bloomberg’s auction platform. The platform manages primary market operations, and has been recently extended to include FX instruments (spot and outright) and deposits, in addition to its pre-existing suite of fixed income and repo products. Ali […]

Money20/20 Europe: Asia in the ascendant

Denmark took a back seat at Money20/20 Europe as the lively fintech scenes in China and India fell under the spotlight with a wealth of information and stats.

More jobs to go from RBS in UK to India

Job-cutting spree continues at the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) – 443 jobs are to go from its business loans department. Many of these will be moved to India.

ZineOne is the one for HDFC digital banking hub

India-based HDFC Bank has selected Silicon Valley start-up ZineOne to improve its digital banking offerings. The bank will deploy ZineOne’s Customer Interactions Hub (CIH), which will establish a single customer identity and “bring real-time, contextual, and omni-channel functionality” to interactions across businesses, applications and digital properties including web applications, mobile apps, digital wallets, website, kiosks […]

Workup a fintech sweat with Isbank’s start-up programme

Turkey’s largest private bank, Isbank, has unveiled its entrepreneurship programme for fintech start-ups in the country. Since forming an innovation team within its Digital Banking Unit, the bank says it has become “much closer” to tech entrepreneurs in the republic. The innovation team is working remotely at Kolektif House Levent (a co-working space for Turkish […]

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