Scaling fintechs in Asia Pacific: challenges & opportunities

What does it truly take for fintech companies to expand successfully across borders and thrive within the fast-evolving financial landscape of Asia Pacific?

David Hanma, CEO of Finmo, offers valuable insights into the core challenges and opportunities for fintech firms in the region. He highlights the complexities of navigating diverse regulatory environments, the importance of building trust with banking partners, and the critical role of leveraging emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and stable coins. These perspectives, shared during his panel participation at the recent DB Innovation Day in Singapore, provide a roadmap for fintechs aiming to achieve sustainable growth and innovation in Asia.

Here’s the full transcript of the video:

“There are a few challenges that I would point out in terms of, you know, the regulatory sort of landscape in Asia and, more broadly for fintech. So I think that, you know, it can be summed up in kind of three different categories. I would say that it's—the first one is really about regulatory kind of nuances and effectively trying to navigate the local nuances in various markets by picking a standard that sort of allows you to kind of navigate that globally.

The second thing I would say is, you know, the challenge or complexity around being fast as a fintech whilst building confidence and trust of our regulated partners, our bank partners, etcetera. And often that's a conflict, but, you know, one, one step at a time.

The third thing I would say is how do we work with banks and global partners in order to effectively bring joint value to our joint customers. And so, so that's how we think about working with all our global partners in that capacity.”

On opportunities for fintechs to leverage emerging technologies:

“I think there are other opportunities for fintechs to really leverage, I think, technology. From my perspective, obviously, we're focused on things like AI and stable coin offerings. And I think it's really about embracing sort of new technology. How do we leverage AI as an example into our risk infrastructure, ensuring that we can leverage data to connect the dots in a better way. If we have transactional data, if we have data across different banks, we should be able to do that more efficiently with AI.

And then I think there are other future offerings around digital assets or stable coins that can further progress sort of how we work with bank partners because there is a demand for that technology. And I think it's about embracing it and showing confidence and trust with our bank partners as to how we can manage it from a risk and compliance point of view.”