Seven Peaks Insights

Future of Fintech in Web 3.0 - SCB Tech Talk at Seven Peaks

Written by Seven Peaks | Apr 22, 2022 4:31:00 AM

An event by SCB, hosted at Seven Peaks Software’s office

 
 

Introduction

Here comes another precious Talk hosted by SCB TechX and Seven Peaks software with special panelists from various backgrounds: Andre Chan – SCB TechX Innovation Lead, Jonas Thürig – Head of F10 Singapore, Jostein Aksnes – CEO of Seven Peaks Software, and Maxime Paul – CMO of Atato.

This panel discussion will be all about “The future of Fintech in Web 3.0”, and here is the summary for you to be prepared for the new era of the digital world!

 

 

What makes a successful Fintech company and product line today?

As you can see from the trend during these past five and a half years, people have been awakened to cryptocurrency. While they didn’t care about it that much previously. That is the key! It is all about timing.

What makes sustainable Fintechs, consequently, is that they are willing to change what they offer to the crowd. There is a case where many Fintechs start offering their customers a credit card service, for example, and six months afterwards they offer a cable service instead.

That is because they realize that they want their product to be a little bit more right to their customers’ needs.

That agility and ability to always think about what the markets really want or what the users really ask for are actually exactly what makes it right. If you put all things together, you would realize that Fintech can offer many different products and services, and end up servicing different groups of people with subsections.

It’s time to listen to users’ points, especially around this time when people are paying more attention to building up and possessing their own digital assets, according to the over-10-year observation by Atato – a digital assets technology company offering services to connect businesses with blockchain networks.

The opportunity has arrived! But it’s not just about finding out how to sell more. Right now, let’s think about what is the hidden desire of the market and turn it into a product eventually. After that keep your eyes on the right time to serve the right tools or technology to people who really need it.

 

What are the possible areas of innovation and disruption in Fintech?

Last year ASEAN startups raised $3.5 billion USD which is actually three times over the funding in 2020. It is a significant growth especially in the digital banks area for people are not hesitant anymore to talk about crypto.

What the panelist would foresee from what they have been experiencing through the last two to three years is that the incumbents are trying to do an experiment on digital assets, metaverse, and also ‘gamefi’, so the infrastructure needs to be built.

Surprisingly, some financial companies e.g. JP Morgan tried to put themselves into the digital world already, which there is still not much. It is more like they just get in there to set things up first because it requires expert experimentation to make it successful.

Plus, over the last few years we have AR, VR, AI. Anyway it takes some time to develop these things to be a version users can use nowadays. Blockchain is another technology we cannot ignore, and we still have to keep our eyes on whether it can develop what kind of solutions for us in the upcoming future.

 

Perception on the digital economy and the importance of cross-border/cross-industry partnership

It was the case two years ago when people were saying that blockchain is a solution looking for a problem. But the thing that people don’t understand is that action is not here to solve the problem. It’s basically to create new businesses.

For example, what’s happening today in Ukraine. They created a decentralized, autonomous organization. People were sending funds and they were organized or managed by the community themselves. In less than 24 hours they had a few million. This is impossible for the traditional organization to process like this because people have to pay and wait for another 48 hours for transparency.

It’s the same way for decentralized finance today. In Maxime’s case, he was trying to buy U.S stocks as a foreigner and he failed. No banks were going to send him a stock. They were sending him to Robinhood to buy stocks there instead.

Today with blockchain decentralized finance, gladly everyone can go and participate in the finance space. They don’t need to ask anybody anymore. Basically, they just need to follow regulation if they want to buy cryptocurrency, but otherwise they need to go to a regulated exchange and report their tax.

So the regulator is trying to keep the border for this new technology where we can see many young smart people creating protocols that never existed before to make access to anybody whatever age they are. We don’t have to wait to become 18 years old now to buy a stock.

Web 3.0 grants us a lot of new opportunities where web 2.0 cannot provide whether it be partnerships, communities, etc. When talking about NFTs, gamefi, or DeFi, there are a lot of groups of people in the community discussing different protocols. They exchange a lot in many different cultures.

As a result, in a year or two we are going to see a much more user-friendly interface of all technology, and there will also be cool new applications on our phone.