Some of the world’s largest banks chose a major gathering of fintech professionals to announce significant new projects, illustrating how traditional finance is moving into this burgeoning new space.
HSBC, J.P. Morgan, and Standard Chartered each claimed a short presentation slot at a specially convened press lunch on the opening day of Money 20/20 Asia in Bangkok to tell journalists about their latest projects and partnerships.
Chief strategy and growth officer of Money 20/20 Scarlett Sieber said the lunch demonstrated the event’s key ethos of being a place “Where Money Does Business”, while also raising the profile of companies and their activities to a broader audience.
Taking the first spot, J. P. Morgan’s bank-led blockchain platform Onyx announced a partnership with Thai banking group Kasikorn to rapidly speed up the process of cross-border payments, which it said had the potential to “reshape global activity”.
Rather than being just another “fintech innovation”, the partners said, Project Carina aims to “take productivity to new heights” by making payments “borderless, instant and secure”.
HSBC announced it had signed an MOU with the Thai Fintech Association that would see the global bank combine its “scale and stability with the mind of a tech start up” to help drive new ideas and innovation in a country in which it had been present for more than 135 years.
The bank also took the opportunity to launch its latest paper – A new payments paradigm – that aims to help those in treasury and finance functions within businesses navigate the trends and implications of how distributed ledger technology and other developments can be used in real life.
Standard Chartered used its slot to officially launch an online Open Banking Marketplace, designed to be a one-stop shop for businesses to “discover, identify, and test” application programming interfaces (APIs) to see which might fit their business needs.
The bank said this tool would allow businesses across multiple sectors, market capitalisations and geographies to work out, in their own time, which solutions suited their needs before approaching it to provide them.
Sony Bank, the financial services arm of the global media and technology business, used the lunch to announce a partnership with blockchain enablement SettleMint.
The Japanese mega-cap said it would work with the Belgian-founded fintech on a proof of concept for a stablecoin, which would combine each company’s strengths to create something that was supported by solid infrastructure within a strong regulatory framework.
Bank Aladin Syariah, a relatively new Indonesian digital bank, took to the stage with software company Mambu to talk about their partnership that was helping to both reveal and promote Shariah or Islam-compliant banking to a huge retail audience.
Research by Mambu showed huge appetite for the concept, which enveloped many of the key themes demanded by customers seeking an ethical approach to banking and lending.
Money 20/20 Asia is taking place in Bangkok’s Queen Sirikit National Convention Centre, April 23-25.