Join together, The Future Beyond FinTech

Published in

DINNGO

6 min readDec 12, 2019

Overview

Just a week ago, FinTech Taipei 2019 was held at Taipei World Trade Center on 29th and 30th November. The exposition is twice as large as last year. This year, the theme is “The Future Beyond FinTech” featuring over 240 exhibitors from 13 countries and 100+ domestic and foreign start-up companies. There are three core activities in the exposition: Fintech International Forum, Fintech Exhibition and Fintech Startups Talks.

In this article, we will take a closer look at the application innovation sector at the Fintech Taipei 2019:

Digital Bank
AI (Artificial Intelligence)
Blockchain

Digital Bank

The difference between the digital bank and the traditional bank is that the digital bank doesn’t provide physical passbook but customers can still use all the financial services that the traditional bank provides online. There are two kinds of digital banks, one is originated from a traditional bank and the other is pure online banking. Both of them want to expand their services to achieve the one-stop payment experience. However, more and more banks are joining the competition, but how do they stand out? With the appearance of digital banks, traditional banks are at an important moment, in which they must ensure that customer loyalty, credit score, reward points, etc. are completely digitalized and create a new type of ecosystem.

Below are some interesting exhibitor showcases that we found in the digital bank field:

E.SUN Bank

E.SUN Bank is a Taiwan local bank established about 30 years ago and ranked as the eighth-large bank in Taiwan in 2019. It has 28 branches in nine countries, including Hong Kong, Tokyo, Singapore, China, Vietnam, Myanmar, Cambodia, Austria, Los Angeles, and Australia.

E.SUN Bank showcased its app integration with Siri and Google Assistant to introduce a voice-activated payment feature. All you need to do is speak to your Siri or Google Assistant, then you could easily complete your transaction without waiting for the whole process.

E.SUN Bank is tapping into voice commands to send money.

LINE Bank

After LINE launched its communication software, they have about 21 million active users so far in Taiwan. The market penetration rate has achieved 91.3%. From individual, enterprise, to even government sectors, all of them have regarded LINE as an important real-time communication channel.

LINE Bank, currently in pre-regulatory approval, will first launch its own debit card. Features include integration with the existing LINE Pay service to carry out small payments, deposits, transfers, LINE shopping, and LINE travel services. In the effort to build up a one-stop-shop ecosystem, LINE Bank has become an important role among LINE’s diverse services.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Artificial Intelligence (AI), is a technology using machine learning to analyze and deal with big data instantly. Thus, AI technology has great potential to be used in the FinTech industry. It can be used in the banking business such as financial consulting, risk control, identification, and smart customer service. In the past, most of them relied on manual operations. With the implementation of AI technology, these tasks would be handled in a more systematic, efficient and low-cost approach and provide high-quality results.

At the exposition, we also found something interesting to share in the AI field:

Yuanta Commercial Bank

Yuanta Commercial Bank is one of the large scale commercial banks established in 1992. Currently, it has 143 branches in Taiwan and also some branches located in Korea, Hong Kong, and the Philippines.

It set up a facial recognition system and combines it with the customer’s big data to precisely recommend financial product for customers, helping them to easily start their digital financial experience.

The facial recognition system of Yuanta Bank

Even the credit information services are starting to use AI and big data analysis.

AI analysis service presented by the credit information service company.

Blockchain

Blockchain is essentially a decentralized distributed ledger database, which itself is a series of data blocks generated using cryptographic algorithms. It is a public distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently and in a verifiable and permanent way.

Different from the traditional payment system, blockchain has indeed the advantages as below:

1. The advantage of cross-border payment

The bank’s SWIFT cross-border transfer generally takes 3–5 days, and each transfer requires a considerable amount of processing fees. The current blockchain technology has already achieved transferring money into an account in a few seconds with a much lower handling fee.

2. The advantage of decentralized payment

In traditional payment systems, the participation of banks and counterparty is required; but in the blockchain world, all the transactions are exchanged on-chain. It doesn’t involve third parties and has a decentralized nature.

DINNGO is also invited to this exhibition. We hope to let more people know about crypto and try out the latest blockchain technology. In these two days, hundreds of people used our decentralized exchange (DEX) and made their first crypto transactions. We also communicated and exchanged our ideas with a lot of Fintech teams from all over the world.

*DINNGO COO’s Fintech Startups Talk Time*

Many people in Taiwan still don’t know that crypto is much closer to our daily life now, and there are many blockchain exhibitors this year that have definitely helped to educate and promote blockchain applications. Such as Pundi X.

Pundi X (NPXS)

Pundi X (NPXS), built on top of Ethereum, is one of the blockchain service providers that has already launched its wallet (XWallet) aiming to make use of their cryptocurrency (NPXS) as a form of payment in daily life.

Summary

As we continue seeing FinTechs building their presence in the market, it’s time for traditional financial services to acknowledge these disruptors and look at the ways in which FinTechs have proved to gain strong footholds in the industry. There are still many pain points in the financial industry to be solved, including the long wait, inefficient process, manual verification, etc. To remain competitive against the new wave of technology, financial services began to embrace technology to help pave the path toward digital transformation since consumers also began to expect technology to play a major role in the services. As the technology which guides the industry continues to evolve, one thing can be certain — more change is on the horizon.