Michael Waitze Presents
After spending more than 20 years in Global Finance with firms like Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, mostly in Tokyo, Michael Waitze moved to Southeast Asia to develop Private Equity and Venture Capital businesses and invest his own capital.
Michael has always maintained a particular focus on how technology could be successfully applied to drive efficiency in businesses and profit growth. He excels at connecting people and capital to innovative ideas and is a trusted advisor to both investors and founders. Michael is a leader in the digital media space, having pioneered the concept of a podcast network in Asia, while building the biggest and fastest growing listener base in the region. His flagship website, MichaelWaitzePresents.com, has listeners in 90 countries and is available on virtually every podcast player that supports RSS feeds.
His popular “Asian Blockchain Podcast” features interesting personalities from the Asia ecosystem and beyond. Here are some of the most recent shows.
Charles d’Haussy — Head of FinTech at Invest Hong Kong (InvestHK)
Charles d’Haussy is Head of FinTech at Invest Hong Kong (InvestHK), the department of the Hong Kong SAR Government responsible for Foreign Direct Investment.
In 2016, InvestHK has set up a FinTech team to attract leading FinTech companies, entrepreneurs, investors, accelerators from Mainland China and overseas to support their businesses set up and expansion in Hong Kong.
The FinTech team is globally distributed between Hong Kong, London and Silicon Valley. They provide practical support and assistance on setting up offices, facilitating visa and banks accounts, regulator introductions, networking opportunities, guidance in government grants and funding.
Dave Martin — Power Ledger — Turning a Network Into a Tradable Platform
Dave Martin is a co-Founder and Managing Director of Power Ledger. He has nearly 20 years of experience in the Western Australia Electricity Industry and worked in two of the largest and most complex energy utilities in Western Australia, including more than five years as a senior executive of Horizon Power. Dave knows energy…
In his capacity as a senior executive, he started to notice that as energy storage was getting cheaper and cheaper, consumers had less of an incentive to stay connected to the network. More troublesome was that as consumers left the grid to produce energy for them selves, the cost of connecting to the network got more expensive…creating a vicious circle.
Power Ledger aims to solve this with an innovative blockchain solution that turns the network into a tradable platform.
Cyrus Fazel — Founder & CEO SwissBorg — You Just Need to Trust the Network
Cyrus Fazel is the CEO and Founder of SwissBorg, a new era wealth management platform, powered by the blockchain.
SwissBorg and its team of FinTech experts is building a crypto wealth management solution accessible to everyone.
Introduced to blockchain technology via an interest in cryptocurrency, Cyrus quickly realized that there was something deeper going on.
Further, when he and his team were introduced to Ethereum, they quickly understood that this technology had the potential to dominate the domain of FinTech. It was the ideal combination of their interest in finance and the Swiss sensibility around meritocracy and decentralization.
However, the big realization came when Cyrus wanted to send his father a birthday present in Tehran. It turned out that he best way (only way) to send his dad a bottle of wine was by ordering from a broker in Tehran and paying him with bitcoin.
This was a revelation…a traditional bank was not necessary to make the payment, he “just needed to trust the network.”
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