During the Fintech Innovation Summit organized by Namiru Solutions, we were honoured to welcome Bertrand Theaud, Andy Chan and Claus Christensen for a knowledge sharing session. These founders shared their insights around the theme of innovation and how they remain at the top of their performance as well as overcoming obstacles to continue to grow.
Artificial intelligence for the underwriting models and highly-skilled team for the strategic thinking
Qupital is a Hong Kong-based provider of cross-border e-commerce sellers with high-quality financing services and is a great example of a company that is automating its business processes to free a highly qualified and well-educated team of credit analysts. Qupital has served over 500 e-commerce sellers by providing more than US$500M worth of loans.
Andy Chan, the Co-founder and CEO of Qupital shared how his company uses big data and self-developed risk control models to improve the financing efficiency by digitalizing the financing process.
- The future of underwriting: Qupital is leveraging machine technology to free up the human capacity for high added value work. Qupital stores more than 2 billion records of transactions, refunds, and order cancellations from their e-commerce clients and lets the machines analyse the data in their big data lake to create the underwriting model.
- More opportunities for expansion: This model has proved strategic as Qupital recently secured US$150 million Series B investment led by GBA Homeland Development Fund and their expansion plans cover China as well as the western world including London and New York, where there are a lot of merchants and potential.
“Earlier we had a slogan Qupital Quick Quality Capital but now we have moved to Quantitative Capital. We have more than 2 billion transaction records from our e-commerce merchants in our big data lake and machines to create underwriting models so that our team of analysts focus on high-level thinking.”
Andy Chan, Founder and CEO Qupital
Customer onboarding must be a great experience even with more extensive anti-money laundering checks in place
Know Your Customer is the pioneer in an often overlooked segment of anti-money laundering compliance, aka the digitisation of corporate onboarding and KYB - or 'Know Your Business' - processes. Claus Christensen, CEO and co-founder of Know Your Customer, cloud-first digital compliance solutions, shared what are some of the key challenges when implementing innovative technology.
Key highlights include:
- Easier onboarding with more requirements: The current revolution in the compliance industry is in large part driven by every-increasing customer demands for a seamless onboarding experience, while on the other hand, the regulatory requirements are getting more and more complex. Management of these processes is now only possible through technology and innovation.
- The two speeds challenge: However, there are huge cultural differences between providers and buyers of RegTech solutions. Large organisations may struggle to catch up with RegTech firms' agile way of working, while RegTech companies often have to adjust to the long-term thinking of large organisations. The "Move fast and break things" mantra does not work as easily when there are hundreds of thousands of employees and customers impacted.
- Focus on the customer benefits: For any fintech firm, it is absolutely critical to be able to guide large organisations and share with them how this technology is able to get them closer to their customer and to make the day to day work more human for the users.
“Artificial Intelligence in AML compliance segment is important, but it is not the answer to everything. You can leverage machines to take care of the most tedious and repetitive tasks, but humans still need to take the final decision.”
Claus Christensen, CEO, Know Your Customer
Customer retention is a key play for any fintech company to achieve hyper-growth in the SME payments sector
To round off our panel discussion we were delighted to welcome Bertrand Theaud who is the CEO of Statrys. Bertrand founded Statrys because he saw how challenging it was for entrepreneurs to get access to a traditional bank account. Statrys are rapidly expanding their offering of versatile business accounts, borderless payments as well as locations and business operations.
Key highlights include:
- Retaining customers is a key goal: As a challenger to traditional banks, Statrys won the hearts of many entrepreneurs before and especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. The company was flooded with new account openings as founders could not travel to Hong Kong. During this period they have learnt that attracting clients might not be the most important challenge, but retaining them could be. This is due to the fact that there are hundreds of options on the market and also because of the changing needs of founders as their companies grow internationally.
- Importance of customer service: Statrys knows the important role that customer service plays in understanding the needs of their clients. Statrys are listening closely to feedback specifically using a human customer service approach. This is especially important due to the nature of their business which is dealing with their client's funds, a very sensitive topic.
- Customer feedback turned product features: Statrys have implemented one of their fast-growing services - 24/7 foreign exchange transfers and a lot more features in their products based on the customer feedback
“Human approach to our customer service is key, especially when dealing with their funds and sensitive information. Our focus is to leverage technology to make it a great experience for our clients, not to reinvent the industry using technology.”
Bertrand Theaud, CEO, Statrys