Author: chingbrenda

30 July 2020

Fast-growing fintech Assembly Payments has appointed Tim Dickinson and Rimal Gokani as its new co-CEOs, following the company’s joint venture with global bank Standard Chartered.

Dickinson takes on the role after working as Assembly Payments’ General Manager for almost a year, and three years in total scaling Assembly from start-up to growth company.

Gokani joins Assembly from SC Ventures, Standard Chartered’s innovation and venture arm, to lead the business on its global growth trajectory. He has two decades of international experience working in both finance and technology for Deutsche Bank, The London Stock Exchange and The New York Stock Exchange.

Co-founder and former CEO, Simon Lee will take a position on Assembly Payments’ board of directors.

He told The Australian he’s joining other highly experienced individuals from major financial institutions and technology businesses to drive the company’s growth and its payment solutions.

“This transition is a result of almost a year’s worth of planning and structuring. It’s exciting to finally be able to announce this shift to the market and show that we’re ready for the next stage of our growth,” said Tim Dickinson, co-CEO of Assembly Payments.

“There has never been a greater need for global timely and effective payment technology. The speed and fluidity of payments could be the difference in dampening the blow of the ongoing COVID-19 led crisis.”

“Our joint venture with Standard Chartered puts Assembly in a unique position to roll out its payment technology globally at an expedited rate across Asia and Europe” said Rimal Gokani, Co-CEO of Assembly Payments.

“This is an exciting time for the payment technology industry and with its great team, agile technology and years of industry experience through the partnership Assembly has all the right ingredients to take the global payments world by storm.“

Co-founder and former CEO of Assembly Payments, Simon Lee added: “After six years of running at 100 per cent it is now time to slow down a little. Handing the baton to Tim and Rimal was an easy decision as they are great strategic operators. I’m grateful to see Assembly in their safe hands.
“Stepping back as a founder is always hard, but, together with the board I will continue to give my support when needed, as they take Assembly from being one of Australia’s most prominent fintechs to a globalised business.”

Assembly Payments has made three new board appointments.

Rampersand’s Paul Naphtali will now serve on Assembly’s board, assuming this role in addition to his current position as managing partner at Rampersand. SC Ventures‘ Gautam Jain and Standard Chartered Bank executive David Howes are also joining the company’s board.

Article: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/technology/coceos-to-lead-assembly/news-story/5b39b4d1102eabebd7775d48a7438cfb 

20 July 2020

Standard Chartered’s venture and innovation arm has been working on a crypto custody offering for the institutional market and the first pilot could launch later this year.

LONDON and MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., July 13, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Standard Chartered Bank and Universities Space Research Association (USRA) have signed a Collaborative Research Agreement to partner on quantum computing research and developing quantum computing applications.

In finance, the most promising use cases with real-world applications include quantum machine learning models (generating synthetic data and data anonymisation) and discriminative models (building strong classifiers and predictors) with multiple potential uses such as credit scoring and generating trading signals. As quantum computing technology matures, clients should benefit from higher quality services such as faster execution, better risk management and the development of new financial products.

Kahina Van Dyke, Global Head of Digital Channels and Client Data Analytics at Standard Chartered, said: “Similar to other major technological advancements, quantum computing is set to bring widespread benefits as well as disrupt many existing business processes. This is why it’s important for companies to future-proof themselves by adopting this new technology from an early stage. The partnership with USRA gives us access to world-class academic researchers and provides us with a unique opportunity to explore a wide range of models and algorithms with the potential to establish quantum advantage for the real-world use cases.”

Bernie Seery, Senior VP of Technology at USRA noted that “This partnership with the private sector enables a diversity of research through a competitively selected portfolio of quantum computing research projects involving academic institutions and non-profits, growing an ecosystem for quantum artificial intelligence that has already involved over 150 researchers from more than 40 organizations that produced over 50 peer-reviewed publications over the last seven years.”

Alex Manson, Global Head of SC Ventures, Standard Chartered’s innovation, fintech investment and ventures arm, stated: “The world is currently in the process of identifying commercial use cases where quantum computer capabilities will surpass classical computers. We have a conviction that some of these use cases will transform the way we manage risks in financial services, for example by simulating portfolios and exponentially speeding up the generation of market data. We will work with USRA to identify such use cases in financial services, with a view to implementing them within our bank, as well as potentially offering this service to other market participants over time.”

Mark Johnson, Vice President, Processor Design, Development and Quantum Products at D-Wave said: “Quantum computing research and development are poised to have a profound impact on the industries responsible for solving today’s most complex problems. That’s why researchers and businesses alike are looking to quantum computing today to start demonstrating tangible value. We’re proud to work with USRA and Standard Chartered Bank as they improve global access to quantum systems and undertake essential research and development.”

At USRA’s Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science, Dr. Davide Venturelli, Associate Director for Quantum Computing, notes that quantum annealing is implementing a powerful approach to computing, featuring unique advantages with respect to other traditional and novel approaches, that should be studied, theoretically and experimentally, to advance the state of art of computing technologies for the benefit of nearly all disciplines.

Standard Chartered’s team, led by Dr. Alexei Kondratyev, Global Head of Data Science and Innovation, and USRA have collaborated in quantum computing research since 2017. An earlier success in investigating the quantum annealing approach to computational problems in portfolio optimisation use cases led to this strategic partnership, where USRA will continue to support fundamental academic research in quantum physics and artificial intelligence and Standard Chartered will focus on future commercial applications.

In 2012, USRA partnered with NASA to found the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (QuAIL): the space agency’s hub to evaluate the near-term impact of quantum technologies. With QuAIL, the USRA team has investigated the physics, the engineering and the performance of multiple generations of quantum annealing processors built by D-Wave Systems. It has also participated in U.S. government research programs that looked into application of quantum annealing for combinatorial optimization, aviation, earth science and machine learning. NASA Ames Research Center is currently hosting a D-Wave 2000Q annealing system, thanks to the support of this partnership.

Standard Chartered and USRA intend to develop this initial collaboration beyond quantum annealing to all unconventional computing systems that could provide an advantage to applications of interest, such as gate-model noisy-intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) processors and Coherent Ising machines.

For more information, contact:
Standard Chartered: Group Media Relations Contact: Shaun Gamble, shaun.gamble@sc.com 
    Tel: +44 2078855934

USRA: PR Contact: Suraiya Farukhi, sfarukhi@usra.edu
    Technical Contact: David Bell, Dbell@usra.edu

About USRA

Founded in 1969, under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences at the request of the U.S. Government, the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) is a nonprofit corporation chartered to advance space-related science, technology and engineering.  USRA operates scientific institutes and facilities, and conducts other major research and educational programs, under Federal funding.  USRA engages the university community and employs in-house scientific leadership, innovative research and development, and project management expertise. RIACS is a USRA department for research in fundamental and applied information sciences, leading projects on quantum computing funded by NASA, DARPA, the US Airforce and NSF.

More info at: https://riacs.usra.edu/quantum/  and www.usra.edu.

About Standard Chartered

We are a leading international banking group, with a presence in 59 of the world’s most dynamic markets, and serving clients in a further 85. Our purpose is to drive commerce and prosperity through our unique diversity, and our heritage and values are expressed in our brand promise, Here for good.

Standard Chartered PLC is listed on the London and Hong Kong Stock Exchanges as well as the Bombay and National Stock Exchanges in India.

For more stories and expert opinions please visit Insights at sc.com. Follow Standard Chartered on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

SOURCE Universities Space Research Association

21 May 2020

SC Ventures Americas facilitated the inaugural Tech Executive Briefing with Michael Gorriz, Group Chief Information Officer at Standard Chartered Bank, centred on “Enterprise Machine Learning” on May 21^st.

Nearly 100 members across the T&I Leadership team, CCIB, and other areas of the Bank participated in the interactive presentations led by leaders in the space. Panellists included Jade Lai of the Silicon Valley VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, CEO and Co-Founder Michael Del Blaso of Tecton.ai, and Dr. Jordan Brandt , CEO and Co-Founder of Inpher.io.

5 May 2020

Standard Chartered has unveiled its new banking as a service venture ‘nexus,’ which offers partnership opportunities and allows ecosystem players to enter financial services without having to set up a bank.

• The banking as a service model opens opportunities for new entrants to provide financial services without having to build it from scratch
• Standard Chartered’s first partner for nexus is a major e-commerce platform in Indonesia
• This is the first venture by the bank’s innovation unit SC Ventures that runs innovation labs, fintech investment fund and experiments with new business models

New entrants such as payments, e-commerce, ride hailing and social media companies increasingly seek to expand their offerings in financial services but face several challenges. The banking as a service (BaaS) model empowers such players and integrates banking seamlessly through a white-labelled solution. This business model is what Standard Chartered uses in its recently launched venture called nexus, which brings transformational partnerships between consumer platforms and digital banking.

“Applying for licences, committing capital, building an end-to-end technology solution and bearing the operational costs of running a financial service can be heavy and extremely painful to set up. We offer the ability to move into that space by plugging into our stack, leveraging our balance sheet and liability without having to build it from scratch. This will be far quicker and more efficient to scale,” said Kelvin Tan, venture lead at nexus.

Tan explained that nexus enables ecosystem players to offer financial services, allowing them to design and support their own value proposition while relying on the bank’s balance sheet and licence.

Incubated at its innovation unit

nexus was incubated under the umbrella of SC Ventures, the unit that drives the bank’s innovations and fintech investments.

Sharing the details, SC Ventures head Alex Manson explained, “Firstly, we have innovation labs called eXellerator, which is in the bank, for the bank and by the bank. Here, we run the fintech programs, new proofs of concept and it also has SC Ventures Fintech Bridge, a matching engine between fintech and use cases.

Secondly, we have a $100 million fund set up to invest in relatively early stage companies. We invest only in partners we work with and we help them scale.

Thirdly, we build ventures wherein the idea is to experiment with different business models, aggregating different capabilities and ways of conducting banking. These are startup companies built from the ground up, and then bring in the investment partners to help them scale. nexus is a venture – in fact, our first venture.”

Among other new business models by the bank include a joint venture with Assembly Payments to develop and deliver next-generation payment solutions. In Hong Kong, it is set to launch a standalone digital retail bank, Mox, and the bank has also built a digital open platform, Solv, to help SMEs in India.

How nexus came about

The solution originated with the thought process of understanding how the bank could gain exponential scale and drive the newer order of banking, in which banking gets integrated into the day-to-day lives of consumers and businesses.

“We considered two options: doing this through application programming interface (API) or reinventing the entire technology stack and middleware and ensuring that change management is as seamless as front-end partners like e-commerce or social media players need it to be. This firmed our view of building up nexus as a business model for the bank in terms of gaining exponential scale and also as a technology solution to other banks. We focused on how one can grow banking and balance sheet exponentially without growing proportionate costs accordingly,” Tan expanded.

Manson explained that while building the framework, the bank looked at different possible scenarios.

The first scenario is where banks become the digitised or digital banks themselves, such as those digital banks in Hong Kong or neobanks in the United Kingdom. In the second scenario, banks become platforms with an ecosystem – they have open architecture and could plug in the capabilities but not exclusively, as other people plug in as well. In the third scenario, rather than becoming platforms, banks become an engine for the platform, i.e. they plug into the ecosystem platform.

“We felt this could be a good outcome for banks to leverage the scale of consumer platforms and ecosystems and provide banking services at scale. nexus is this scenario number three,” Manson elaborated.

The venture is set up as a separate legal entity. While it works within the risk appetite of the bank, it also has separate governance, policies and processes. It comprises about 100 people based in three key markets in Asia: Singapore, India and Indonesia.

Future roadmap

Standard Chartered has already acquired its first partner for nexus, a major e-commerce platform in Indonesia. Being a hotbed for e-commerce with one of highest adoption rates in the world, launching nexus in Indonesia will give Standard Chartered the opportunity to reach a significant unbanked population through partners. While the bank refused to share the name of the partner, it expects to co-create and launch products powered by nexus in 2021, subject to regulatory approvals.

The bank is starting nexus with the minimum viable product of retail and CASA products, with plans to add SME and corporate products later on. Future plans include rolling out the service to other promising markets in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

It will bring a new revenue stream for Standard Chartered, but the bank plans to take a flexible strategic approach in forming partnerships depending on each partner’s needs.

“We are looking at a revenue share model, but we are flexible with regards to how we structure the deal. So, we are open to risk and asset sharing as well. The model will be customised for each partner depending on what they bring to the table. There is no one size that fits all,” explained Manson.

‘Banking as a service’ solutions in the industry

Standard Chartered is among the few early players that have entered in this space in Asia Pacific. In a slightly different approach, Ping An Group’s One Connect offers ‘technology as a service’ to other financial institutions in Asia. Some other players exploring the BaaS model in Europe include solarisBank, Starling Bank and Fidor Bank.

Among the early innovators is Fidor Bank, which provides white-labelled cloud solutions powered by open APIs. They cater mainly to challenger banks and consumer organisations that want to tap the market quickly without regulatory compliance hassles. This provides the organisations with a full set of banking products to be deployed.

In a similar model, German bank and technology company solarisBank offers a completely digital BaaS platform connecting other businesses through APIs to offer financial services.

UK-based mobile-only challenger bank Starling enables banks, fintechs and retailers to develop and scale new, customised products quickly by picking and choosing individual features or components from Starling while taking advantage of its banking licence.

In these end-to-end and shared infrastructure models, customer ownership remains with the ecosystem partners while the bank becomes the provider of banking capabilities at the back end. This provides a win-win relationship for both the partners. It drives new revenue streams for the bank as well as allows them to leverage their banking capabilities with the scale of ecosystem partners who tend to be inherently better and more agile at customer experience. On the other hand, it provides faster products, quicker time to market to ecosystem players and allows them to circumvent regulatory compliance challenges.

Through this venture, Standard Chartered can empower platforms to bring financial services at the fingertips of millions of users. Yet, it is still at an early stage, as the first partner will go live only next year. As the BaaS model gains popularity and matures, there is likely to be greater adoption as well as competition. For long-term success, nexus will need to carve a niche path for itself, stay ahead of the curve and expand its market reach with speed through new partnerships.

21 April 2020

Singapore’s «circuit breaker» – a curb of all non-essential businesses and activities, and heightened social distancing – has dramatically changed the daily routine for professionals in the financial services sector, many of whom are now working from home (WFH). This series takes a look at how they are coping during the city’s lockdown. Singapore’s fight against the Covid-19 pandemic stepped into high gear about two weeks ago, with a partial lockdown and mandatory wearing of masks in public, to curb the spread of the disease. Yet, infection numbers have continued to reach new highs, with 1,426 cases reported on Monday, making it the Southeast Asian country with the highest number of infections. Currently, workplaces have been forced to shut until May 4 in the earliest scenario, and nonessential businesses have had to either cease operations or do what they can to function virtually.

As work-from-home rules are implemented on a wide-scale, the implications of this period are going to be profound, with organizations forced into new ways of working, new tools, and different ways of interacting together, Alex Manson, global head, SC Ventures at Standard Chartered, tells finews.asia in an interview. The business unit within Standard Chartered enables innovation, invests in disruptive financial technology and explores alternative business models. Set up in 2018, it has been a key driver in promoting a culture of innovation within the bank, as well as developing and delivering digital solutions for both the bank and its clients. Alex Manson, Singapore has been at the forefront of Covid-19 prevention. Is the current lockdown a setback of its containment efforts so far?

I don’t see it this way, Singapore did a stellar job of managing the «early outbreak» but could not prevent re-importing the virus as the pandemic became global and other nations were slow to react and manage the situation, while people continued to travel freely with little awareness or precautions.

I find the answer in Singapore has been balanced through the crisis, meaning avoiding extreme pendulum swings and taking measures as a function of the information available at any point in time. This includes the fact that information evolves rapidly in a crisis, and I have in fact seen an element of refreshing humility in leadership with the ability to change your mind once you have new facts.

What are the biggest obstacles you are facing in your work these days?

Some aspects of our work continue almost undisrupted, working from home and using various digital tools, which we were advocating in the first place. Other aspects are really difficult: for example how do 12 people build a prototype around a table and a whiteboard? Well, there are tools for that too but yes it is just a lot more cumbersome.

Personally, I like to walk around, grab somebody for a chat – include another, improvise a quick meeting to solve a problem: that’s a lot harder too. And the most difficult part is to keep a good sense for how everybody is coping, how individuals feel in the current context – I can see anxiety building around the world, our teams are probably no exception and there will be an even more acute need to focus on people’s overall wellness in this environment.

How are you communicate with your clients now?

Remotely! That part is actually almost easy and I expect that in the future people may insist on a lot on face-to-face meetings as all are getting used to working at a distance.

Perhaps a helpful tip is the use of phone or video chat, etc., as opposed to e-mail: e-mail was never a great means of communication (it is good for passing on information, but certainly not for debating things or asking someone for a favor). I used to say when in doubt, pick up the phone. More so today actually.

How long can you ride out such a situation?

As it relates to ways of working, we’ll have to work this way for as long as it takes… I enjoy endurance sports and this situation reminds me of the reflexes of a long-distance effort: find a sustainable pace, don’t waste energy, think of «after» rather than «tomorrow» and importantly, just get used to the fact that it will be uncomfortable!

I am more worried about the long term impact of the crisis for a number of clients in our ecosystem: the longer this goes the more stretched they will be and we can see the first signs of distress with SMEs in particular – they typically represent 60 percent of any nation’s GDP.

Do you think Singapore as a financial center will lose its attractiveness over the Covid-19 crisis?

Quite the contrary actually. Singapore’s crisis management skills have been both effective and noted internationally, especially in comparison to some of the Western markets. I think Singapore may well gain rather than lose on a relative basis.

Alex Manson heads SC Ventures at Standard Chartered, a business unit established in March 2018 to lead innovation across the Group, invest in fintech companies, and promote the testing and implementation of new business models. Alex joined the firm as Group Head, Wholesale Banking Geographies in 2012, and was Global Head of Transaction Banking, between 2014 and 2018. He also spent 12 years at Deutsche Bank, notably as Global Head of Lending and Corporate Banking Coverage, and was at Credit Suisse for 8 years. 

Article: https://www.finews.asia/people/31562-wfh-chronicles-sc-ventures-alex-manson