Asia’s FinTech Can’t Wait, We Need Yo Hurry: Next Bank Founder

E27.CO: Rob Findlay sat down with e27 to share his thoughts on the fin-tech ecosystem in Asia and where it is all going from here

Meeting Rob Findlay at a trendy gastrobar in Singapore’s Marina Bay Financial Centre somehow seems oddly fitting. Findlay is very much a product of two worlds: on one hand, he brings with him the creative flair and artistic touch of a design major and on the other, his career path has been rooted in the banking and tech sector, whether as BlackBerry’s Director of Innovation for Asia Pacific (2012-13) or as the Senior Vice President for Experience Design at DBS Bank (2014-present).

His banking and fin-tech conference Next Bank, which held its first event in Singapore in 2011, has in many ways become a staple of the region’s fin-tech community with speakers like Startupbootcamp FinTech‘s global COO Markus Gnirck — who recently relocated to Singapore to launch the Asia edition of the British startup accelerator — and newly announced partnerships with the likes of SWIFT’s fin-tech innovation initiative Innotribe that will see a handful of qualifying startups from around the region battling it out for a cash prize during this year’s Singapore event (May 27-28). Included in the line-up is Hong Kong’s bitcoin startup Bitspark, which last month raised a ‘seven-digit’ funding round in its quest to bring cryptocurrency solutions to Asia’s huge population of the unbanked.

Read the full interview: E27.CO

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DEALSTREETASIA: Startupbootcamp Fintech Singapore, part of a global accelerator network whose Singapore branch specialises in financial technology, has established strategic partnerships with PwC Singapore, Pix Vine Capital and Jungle Ventures. Steven Tong, formerly an assistant director at Infocomm Investments, has also been brought on board as the managing director of Startupbootcamp Fintech Singapore