As of end of 2020, I’ve been supporting the North American market development efforts for about 1.5 years now. I’ve made some observations about blockchain technology adoption between the eastern and western markets.

Disclaimer: This can be overgeneralized. I only aim to provide some interesting insights, not an analysis report.

Eastern and western audience responds to the adoption of emerging technologies differently

Having done numerous pitches to enterprise clients and conversations with blockchain and crypto enthusiasts in both Southeast Asia and North America, I’ve realized the pattern of the questions asked.

1. The first question they ask.
   Clients in Asian usually ask about use cases and seek clarification on the type of new business model while those in the US usually ask for ROI testimony from previous clients.
2. The primary driver.
   Clients in Asia usually are seeking new business models to fit their new market entry strategies into SE Asian countries as well as emerging technology innovation that attracts the digital generation representing the future power of purchase. On the other hand, the counterparts in Canada and the US usually are seeking solutions that improves on a specific module such as product recall capability in order to be regulatory compliant with FDA FSMA, FDA DSCSA, or Cannabis Act, etc.
3. Integration implications on legacy systems.
   Absolutely, both of the clients ask about technical integration. Most larger clients in western markets have layered up multiple legacy systems that warrant a higher cost and complexity of integration; some services and systems don’t have have API exposed. However, clients in SEA markets usually are trying new things in a completely standalone subsidiary entity with little legacy systems. Some of them even have to build corresponding operations processes from scratch when I talked to them.
4. Suitability.
   10 out of 10 times, either directly or indirectly, they all ask: is blockchain technology a good solution to my use case and organizational problem at all?

More or less, it oftentimes boils down to whether the outcomes of the innovation outweighs the investment. Different clients across different industries are looking to achieve different outcomes. Theoretically, we can use the below diagram to categorize the type of clients and outcome.

On a high level, most larger clients have mature processes and legacy systems to support the operations. With industrialization and internet adoption, most clients in the developed countries are looking for incremental innovation that gives them the marketing halo of using blockchain, also allows them to play within the constraints of legacy operations and systems.

On the other hand, smaller clients who have little to none legacy systems and operational processes are more nimble and agile to change. The lack of infrastructure allows them the flexibility to look at more radical and even disruptive innovation. Much like Alipay and M Pesa were both in countries that didn’t have any payment legacy infrastructure to overhaul.

This logic of innovation matrix above has provided the direction in most of my day to day engagements with prospects coming from different industries and around the world. It underpins the initial conversation with prospects. Hope this will somehow be insightful for some of you reading it.

Having been on both sides of the table (i.e. solution buyer and seller), I’ve had the chance to learn the characteristics in a blockchain solution that buyers are looking for.

At this moment, it’s common to be in a meeting with a prospect client who doesn’t really understand what is blockchain and how blockchain can help their businesses because blockchain is such a new, emerging technology.

Always start with a business case you’d like to solve

Software solution sales starts with identifying business pain points. Blockchain solution is no different.

Blockchain solution providers are no strangers to prospect clients coming from an innovation arm/hub hinting that they need to spend the innovation budget, but they don’t know where to start. (There are pros and cons to doing business with this type of clients….)

In my experience, identifying the primary project driver becomes critical in this scenario. I usually start with regulatory mandates since it’s a hard requirement from regulators. e.g. FDA’s Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA) and Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA). The secondary driver is the client’s internal corporate development strategies. e.g. Apple and H&M both have CSR targets to achieve zero carbon emission by a certain deadline. Check out if this is something your solution can be used for.

Lesson Learned:
When I first switched to the sell side, I didn’t know better. For almost 3 months, I found myself talking to prospect clients about how blockchain is such a magical technology, but none of them converted to a paying project. Find the project drivers in order to frame the conversations moving forward. Otherwise, it’s going to be an aimless, perhaps even endless, conversation.

Do you really need a blockchain solution? Why do you need blockchain?

Data immutability is a impactful characteristics of blockchain and smart contracts are powerful tools, but they aren’t the magic fix for everything.

I’ve been in countless meetings where the business opportunity is focused on process optimization or digitization. For many organizations that don’t have a reason and a long-term roadmap for implementing blockchain, the ROI is probably more justifiable for adopting RPA rather than blockchain.

Some people may argue that if you were to ask someone decades ago do they need a Amazon Store website or an email, the answer is probably no. Guess only time will tell if blockchain will eventually live up to its hype.

Lesson Learned:
When I was on the buy side, I actually implemented a securities reconciliation project using Hyperledger. It turned out, there’s no need for blockchain in this case unless I further articulated and extended the roadmap by another 3 years, which I didn’t do. Nowadays, I try to advise my clients to come up with a short/medium/long-term roadmap for using blockchain, and put milestone check-ins to validate the success along the way.

What kind of blockchain do you need? Private/consortium or public?

We use this diagram to briefly explain different types of blockchains. I find it very straightforward and easy to understand.

Different use cases can be better addressed by using the right blockchains. One of the key determents to choosing between private or public blockchain is “ecosystem roadmap”. Does your use case involve multiple players in the entire ecosystem? Do you need a shared enterprise data lake? a consortium blockchain? or a public blockchain?

Some companies are incentivized to do good regardless of technologies adopted because the reputational risk and a sustainable brand image drive and motivate them.

Lesson Learned:
Some POC projects don’t move onto full-fledge production because the clients learned that blockchain isn’t for their organization at this stage, or they learn that another product line might benefit more from the technology. From buyer’s side, the purpose of a POC is achieved. However, from seller’s side, we should have been wiser in advising clients on picking the right product lines, services, or even subsidiaries to implement blockchain projects.

Businesses want solutions, not technologies.

For solution providers out there, we should try to make blockchain as user friendly as possible. I believe one of the key success factors is to remove protocol level development and implementation from clients’ hands, so clients can focus on solving business cases.

Clients don’t know how to write smart contracts. Making your blockchain solution as a mature as a SaaS offering that requires no coding experience will surely expedite the technology adoption speed.

Lesson Learned:
Without a SaaS kind of product backed by blockchain infrastructure, every client project is a standalone implementation and that impedes company growth and scalability. I advocate and try to steer a more standardized product offering in order to capture a wider user base and decrease COGS while keeping the “Enterprise” tier open for bigger fish that needs customization.

Being a self-starter means taking time to produce deliverables.

Self-starters usually spend time creating documents and charts which they believe will help the organization to grow and align understanding among stakeholders. It’s also a process of externalizing your knowledge. When those deliverables are properly reviewed and recognized, they usually become the organizations’ assets such as a process flow, a policy document, a system that the organization ends up adopting, or a training slides that get circulated in the organizations.

Being a self-starter is a key part of someone’s learning curve.

You get feedback on your work since it’s reviewed by various stakeholders. This generates opportunities for interactions with stakeholders across departments and chances of understanding what matters to different people. Speaking from personal experiences, it’s obviously an excruciating process to go through as you won’t be able to satisfy everyone. Considered being a self-starter an investment to your career growth.

Self-starters usually take up responsibilities outside of their job scope.

We all have seen someone in the organization lands a new position or opportunity, and we all say — “Of course! S/he’s been doing that job for quite some time now.”

Oftentimes, self-starters have been gradually expanding their job scope without most people noticing, or even without themselves knowing.

You might say being a self-starter somehow contradicts the idea of working smart.

Sometimes I also struggle and ask myself — “Am I wasting time on creating something that might not be used later on?”. Since being a self-starter is part of the learning experience, there are always failures. However, if you don’t give it a try, you won’t improve on your business and organizational acumen in finding something with a higher ROI in terms of time spent.

So, yes, I believe that it’s like a hockey stick chart. Your efficiency and ROI will start to grow after you’ve accumulated enough ‘failures’.

Is your organization ready to welcome some self-starters?

Is your leadership able to identify good self-starters and not taking them for granted?

Do the self-starters have rooms to grow in your organizations? Do you have a promotion and incentive mechanism to retain them?

Does your organization have the resources to support them as they contribute to the organization and hone their skills at the same time?

Does your team and organizational culture welcome self-starters and, most importantly, their mistakes?

It takes two to dance. After all, building an organization that is suitable for self-starters isn’t easy. So, what’s your take on being a self-starter?

Data immutability inherited from using blockchain technology becomes more meaningful through data sharing and monetization. With a robust mechanism, companies can collaborate across industries and even with competitors.

When talking about ecosystem expansion through data sharing, in a way it explicitly refers to a diversification strategy for those who share. Many technology companies with products and services in multiple markets are eyeing on the opportunity to provide a platform or a marketplace that enables enterprise clients to collaborate via shared, immutable data. A new ecosystem and a new type of as-a-Service evolving around data sharing within the ecosystem are incubated.

Here’s to share a few tools that can help technology companies extract product requirements that can facilitate ecosystem growth.

1. Three Buckets

List out all of your subsidiaries across the world, and fill in partners and clients the subsidiary has been working with and use a colored post-it to indicate industries. Since every bucket comes with actions, we don’t want to waste time on mapping out partners and clients that have no long term strategic meaning.

You will grow your Partner Pool, deepen relationships with organic inbound clients, and focus on clients acquired via paid channels.

You can devise business development plans for each client and partner, and use a standardized tracking to follow up on the status. However, we will not get into business development in this article.

2. Ecosystem Mapping

Based on what you’ve listed out in the Three Bucket exercise, you then focus on mapping out the ecosystem within the subsidiary first by expanding your list into projects and categorizing projects into industry themes. In the sample diagram below, we use purple to represent an industry theme, blue to represent projects/products currently offered associated with the industry theme, and grey to stand for projects/products to be offered in the future.

The x-axis is the services and solutions coverage of the client project (if using a client product makes sense in your analysis, go ahead and do that!). Moving from left to right on the x-axis means your product/project is gradually penetrating the international markets.

The y-axis refers to how diversified the services and solutions scope is. In the sample diagram, Single Company means that the project/product is only offered by a single company, which is most likely the case across all industries and companies. Since the involvement of financial and professional institutions is powerful and oftentimes leads to a new business model around financing and how professional services are conducted, we separate it in its own lane on the y-axis. Moving upwards on the y-axis represents that you’re match-making clients in the same or related industries to collaborate together.

Then, you start relating the industry themes and client projects/products that have cross-border collaboration potentials.

3. Business Models

At this step, you’ll do a business model analysis for the industries and clients you’ve prioritized in the previous exercise.

Make a business model canvas for each client, and find correlation in the business models among them by putting multiple canvases together.

The key here is to map out the areas that you can offer services to the clients. Put yourself in the shoes of your clients and imagine what they would need from your solutions in each building blocks.

It’s useful to place them according to the possible relationships they might have on their industry value chain.

4. Requirement List

Take the clusters of post-its from the previous exercise, and ask a prompt starting with “how might we…?”

In the first column, write down potential use cases that support or meet the requirements from the “how might we” prompt, and expand the use cases into the rest of the columns that cover system features, operational support, training materials & documentation, BD and relationship, and legal & compliance. This framework helps you cover the most important aspects in facilitating this requirement.

5. Requirement Prioritization

Lastly, you can put the requirements into the below simple Impact-Difficulty Matrix to determine which requirements get prioritized.

The tools above are usually used in a 2–3 day workshop. You can involve your clients to participate, so you get to co-create your products with the actual users.

Hope these tools will help.

After almost 4 years in the banking group, I’ve gone through a dozen of functions, dealt with colleagues from C-level to operations analysts of different languages and races, and built a FinTech & Innovation team for a country, I decided to join the other side of the table. I wanted to experience a different company culture, decision-making style, prioritization, and more.

Advantages with banking groups are sufficient budgets and resources, and well-established processes to guide you through the journey, especially when it comes to the “defense” work such as legal and compliance matters. However, they are sluggish. Getting things done is a lot about bureaucracy and political correctness.

Startups are the complete opposite in both upsides and drawbacks. Oftentimes, they move rapidly — arguably due to the lack of procedures and processes. They, nonetheless, have limited budget and resources.

Due to the different foundations and natures of a big banking group and a startup, they prioritize vastly differently.

System Development Life Cycle (SDLC) means very different things to a banking group and a startup.

For a banking group, SDLC almost means a tedious and lengthy process that involves compiling codes, getting approval for version control/release, obtaining production access to deploy codes, getting users ready to perform Post-Implementation Verification (PIV) right away. Such process takes weeks and some activities can only happen at a certain timing of the week.

While for a technology startup, there’s no well-documented version control, almost zero or just lenient approval required, no user segregation among development, test, and production environments, and nice-to-have PIV by users.

Those are just a handful of examples. Beyond the trade-off among information security, risks, and speedy time-to-market, what it really implies is the organization’s attitude towards failure.

Companies at different scales perceive the ease of use and value of Confluence and JIRA differently.

Both the banking group and the tech startup use commonly adopted products by Atlassian like JIRA and Confluence for technology project management, but the realized benefit and feedback from users are not the same.

I remembered many colleagues loved Confluence once they’re fully familiar with it, simply because finding documents and information relevant to their line of work became easier. You’ll be surprised by how little project members know about the project in a banking group. The clear segregation of duties and boundaries among departments and teams make it impossible to find information that’s not fragmented.

While many of my ex-colleagues from the banking group loved Confluence, it doesn’t appeal to my current colleagues at the startup. My take is that an organization needs to have some ground-level processes in place to maintain a meaningful Confluence. Without a certain level of process and control, Confluence is just like MySpace that’s filled with a bunch of unstructured information, which turns out to be garbage simply because no one reads it. Generally, with employees less than the size of an MBA class, startup employees just walk up to their friends’ desk and sort things out, leaving no trace of documentation.

Do you know even the company messages are delivered in a different fashion in town halls?

The founder of my current startup wasn’t beating around the bushes when he delivered messages in town halls. “During crypto winter, you have to ask yourself why entrepreneurship matters?” he said. He encouraged those who have doubts during the so-called crypto winter to quit right away. (Probably also a way of avoiding severance pays.)

Regional C-level was the biggest boss we can get for town halls. The messages were always about how much the company has made and the company can’t thrive without all of you employees, although an hour before the town hall we were literally talking about how many FTEs need to go within a quarter.

I’ve always talked about how important operational risk management is. I felt stronger about it after joining the tech startup. Personally, I think experience hires can be one of the most effective ways of mitigating operational risks should expensive salary overheads don’t become a financial liability.

“ While cutting-edge technology is exciting, it can also be complex; demand is also untested, which can result in long lead times with little opportunity to validate the business model.” quote from McKinsey report.

Management and market demand aside, this quote from McKinsey made me think of the “why entrepreneurship” question from the founder of my current tech startup. Some entrepreneurs have a clear goal of selling the business. From an acquisition perspective, it’s even more interesting to find out what makes a startup so compelling to its potential buyers even during the difficult times of its business growth as quoted from McKinsey.

How a blockchain company fundamentally different from the banking group or a traditional IPO company?

This is a change of mindset driven by the fundamental difference in business valuation.

Blockchain startups (here it means those who have its own main nets) care about transaction volumes. Meaningful and ongoing transactions stabilize the crpyto-currency price. In return, happy token holders (a.k.a. shareholders).

Owing to the nature of the DLT, open source makes so much sense. Open source and supporting services reduce the entry barrier to adopting blockchain, eventually attracting more projects developing on the main net, generating more transactions, and consuming utility tokens.

IP ownership somehow becomes less of a concern as long as more projects are generating traffic. Such logic is so different from the traditional concept where companies must own IPs and data and everything needs to be confidential in order to prevent entry of potential competitors and substitutes.

What I have shared in this piece of writing is based on my in-person observation. I can be biased. However, I’m just glad to have personally sitten on both sides of the table and experienced the prioritization and decision-making processes behind the scene.

Before FinTech

I spent a lot of time getting involved in and rolling out digital payment projects before I developed my interests in FinTech and later on got promoted to FinTech Lead.

(See Digital Payment In Taiwan article here)

Working on digital payments allowed me to see cross-organization integration even more clearly. By which, I meant integration among:

1. VISA/MasterCard
2. Issuing and acquiring banks
3. eCommerce players and physical merchants
4. Government-backed settlement institution
5. Payment service providers (Google/Apple/Samsung, etc)
6. Multiple internal systems scattering around the world

By the time I moved to CIO Office to work on FinTech, I’d implemented digital payment projects and worked halfway through AI-enabled investment advisory app, and mobile banking app UI/UX revamp/upgrade. I saw how technology empowers customers and I’d like to pursue more along the way.

FinTech in big organization needed a plan

I laid out a phase-in plan (6 months, 1 year, and 2-year deliverables). Due to uncertain organizational appetite for FinTech, a 2-year plan was already a long term play.

It all started from changing mindsets and ‘preaching’ the idea of new technologies. The team partnered with one of the Big 4 to deliver a series of beginner-level FinTech workshops, set up internal site to share industry use cases, open up feedback sessions, and allow ‘shark tank’ style idea pitching. While these internal activities were happening, I was taking ideas from inside and exploring solutions from outside, preparing for medium terms — such as startups from accelerator programs and university hackerthon.

Momentum is important, but we need something solid to keep the momentum going

I knew everybody was watching. At the end of the day, it’s all about what solutions I could deliver. Workshops and internal comms website were only for creating momentum. How to keep the momentum going? Deliver something!

So, among all ABCD (AI/Blockchain/Cloud/Data) fields, I sought low-hanging fruit (ie: RPA and RCA) which has immediate benefits to users. One of the most heart-warming stories was a mom finally didn’t have to work overtime and was able to pick up her kids from school first time in a long while.

Stories bought the team some time. And we were lucky enough to find a blockchain PoC implementation opportunity, gamification initiative from the university collaboration, and a couple of ongoing requirement requests in the pipeline.

I positioned the team as the new solution seeking unit. Once PoC is successfully implemented, we let respective business units scale it up by sending requests to the pipeline which would be taken care of by Project Management Office which I worked for prior to FinTech.

What worked?

1. Workshops with one of the Big 4 did the job as it got the organization to talk about and ‘think’ about FinTech solution more.
2. Internal communication website served as a 2-way street — one way for the team’s work to b recognized, and the other for interactive ideation.
3. A heart-warming story that got employees to realize FinTech really can help with their day-to-day work.
4. A plan that’s well communicated with the senior management. I had weekly update meeting with CIO and Business Planning Manager from CEO Office. Through their lenses, the plan was delicately crafted to do its job without stepping into organization political minefield.

What could have been done differently?

1. A live stream or video on the internal communication website would be even stronger of messages we tried to cascade. Website traffic statistics showed that people only came to the website when there’s a ‘push notification’ being sent by the team. Adding a ‘pull factor’ would have been better.
2. This one is debatable — the team would be better off to have put together a procedure or memo detailing all the steps we would be taking, and get it signed off by not only country and regional stakeholders, but also group level stakeholders. One could argue that a procedure detailing innovation steps would not be possible in the first place, which I would agree. However, one could also dispute that if we take a step back in hindsight, all the actions being taken were very similar to the traditional way of doing business in an organization, which I also agree. For better or worse, we as a team probably wouldn’t have gotten the job done if everything needed to go up to the chain for approval. Sometimes an organization needs unordinary people with ordinary methods like that.
3. A special, temporary process to onboard startups with great solutions. Without help, startups without enough assets and equity on their balance sheets won’t even make it to the first stage of the conventional vendor onboarding processes. Some don’t even have a balance sheet!

What to watch

Overall, what we did was involved around

1. Whether there’s a justifiable business case — operationally and financially?
2. Whether the organization’s legacy systems are ready for the change or only ready to take a small step forward?
3. Whether what we try to do is in compliant with internal and external regulations? Can we re-define the regulation that falls in the ‘grey area’?
4. Whether implementing the technologies is more of a learning process for the organization or the financial benefit is easily justifiable?
5. Whether the startup pitching in the meeting room provides real and tangible solutions suitable for the organization or just tries to sell solution without a product roadmap so the venture can survive?

Looking back now

Banking PM and FinTech Lead were 2 very different roles requiring different skill sets. I think having an open mind for every possibility played a tremendous role in the successful beginning. I realized it was about collaboration and giving the credits — avoid internal political fights and deliver for the organization in the way that everyone felt like they were involved and had a stake in it.

Next, I’ll be working on

1. How to manage a team of people who’re around your age?
2. How to manage a young team with an innovative idea?

Having been working on Apple Pay, Android Pay, and Samsung Pay projects in the past few months, I’ve gotten a chance to look into the digital payment market in Taiwan. There are a couple of drives and challenges facing this market.

Drive 1. A good starting position (Infrastructure & Demographics)

Taiwan has good basic infrastructure, and it provides this tiny little island with all necessary foundations for building up those digital toys. Almost everyone in Taiwan has a smartphone, if not an iPhone.

With the high penetration rate of the number of people using smartphones, it’s interesting to look at 2 stats — what do Taiwanese people do on their smartphones? and, do Taiwanese people embrace the convenience of transacting on their smartphones?

If you look at the stats below, turns out, banking and transaction-related activities are among the top 7 activities that Taiwanese people do on their phones.

Also, Taiwanese people do embrace shopping on their smartphone compared to other countries.

Fortunately enough, with all the good foundations and its people’s non-resistance to using mobile devices for banking activities or to purchase and shop online in general, Taiwanese do end up having a higher utility rate when it comes to such behavior on mobile devices and, even more, on mobile banking applications. See the below stats charts for informational features and transactional features Taiwanese people do on their mobile banking applications.

It’s hard to imagine this — there are more than 50 banks competing on this tiny little island, a.k.a. Taiwan. With the insanely high market saturation, banks must pull some magic to get their banking applications on their customers' mobile devices, and to make it very user-friendly — for starters — simply because transforming into a digital bank not only reduces operations costs but also brings value in customer service.

Have you ever walked down on the streets in Taipei? If you have, you must have seen about half of the people walking down on the streets with their eyes glued to their little screens instead of the traffic lights and cars passing by. One can argue that this is because of the demographic structure in Taipei city where there are more digital-gen populations.

Never been to Taiwan? You should go visit!

Drive 2. More lenient regulations

If you compare Taiwan to other advanced countries or cities such as Singapore, Hong Kong, London, or Chicago where the governments are a lot more powerful and less political, Taiwan will for sure dim away from their shines. Nonetheless, the Taiwanese government is still trying to back its FinTech related activities and help the industry to grow and transform.

1. In H2 2016, Taiwan Financial Supervisory Committee (FSC) just announced its plan to boost digital payment usage rate from 25% to 52% by 2020, almost double than less than 5 years. (If you know the history of Taiwan and its political situation, you will consider this result good enough. Just put aside any potential political turbulence that might sabotage the plan).
2. In April 2017, Taiwan FSC has submitted bills for Regulatory Sandbox for the banking industry in hope to get the bill passed in the parliament by the end of this year.

Just like other countries’, what Taiwan FSC is proposing is that having a Regulatory Sandbox in place to allow banks to try out their new financial technologies in a controlled and permissioned environment for 6 months, with an extension period of additional 3 months. In total, it makes 9 months trial time.

What’s interesting about Taiwan FSC’s regulatory sandbox is that it mandates the participating banks to reveal certain level of information during the trial. Transparency has never been a thing in this country. We will have to see how it works out first!

Drive 3. Hectic Market Competition from International Players

Similar to the high market saturation in banking, Taiwan also has quite a number of international and domestic digital payment players taking up their own shares in the market.

International big brands offering NFC solutions such as Apple Pay, Android Pay, and Samsung Pay; Mainland China powerhouses providing QR Code payment solutions such as Alipay and WeChat; domestic pioneers leveraging Chinese investment funds such as JKOS; early movers switching from gaming industry to payment service provider such as GOMAJI.

Both international giants and domestic niche players see opportunities in this market and have been competing for the market leader position.

Challenge 1. Cash Transaction Behavior & User Scenarios

Cash transaction behavior is deeply and heavily rooted in Taiwanese day-to-day payment activities. From morning markets to supermarkets, from food stalls to nice restaurants, from drinking water to gas fills, from parking tickets to water bills, etc. There is still a great proportion of the population tend to use cash instead of other non-cash payment means.

Challenge 2. Lack Of Infrastructure

Plenty of Taiwanese daily user scenarios don’t offer POS terminals or other methods of payment infrastructures. If you have ever lived in Taiwan, especially some cities out of Taipei, you must have ideas on how difficult it is to find a POS terminal that takes your RFID cards and credit & debit cards, let along highly advanced ones that accept NFC payments. This impedes the growth of digital payment fundamentally.

Challenge 3. Fragmented Market

This challenge echoes back to Drive #3. Having too many market players in the market it’s like playing with a double-bladed sword. On one hand, it creates positive competitiveness among players. On the other hand, it breaks the market into smaller chunks and that makes it difficult to scale up.

There are 4 types of players in the market — third parties, OEM and phone manufacturers, telecoms, and banks.

It only took Apple Pay 1 week to gain 600,000 successful provisioning requests whereas it took 9 months for a government-backed wallet provider to acquire 30,000 successful provisioning attempts.

I personally believe Taiwan digital payment market has just started undergoing a transitory phase from a fragmented market to a consolidate one where small and medium players are trying to partner with others so that they don’t get pushed out of the market, and large players keep posing their international influence from reputational branding to Taiwanese smartphone users.

Technical solution wise, the market will move towards mostly 2 solutions, namely NFC by Apple, Google, and Samsung, and QR code by one of the code solution providers. While international powerhouses (Apple, Google, and Samsung) are driving this market towards NFC in cooperation with VISA and MasterCard, a low cost method in QR code when it comes to solution deployment will still be used for a cheaper and quicker market entry strategy.

From customer journey’s perspective, having one OEM wallet with NFC/MST features enabled, and another 3rd party wallet with QR code payment available, customers can pretty much pay digitally most of the time with these 2 types of wallets.

I recently got to work with HR from outside of the company. They are a major player in power electronics, manufacturing, energy management, and green life businesses in the world. Just jotting down some of the thoughts I have.

Let’s call the company Company D in this article.

Almost every industry is moving away from labor-intense forms to technology-enabled solutions, if not entirely labor-less automation. New concepts such as Industry 4.0, automation, and autonomous cars are no strangers to us these days. These trends are definitely impacting the way how people work, thus impacting how HR helps the company in serving employees.

Aligning Corporate Strategy By Evolving Workforce Demographics

Company D had a 3–5 years strategy to accelerate business transformation into a digital and autonomous work environment for its factories around the world, with a certain amount of funds allowed to allocate to core areas for more efficient expansion. Correspondingly, HR set out a plan to identify high potential talents, provide them with tailored-made mobile training sessions (training on their phones), shape them into becoming SME and create the SME community for them, and offer them with international job rotation. On the other hand, those not identified as high potential talents will then be gradually “phased out” of the organization as the automation projects keep rolling out.

Tailored-made training sessions on mobile phones are anytime and anywhere. It’s also very brilliant to create an SME community in the sense that it creates a friendly competitive environment among employees, an implication for better cross-functional collaboration.

As the workforce trend shifts to less operational workers, more rapidly adapting talents with knowledge gained from self-applying technologies, we will be looking at the capacity projections of reduced capacity for previously overcapacity operational workers, and increased capacity for previously under-capacity white-collar employees.

From A Better Foundation To An Advanced Analytics On Employees

I’ve put together the below table which I believe explains how does Company D’s HR department help navigate through the changes along with its entire company.

The result of this transformation has been incredible, and Company D’s stock price has been steadily going up ever since the announcement of the big plan.

During my trainee rotation, I got to know a Stan Char alumnus who’s been working in Fidor, Germany for a couple of years where she’s responsible for service delivery and project management. I also got to chat with her supervisor, a German gentleman who worked for a top-tier consulting firm and an investment bank prior to joining Fidor.

**Fidor is a Germany-based FinTech player that offers a wide range of services in financial industry using Fidor OS running on Open API Platforms. Adopting white-label technology that enables ecosystem among Fidor Group, its strategic partners, and its clients, Fidor leverages its technology to create Fidor Bank operating in both London and Germany.

Not Only Delivering Technology-enabled Solutions, But Rebuilding Trusts

Fidor originated from Latin, stands for trust. Clearly, it aims to disrupt the traditional banking value chain by rebuilding client trust in the ecosystem. Fidor puts in 3 levels to achieve this goal.

1. White-label technologies

Leveraging digitized solutions such us finance apps, full-service B2B platforms, banking on the cloud, and SaaS is essential, but basic to begin with.

2. A Twist In The Offer That Is Hard To Achieve By Its Massive Brick-And-Motor Competitors

Different from major, traditional banks, Fidor offers innovative ways to bank, including crowd-financing and P2P banking (such as P2P lending).

3. Taking Control By Giving It Back

Reintroducing the concept of ‘COMMUNITY’ lets clients take back controls over transparency by leaning closer and contributing to the community, resulting in regaining the trusts.

Starting From Its Core Capabilities To Taking Positions In The Value Chain

Started as a technology service provider, Fidor has expanded its landscape from the back office position supporting the operations to the front office position facing clients directly with its brand name Fidor Bank. Wisely leveraging and partnering with existing big players in fields where Fidor hasn’t had a footprint in helps it focus on its core capabilities and competitive advantages, building up a solid and client-oriented ecosystem running on its OS. Ultimately, this creates client adhesiveness to its offering.

Fidor is an interesting example of a successful FinTech company transforming from the man who’s doing all the hard work behind successful businesses to the man who’s building up good reputation. Go check it out today!

If you’ve read my very first post about how I started my job in banking (link to the previous post), you knew that I wasn’t the keenest one on technology and operations. Both colleagues and friends have asked me, even until the most recent days, that ‘’Have you ever had any regrets accepting the transfer offer to IT&O?”, “Have you thought about the HR career you would have built outside of the company if you didn’t take the transfer offer?”

Yes, the thoughts came across my mind a lot during the first few months into the bank. I thought about quitting many times because I knew nothing about databases, servers, network routing, firewalls, etc. Every day, I was drowning in endless conference calls where I got bullied orally for asking questions that showed I knew nothing about IT. (Not everyone did that. There were still nice people out who were willing to share what they knew with me).

In spite of the many ‘headwinds’, I pulled it off. What it took was endless weekends and nights trying self-learning, googling terms in the emails, and synthesizing the conversation flows in the conference call (via meeting minutes of course) or email threads. Little by little I got used to the pace of the environment and later on found that how important technology is, and what an indispensable role it plays in keeping the business running efficiently both in banking and other industries.

Nowadays, if someone asks the same type of question, I would say “Taking the transfer offer to work in IT & Operations actually opens up a lot of doors and windows to opportunities!”