By Yifan Li, Junior Project Manager - Innovation & Entrepreneurship
Venture Leaders Fintech 2020, co-organized by swissnex China and Venturelab, offers the Swiss national startup team composed of ten world-class fintech startups an exclusive opportunity to showcase their technology, products and solutions to potential partners and investors in the Greater Bay Area and explore the fintech ecosystem of the Greater Bay Area. This year marks the second edition of Venture Leaders Fintech in Hong Kong attending the Hong Kong FinTech Week, and the first-ever Virtual Demo Day launching this special edition in consideration of the global pandemic.
On October 27th, swissnex China together with Venturelab, held a virtual roadshow with the ten Swiss fintech startups pitching in front of over 180 registered fintech experts and investors. The ten startups in an alphabetical order are CurioInvest, cybera. Global, eCollect, flovtec, SIBEX, SwissBorg, Teylor AG, Vima, Wecan Tokenize and Yova Impact Investing. Opened by Felix Moesner, Science Consul and CEO of swissnex China, and moderated by Stefan Steiner, co-managing partner of Venturelab, Venture Leaders Fintech 2020 Virtual Demo Day began at 4:00 pm Hong Kong time / 9:00 am Switzerland time.
The first presentation was given by Rey Fernando Verboonen, co-founder and CEO of CurioInvest, aiming to build a technology platform bringing collectibles to people’s investment portfolio. Fernando started the presentation by pointing out the current challenges for investing in lucrative collectibles and continued with the market information and CurioInvest’s smart real asset tokenization solution. CurioInvest is currently seeking for investors for their seed round fundraising which will take place within the next six months.
Nicola Staub, co-founder and CEO of cybera.global, was the second presenter. As an ex cybercrime prosecutor whose work was to investigate and capture cybercriminals, Nicola is aimed at building a fintech platform to prevent cybercrime and online fraud, such as CEO fraud where criminals pretend to be CEOs and ask victims to help them cash out their money. cybera.global is trying to change this situation with their real-time and real-world global database to effectively prevent these illegal transactions.
eCollect was the third startup presented in the virtual demo day. Currently as a Europe’s leading receivables management platform, Marc Schillinger, the CEO, and his team have been working diligently in the collection industry for six years. Headquartered in Switzerland, eCollect has had operating hubs around the central Europe and eastern Europe and plans to expand by promoting their AI-and-Machine-Learning-driven tailor-made solutions. In 2020 Q4 and 2021 Q1, eCollect desires to raise four million euros ideally from fintech investors, family offices and industry investors.
The fourth presentation was about flov technologies - a liquidity provider for digital assets. Its co-founder and CEO, Anton Golub, opened the pitch by emphasizing their market making solutions to digital asset exchanges and token issuers to create a liquid and efficient market. He further introduced the deadlock problem caused by the bond between no liquidity and no users, and how flovtec could break this vicious cycle by adding liquidity. After addressing the role that flovtec could play and show their software and business model, Anton closed the pitch with the path that flovtec has taken and would take in the future.
Next startup SIBEX is presented by its co-founder and CEO, Daniel Haudenschild, whose aim is to make the Over-The-Counter (OTC) orders simple and safe. Daniel did the calculation for us that a transaction of 100 BTC could cost 35,000 USD for the escrow fee, arranger fee and legal fee etc. SIBEX, however, could offer a solution to this pain thanks to blockchain and smart contracts. Daniel also pointed out that SIBEX was a live protocol with revenue in the early growth stage and has gained key partners and investors in the blockchain and finance industries.
A short video about the last year’s Venture Leaders Fintech in Hongkong was played afterwards to give the the audience a short break and to give an overview of last year’s offline program.
After a short halftime, Cyrus Fazel, founder & CEO of SwissBorg, shared his vision of bringing Swiss wealth management to the world. Cyrus stated that there was no way backwards from the crypto era and showed that a total worth of 52 million USD token was transferred in the SwissBorg APP in January 2018 with 23,872 participants from 149 countries. SwissBorg currently has a team of 72 engineers, entrepreneurs and financial experts with five offices around the world and plans to do their IPO in 2024.
The seventh startup presenter was teylor who envisions the future of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SME) lending. Its CEO, Patrick Stäuble, firstly pointed out that traditional banks tended to neglect SME customers which resulted in the slow, expensive and inefficient SME lending processes, and then discussed teylor’s solution - fully digital and automated loan for SMEs with offer generated within 10 minutes and paid out within 48 hours. Patrick also showed how teylor monetized through its own loan and licensing technology as well as its internationalization ambition.
Raphaël Héraïef, founder and CEO of Vima – a spin-off from the IDIAP research center, introduced their revolutionary technology for credit lending. Raphaël opened his pitch by addressing the revenue and risks brought to the banks by credit loan, and followed with the Vima way of credit scoring – behaviour assessment based on a 1-3 minutes video presentation by the borrower applicant.
Wecan Tokenize, the nineth startup demonstrating in the demo day, aims to bridge the gap between traditional finance and the new complex world of digital assets. Mathieu Saint-Cyr, managing partner of Wecan Tokenize, showed us a well-designed video illustrating how the team leveraged the blockchain technology to help lower the general public’s investment threshold. Wecan Tokenize does not sell a platform, but sells a fully integrated process for the issuance, distribution, custody and exchange of digital assets through core banking systems or APIs and the best marketplace solutions.
The final presentation was given by Cristian von Angerer, CFO of Yova about how Yova transformed investing into an emotional and personally meaningful experience by helping people invest for a better world. Cristian listed that 80% of the 30-50-year-olds have over 50,000 USD in cash, which in total would be a huge investment market, and introduced how Yova could help people become impact investors in three simple steps. Currently, Yova is seeing a 7.6x growth year-on-year and hundreds of new investors every month, and meanwhile looking for global partners to expand geographically.
During the presentations, many questions were asked by our active audience and answered diligently by our startup entrepreneurs during the Q&A session.
With the virtual demo day wrapped up nicely, we are looking forward to the moment when all ten startup entrepreneurs are able to come to China physically for the onsite roadshows to exchange with local industry players, and potentially enter the Chinese market in the future.
Special thanks to our program partners, IMMOMIG, PostFinance, TX Group, Walder Wyss Attorneys at Law, Presence Switzerland, Canton of Zurich, EPFL and ETH Zurich, and our promotional partners, Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks and Hong Kong Business Angel Network, for making this possible.
We would also like to express our gratitude to the startups for sharing us with the technologies and products, as well as the audiences for the time and interests. Please do not hesitate to contact us or the startups directly should you have any questions.
Watch recording here