NTC Mentor Speaker Series - Programmable Assets, Transforming Finance

In a talk titled Programmable Assets, Transforming Finance, Nanyang Technopreneurship Center Mentor Mr Chan Boon-Hiong, shared his knowledge about the growth of digital and crypto assets and currencies as a trend in recent years and its resulting impacts on the financial industry. 

Mr Chan is the global head of securities market and technology advocacy at Deutsche Bank. In his personal capacity, he shared his knowledge of the relationship between technology and the financial industry while providing a brief overview of how this relationship intersects with the securities market. 

He began his sharing with Bitcoin as an example, illustrating the nature of the currency by covering various aspects of its development, usage and users’ concerns. 

For instance, he spoke of rising privacy concerns as the growing realisation of how Bitcoin transactions were pseudo-anonymous sparked users’ worries of maintaining privacy and confidentiality. In addition, he mentioned security concerns as the originality of crypto-transactions are harder to determine as original documents are harder to identify. This is because records of crypto transactions can easily be copied.

In the session, Mr Chan also explained the convergence of financial services and technology as well as the laws and regulation that enable these applications. He also shared on how more individuals are seeing the value of cryptocurrencies and hence, are willing to invest and trade it leading to the rising exchange of digital assets. This also gives rise to a growing number of new business models and the idea of digital asset custody which protects one’s assets. 

In a conversation with Thomas Chapman, a career coach and technology headhunter, the pair also shared how digitalisation has impacted Singapore such as the growing trends in Singapore, the technology’s effect on start-ups and more. In addition, they spoke of the challenges in employment for this sector such as the lack of talent within the industry. 

They ended their pair-sharing by sharing an insight into the future of the industry such as whether the popularity of the technology itself will be short term or long term. They believe that the growth potential of this technology depends on the track record of the technology and it could potentially prosper if it gains success and traction in the next few years. 

The session concluded with a Q&A segment with the participants.