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09.04.19 Credit Cards

Elliptic banks $23M to shrink crypto risk, eyeing growth in Asia

Crypto means risk. To UK company Elliptic it also means business. The startup has just closed a $23M Series B to step up growth for a crypto risk-management play that involves selling tech and services to help others navigate the choppy darks of cryptocurrencies.

The round was led by financial services and asset management firm SBI Group, a Tokyo-based erstwhile subsidiary of SoftBank . Also joining as a new investor this round is London-based AlbionVC. Existing investors including SignalFire, Octopus Ventures and Santander Innoventures also participated. SBI Group’s Tomoyuki Nii and Ed Lascelles of AlbionVC are also joining Elliptic’s board.

Flush with a sizeable injection of Series B capital, Elliptic is especially targeting business growth at Asia — with a plan to open new offices in Japan and Singapore. It says client revenues in the region have risen 11x over the past two years.

We last spoke to Elliptic back in 2016 when it had just raised a $5M Series A.

The 2013-founded startup began by testing the crypto waters with a storage product before zeroing in on financial compliance as a pain-point worth its time. It went on to develop machine learning tech that screens transactions to identify suspicious patterns and, via them, dubious transactors.

Now it offers an integrated suite of products and services for financial institutions and crypto businesses to screen volumes of crypto-flows that sum to billions of dollars in transactions per day — analyzing them for links to illicit activity such as money laundering, terrorist financing, sanctions evasion, and other financial crimes.

It’s focused on selling anti-money laundering compliance, crypto forensics and cryptocurrency investigation services to the private sector — though has also sold tools direct to law enforcement agencies in the past.

Billions of dollars in financial services terms is of course just a tiny drop in a massive ocean of money movements. And growth in the crypto risk-management space has clearly required more than a little patience, from a startup perspective.

Three years ago Elliptic’s first blockchain analytics product had 10-20 Bitcoin companies as customers. That’s now up to 100+ crypto businesses and financial institutions using its products to shrink their risk of financial crime when dealing with crypto-assets. But the more three than year gap between Elliptic’s Series A and B is notable.

“To date, we’ve focused on product development and assembling the right team as the market has matured. This new funding will help us expand in the right way, namely by making the push into Asia without diluting our focus on the US and EMEA,” says co-founder and CEO James Smith when asked about the gap between financing rounds.

He declines to comment on how far off Elliptic is from achieving breakeven or profitability yet.

“We provide best-in-class transaction monitoring products for crypto-assets, which are trusted by crypto exchanges and financial institutions worldwide,” he adds of its product suite. “Our products are used as key components of larger compliance processes that are designed to minimise money laundering risks.”

With the addition of SBI Group to its investor roster Elliptic gains a strategic partner in Asia to help push what it dubs “bank-grade risk data” at a new wave of established financial institutions it believes are eyeing crypto with growing appetite for risk as larger players wade in.

Larger players like Facebook . Elliptic’s PR name-drops the likes of Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency, Line Corporation’s LINK and central bank digital currencies, as markers of a rise in mainstream attention on crypto assets. And it says Series B funds will be used to accelerate product development to support “an emerging class of asset-backed crypto-assets”.

Regulatory attention on crypto — which has been rising globally for years but looks set to zip up several gears now that Facebook has ripped the curtain off of an ambitious global digital currency plan which also has buy-in from a number of other household tech and fintech names — is another claimed feed in for Elliptic’s business. More crypto implies growing risk.

It also points to the intergovernmental Financial Action Task Force’s global regulatory framework for crypto-assets as an example of some of the wider risk-based requirements and now wrapped around those dealing in crypto.

The focus on Asia for business expansion is a measure of relative maturity of interest in opportunities around crypto-assets and localized attention to regulation, according to Smith.

“Revenue growth is certainly very strong in this region. We have been working with customers in Asia for a number of years and have seen first-hand how vibrant their crypto-asset ecosystems are. Countries such as Singapore and Japan have developed clear crypto-asset regulatory frameworks, and businesses based in these countries are serious about meeting their compliance obligations,” he says.

“We have also found that traditional financial institutions in Asia are particularly keen to engage with crypto-assets, and we will be working with them as they take their first steps into this new asset class.”

“We believe that crypto-assets will play an increasingly important role in our everyday lives and are shaping the future of banking. Our investment in Elliptic is a further commitment to this belief and to SBI Holding’s appetite to help build the digital asset-related ecosystem,” adds Yoshitaka Kitao, CEO of the SBI Group, in a supporting statement.

“Elliptic’s pioneering approach is enabling the transparency, integrity, and trust necessary for this vision to become reality. We are seeing a growing demand for their services across our portfolio of crypto-assets related companies and view Elliptic as best-placed to meet this considerable opportunity.”

While Elliptic’s business is focused on reducing the risk for other businesses of inadvertently transacting with criminals using crypto to launder money or otherwise shift assets under the legal radar, the proportion of transactions that such illicit activity represents in the Bitcoin space represents a tiny fraction of overall transactions.

“According to our analysis, approximately $1BN in Bitcoin has been spent on the dark web, so far in 2019, on items ranging from narcotics to stolen credit cards. This represents a very small share of all Bitcoin activity — less than 0.5% of Bitcoin payments over this period,” says Smith.

Not that that diminishes the regulatory risk. Nor, therefore, the business opportunity for Elliptic to sell support services to help others avoid touching the hot stuff.

“Crypto money launderers are continually developing new techniques to cover their tracks — from the use of mixers to transacting in privacy coins such as monero,” Smith adds. “We are also constantly innovating to keep pace with this and help our clients to detect money laundering. For example our work with researchers from MIT and IBM demonstrated the application of deep learning techniques to the identification of illicit crypto-asset transactions.”

Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/03/elliptic-banks-23m-to-shrink-crypto-risk-eyeing-growth-in-asia/

08.06.19 Credit Cards

Aspire raises $32.5M to help SMEs secure fast finance in Southeast Asia

Aspire, a Singapore-based startup that helps SMEs secure working capital, has raised $32.5 million in a new financing round to expand its presence in several Southeast Asian markets.

The Series A round for the one-and-a-half-year-old startup was funded by MassMutual Ventures Southeast Asia. Arc Labs and existing investors Y Combinator — Aspire graduated from YC last year — Hummingbird and Picus Capital also participated in the round. Aspire has raised about $41.5 million to date.

Aspire operates a neo-banking-like platform to help small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) quickly and easily secure working capital of up to about $70,000. AspireAccount, the startup’s flagship product, provides merchants and startups with instant credit limit for daily business expenses, as well as a business-to-business acceptance and other tools to help them manage their cash flow.

Co-founder and CEO Andrea Baronchelli tells TechCrunch that about 1,000 business accounts are opened each month on Aspire and that the company plans to continue focusing on Southeast Asia, where he says there are about 78 million small businesses, leaving plenty of room to scale (applications can be made through Aspire’s mobile app and are reviewed using a proprietary risk assessment engine before getting final approval from a human). Aspire claims it has seen 30% month-over-month growth since it was founded in January 2018 and expects to open more than 100,000 business accounts by next year.

Baronchelli, who served as a CMO for Alibaba’s Lazada platform for four years, says Aspire launched to close the gap left by the traditional banking industry’s focus on consumer services or businesses that make more than $10 million in revenue a year. As a result, smaller businesses in Southeast Asia, including online vendors and startups, often lack access to credit lines, accounts and other financial services tailored to their needs.

Aspire currently operates in Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore and Vietnam. The startup said it will use the fresh capital to scale its footprints in those markets. Additionally, Aspire is building a scalable marketplace banking infrastructure that will use third-party financial service providers to “create a unique digital banking experience for its SME customers.”

Baronchelli adds that “the bank of the future will probably be a marketplace,” so Aspire’s goal is to provide a place where SMEs can not only open accounts and credit cards, but also pick from different services like point of sale systems. It is currently in talks with potential partners. The startup is also working on a business credit card that will be linked to each business account by as early as this year.

Southeast Asia’s digital economy is slated to grow more than six-fold to reach more than $200 billion per year, according to a report co-authored by Google. But for many emerging startups and businesses, getting financial services from a bank and securing working capital have become major pain points.

A growing number of startups are beginning to address these SMEs’ needs. In India, for instance, NiYo Bank and Open have amassed millions of businesses through their neo-banking platforms. Both of these startups have raised tens of millions of dollars in recent months. Drip Capital, which helps businesses in developing markets secure working capital, raised $25 million last week.

Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/31/aspire-seriesa/

09.22.17 ecommerce

Amazon launched Prime Now in Singapore and sold 3 times the volume that it did in Seattle. Here’s how.

Amazon staff in Singapore at the Prime Now warehouse
Image: victoria ho/mashable

People were surprised when Amazon launched its two-hour delivery service, Prime Now, in Singapore last month. Unlike other countries where it launched Prime Now, the e-commerce giant didn’t have a retail presence here to begin.

So going from no Amazon at all to the ultra high pressure two-hour Prime Now delivery service certainly raised eyebrows.

SEE ALSO: Amazon’s new Prime Now warehouse in Singapore is absolutely massive

Customers responded by calling for an avalanche of orders on launch day, July 27. Singaporeans were so enthusiastic, Amazon’s first day here closed three times the order volume in this tiny island, than it did when it launched in its home city of Seattle in 2015.

And as the orders piled up, the app started showing delivery was “unavailable” within the day as Amazon ran out of physical delivery folks to fulfill orders.

But because it was relying on multiple third party logistics services, instead of running delivery itself, it could ramp up capacity over the next day by requesting for more help.

The company was so serious about making good on its two-hour promise, it sent off some of its warehouse officers in Ubers and cabs to make deliveries, too, confirmed Henry Low, director of Amazon Prime Now for Asia-Pacific.

With that, Amazon pulled off its biggest Prime Now launch in its history.

Amazon closed three times the order volume in this tiny island than it did when it launched in its home city of Seattle in 2015.

Singapore packs its 5.5 million people into a metropolis of just 710 square kilometers (274 square miles), with most of its residents living in high-rise apartment buildings. Amazon serves the country out of a single warehouse — its largest Prime Now facility yet, at 100,000 square feet. 

Seventy-nine of the 80 postal districts that cover Singapore have made orders in the month since Prime Now launched.

How Amazon did it: data, data, data

Amazon had already offered two-day or next-day delivery in the U.S., UK, and Japan, which has allowed it to iron out its processes in the lead up to offering Prime Now.

In Singapore though, it had to come out with a bang and go straight into two- and one-hour delivery, without the luxury of testing it out in real life.

To get it right, the secret was Singapore’s fairly unique postal code system, Low said. Each six-digit number corresponds to an individual building — and not a broader district, as it does in other countries.

This gave the company sufficient granularity to run in-depth simulations on delivery routes right to a customer’s doorstep. It could also develop more sophisticated models, with data it had on what customer sets would likely order from Prime Now, and when.

In addition, Amazon has years of historical data on Singaporean buying patterns on Amazon (the slow, non-Prime Now way). All of this helped its predictive systems see into the future, providing a picture of how the real day would likely play out, Low explained.

Local goods on the warehouse shelf.

Image: victoria ho/mashable

And what are Singaporeans buying? The top five items in its first month of operation are toilet paper, green tea, fresh milk, hot and spicy potato chips, and — curiously — broccoli.

Apart from groceries, Amazon has also delivered a toy flamingo set, and a car transmission cooler here.

Low said Amazon is keen to be in Singapore, despite its small size, because the country’s tech-obsessed citizens are super connected and “love shopping.”

Plus, Amazon hopes to plug into the talent pool here, he added. “The business environment allows us to experiment with various innovations like new payment services, that we haven’t before.”

All well and good, but our only question is, who’s ordering all that broccoli? 

WATCH: Amazon’s new meal kits are already available to select Prime members

Read more: http://mashable.com/2017/09/21/amazon-prime-now-singapore-one-month-later/

09.13.17 mobile wallet

Singapore’s female president is the first in the world to get her own emoji

Image: AP/REX/Shutterstock

Singapore now has its first female president ever.

63-year-old Halimah Yacob, a former speaker of parliament, was declared the country’s latest president on Wednesday.

SEE ALSO: Asia’s newest mobile wallet may actually get the region to go cashless, finally

She was the only candidate to qualify for the presidency, a largely ceremonial role, which was this year reserved for candidates from the Malay community.

In celebration of her win, Twitter launched a special emoji for her — the first for a female head of state anywhere in the world.

Not gonna lie, it’s pretty adorable.

Image: twitter/supplied

She can be seen here decked out in a red headscarf and a white top — Singapore’s national colours. She also gets a little star pin on her headscarf, a prominent symbol in the country’s flag.

So if you’re hashtagging your tweets with #HalimahYacob, #PresidentHalimah or #MdmPresident, amongst others, a tiny emoji of Halimah will automatically come up.

This is also the first time that Twitter has created an emoji specially for a national leader in Singapore.

But not everyone is happy about Halimah’s win.

Some online took to Twitter to vent, with many calling her win undemocratic — as she was the only candidate qualified for the election.

The government ruled that two of her other rivals were not eligible to run as their companies did not have at least $370 million (S$500m) in shareholder’s equity — one of the many criteria put in place for the job.

Halimah also faced further criticism as the presidency this year was reserved for a particular ethnic group. The government had previously explained this was to allow representation of minority groups in a predominantly ethnically Chinese country.

She will be the first Malay head of state in 47 years.

The strict criteria put in place let many to believe that Halimah had been “selected”, and “not elected” for the presidency.

#HalimahYacob is #NotMyPresident She was #SelectedNotElected

— Nazeem (@nazeem) September 13, 2017

Singapore #PE2017 summarized pic.twitter.com/ObjjOdKZuK

— Agrim Singh (@agrimsingh) September 11, 2017

Here’s to progress #PE2017 pic.twitter.com/yf0BoXD9FV

— mooroo (@mooroomania) September 12, 2017

Can’t lose a presidential election if you’re the only approved candidate #singapore #PE2017 pic.twitter.com/796ApmThoj

— ILKJ (@IanLeong93) September 11, 2017

Some even marked their posts with the hashtag #NotMyPresident, which first emerged as a reaction to Trump’s presidency.

Halimah is #NotMyPresident #Singapore #VotingRights

— Iris (@Iris_Lok_ML) September 13, 2017

Nothing personal against Mdm Halimah. Respect her as a Muslim but still #NotMyPresident due to the deceit.

— Adam Satria Premanon (@MasterPremanon) September 13, 2017

The President of Singapore has limited powers. The country’s head of state has traditionally been its Prime Minister.

Halimah, who will be sworn into office on Thursday, will serve as the president for the next six years.

WATCH: Live out your childhood dream of pure destruction in this rage room

Read more: http://mashable.com/2017/09/13/singapore-elections-halimah-yacob/

09.06.17 mobile wallet

Asia gets a new mobile wallet, and surprise, it’s not from a bank or payment company

Finally, people in Singapore are about to get an easier and quicker way to send money to a friend, via a mobile wallet app.

But surprisingly, it’s not coming from a bank or payment company — it’s coming from ride-hailing app, Grab.

SEE ALSO: You can now pay for public transport in China’s capital with Android phones

Grab, Uber’s biggest competition in Southeast Asia, on Wednesday announced users will be able to transfer funds in the app’s wallet between users, without fees.

They can do it by sending money over to a mobile number registered with Grab, or by physically scanning a friend’s QR code.

Image: GRAB

Image: grab

The function is similar to what users have with China’s WeChat and Alipay wallets — arguably the world leaders in simple peer-to-peer fund transfers.

But it’ll lack one key thing that the Chinese apps have. Your money in the Grab wallet can’t be transferred out to a bank account.

That means whatever you have in there needs to be spent on rides or to be sent back to other friends.

1,000 street vendors are coming

By the end of the year though, Grab plans to announce a raft of 1,000 small merchants in Singapore that’ll be on board, allowing you to pay with a scan of their QR codes.

Now we’re talking. The biggest barriers to cashless adoption in cash-reliant Southeast Asia are infrastructure and bank fees.

To take a credit card, a street vendor would have to get a point-of-sale system that works with MasterCard or Visa, and pay fees of between 1 percent and 3 percent on each transaction.

Alipay and Wechat, on the other hand, revolutionised the Chinese market with the simple QR code scanner, and far lower fees of less than 1 percent.

Grab hasn’t announced its merchant fee structure yet. But if it’s acceptably low to the small retailer, it could really help unshackle users here from carrying cash around.

In Singapore, at least, the cashless options haven’t been quite as slick as what China has. Recently, the country’s banks jointly announced a way to pay friends from your mobile banking app.

That process requires a 2FA token or SMS code, and way too many taps, in comparison to what Grab is showing off right now.

Local bank DBS has a QR code P2P payment option, but again it requires fiddling with 2FA codes. DBS has been trying to get small merchants onboard, to its credit.

For Grab, its headstart into the market with 1,000 merchants in Singapore (and presumably way more in the region) may well further entrench users in relying on the app, beyond calling for rides.

Grab already claims about 72 percent market share for private vehicle sharing, and 95 percent for taxis in Southeast Asia, where it’s in seven countries fighting Uber.

It also processes 1 billion payment transactions annually for rides, but it’s got to prepare to add merchants to that load soon.

So while the country continues to look for a way to go cashless, Grab’s already out of the gates. It’ll be interesting to see who’s next on its tail.

WATCH: Should we even really worry about GMOs?

Read more: http://mashable.com/2017/08/30/grab-wallet-singapore/

09.06.17 Merchant Services

Google Wifi comes to Asia, hitting Singapore first

Image: google

UPDATE: Aug. 30, 2017, 4:29 p.m. SGT Google has launched Hong Kong availability, in addition to Singapore.

Google Wifi has launched in Asia, making mesh Wi-Fi easier for the average man on the street — but there’s a catch.

The Wi-Fi router package is now available in Singapore and Hong Kong.

But for its Asian debut, Google Wifi is going to be a little harder to access, compared with Western countries. 

SEE ALSO: Never worry about WiFi deadzones again with eero

Unlike its off-the-shelf availability in the U.S. — where you can buy the product in Best Buy stores in person, or online via Amazon or Google’s own online store — users in Singapore will have to sign up for a two-year contract with StarHub, one of the local internet operators.

Three should cover most homes up to about 4,000 sq ft.

Image: google

StarHub will then send staff to your home to install routers for you, and you’ll be locked into a S$15 a month ($11 USD) contract for the next 24 months.

And in Hong Kong, you get two Wifi routers — not three — with a 30-month broadband subscription of HK$258 ($33) per month with provider, HKT.

The Hong Kong deal with HKT, like the Singapore one, is exclusive.

On the other hand, in the U.S. you can pick up a three-pack for $299, or $129 for a single router unit, no strings attached.

Exclusive? That’s so not Google’s style.

Google Wifi is already available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, New Zealand, the UK, and the U.S. And yes, you can get it via Google’s online stores in those countries.

In Asia, Google’s online Store is available to users in Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and India.

Singapore doesn’t have a Google Store yet. So the tie-up with StarHub could simply be an easier way for Google to reach consumers here.

But exclusive? That’s so not Google’s style.

When we asked Martin Geh, Google’s managing director for Asia-Pacific hardware partnerships, he couldn’t comment on how long Google’s deal with StarHub is slated for. He did, however, acknowledge that it was “rare” for Google to have similarly exclusive arrangements in other markets.

Image: google

Braver and more technical users might feel tempted to entirely bypass the whole lock-in deal and directly Amazon themselves a set, but Alex King, a Google Wifi product manager said that isn’t advisable.

He noted that different regions have unique channel regulations, and a Google Wifi router made for the U.S. might not play well with devices here.

Moreover, you won’t get much support or a warranty if you do that, since the support in Singapore is provided by StarHub.

According to a Redditor in Japan, who tried installing a set from the U.S. shortly after launch, he wasn’t able to access a handful of sites, including Netflix.

He said a Google spokesperson told him:

The reason for this is that U.S. use different channels than other countries. Since Google Wifi is currently only available in North America, the hardware for Google Wifi only supports channels that are available for that region.

So exclusive or otherwise, users in Singapore and Hong Kong might have to consider signing on with the respective internet providers, if they want Google Wifi badly.

Image: google

WATCH: Charge your electric car with these inductive roads as you drive

Read more: http://mashable.com/2017/08/29/google-wifi-singapore-starhub/

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