Technology Awards 2018 – Best Fintech Partnership/Collaboration

2018 Winners

BEST FINTECH PARTNERSHIP/COLLABORATION

FINCHAT

Bill Eng
CEO,
FinChat

FinChat makes social messaging (WhatsApp/WeChat/LINE etc.) compliant and productive for enterprises who love to freely use these apps to engage clients in lieu of traditional compliant channels such as emails, plain old telephone, or SMS.

Actionable insights can be extracted from captured chats like never before, for use in non-compliance alerts, improving service quality, business intelligence, remote KYC, client onboarding, chat-bots and business continuity etc.

We are grateful for the many exciting partnerships in digital transformation with various visionary banks, insurers, asset managers, wealth advisors, family offices, law firms, traders/brokers/dealers and many more looking to transcend the status quo in client management.

Two heads are better than one — especially when one of those heads is a pioneer in Singapore’s burgeoning fintech space and the other is the biggest bank in the city-state. Such collaborations have the potential to solve the seemingly incongruous challenges of remaining compliant with increasingly stringent banking regulations and offering the region’s private banking clients a convenient banking-related communications solution.

In September 2018, FinChat and DBS Wealth Management officially rose to the challenge, releasing a compliant social messaging service, Wealth Chat — an industry-first for private banks in Southeast Asia.

Following a seamless and paperless onboarding process, DBS’s HNW clients in Singapore can now interact with their relationship managers over third-party instant messaging services — such as WhatsApp, WeChat, and LINE — with the peace of mind that all client-RM exchanges are archived on-premise or on the cloud in accordance with regulators’ compliance standards without infringing upon clients’ rights to privacy. Only business communications are captured — private chats remain just that: private.

Not only does the device-agnostic service adequately respond to the demands of wealthy Asian clients for more convenient channels of communication, but also to those of digital-savvy millennials — including successful entrepreneurs and successors of family fortunes — who typically prefer social messaging over traditional forms of communication.

On the relationship manager front, Wealth Chat supports BYOD (bring your own device) and corporate devices. Through the application, RMs can provide their clients with general advisory services, such as research, and pass on certain documents, such as those describing the market conditions relating to the client’s portfolio. Looking forward, FinChat intends to enable relationship managers to sign off on clients’ trade and order requests through the service.

Unsurprisingly, DBS Wealth Management is not FinChat’s only client. The fintech firm is also working with other top global and regional banks, family offices, asset managers, insurers, and trading and securities houses to create similar solutions for their wealthy clients in Asia.

FinChat is the winner of Asian Private Banker’s Best Fintech Partnership/Collaboration award for 2018.