Zurich, courtesy of David Biedert

Voice of FinTech, is a podcast mapping out the Swiss and European FinTech scene. It aims to inspire entrepreneurs to start new ventures and connect them with various key actors and resources in the ecosystem. In case you missed out on September episodes, here are the highlights:

digitalswitzerland — Platform to drive digital transformation across the country

with Matthias Zwingli

An interview with Matthias Zwingli, Program Manager Start-up Enablement at digitalswitzerland.

Matthias describes what digitalswitzerland would like to achieve in the Swiss start-up ecosystem. He explains that while there are incredible start-ups in Switzerland from a technological perspective, they often lack the speed when trying to grow. Most of the start-ups take ten years to achieve some scale, which is very slow (even though there is a lot of deep tech and health tech in Switzerland, which effects it a little bit). Moreover, start-ups in Switzerland often grow only to the SME level with around 50 staff. That’s why Matthias and his team strive to foster the global spirit in Swiss start-ups. They firmly believe that digital businesses are not meant to be built just for 8 million people, but for the world!

RegPac revolution and F10 Hackathon Singapore

with Mona Zoet

An interview with Mona Zoet, founder of RegPac Revolution, RegTech ecosystem builder & accelerator based in Singapore and F10 Hackaton Singapore’s local partner.

Mona describes the state of RegTech and the start-up scene in Singapore and contrasts it with the one in Switzerland / Europe. Mona explains that the FinTech (and especially RegTech) start-ups in Europe have started much earlier than in Singapore. The FinTech “movement”, whether it was called that way or not yet back then, accelerated in Europe right after the financial crisis. The FinTech scene in Asia started to develop much later, although especially Singapore has been accelerating its development on numerous fronts in the last few years. This development is driven mostly by the government’s ambition to turn Singapore into a preeminent financial services hub and a smart city. However, at a “working-level,” cooperation between incumbents and start-ups is still much more commonplace in Switzerland and the rest of Europe. Singapore and South East Asia are catching up fast at all levels, though!

Union Park Ventures: From a banker to a VC investor

with Jatin Rajput

An interview with Jatin Rajput, partner at New York based Union Park Ventures, about his transition from banking to VC investing and his views on technology trends impacting financial services and the global economy as a whole.

We talk about emerging technologies like blockchain, AI and IoT and 5G, and how they will make the storage and transmission of data and value much faster and cheaper. That will enable a lot of P2P interaction, which will, in turn, disintermediate much of the intermediation infrastructure that has been built over the years. This trend is effectively the heart of the thesis of Jatin’s fund. Jatin and his partners are looking at the following broad themes within this thesis: a) bridging technology and solutions which will enable the move from the way the economic model structure today towards a more data-centric decentralized set up, b) digital assets and decentralized applications which will effectively be built on that infrastructure and c) embedded finance, which is the transaction layer embedded within the user experience.

Enterprise Bot — Founder(s) story: Customer service that works!

with Ravina Mutha and Pranay Jain

An interview with Ravina Mutha and Pranay Jain, co-founders of Enterprise Bot about their (sometimes adventurous) entrepreneurial journey so far!

In this interview, I asked Ravina and Pranay why their bot is better than anyone else’s. In other words, what is their unique advantage? Ravina responds:

If I were to answer that question in two words, it would be: It works!

Ravina explains that people often underestimate how difficult it is to make an enterprise-ready chatbot. Most existing chatbots fail to function correctly. When a user types in a request without having to do multiple clicks (similar to IVR (Interactive Voice Response)) over the phone, chatbots often respond with “I’m sorry I don’t understand, can you rephrase that?” again and again…

That’s why Enterprise Bot focuses on leveraging natural language processing (“NLP”) technology. Their core focus is to understand how humans ask their questions in different languages, for instance, in English, German, French, Italian, or Dutch. Their bot is learning continuously by using NLP and then provides the response that makes sense to humans, unlike most other chatbots.

For comments or suggestions, please e-mail us at info@voiceoffintech.com. Happy to hear from you! Thank you!