SEA
Merely three years ago, peer to peer (P2P) lending in China was hailed as the banks of tomorrow and the harbinger of financial innovation. The new elites in jeans and T-shirts would show the suited up old guard how finance is supposed to work. Then it all came crumbling down. What can Southeast Asia learn from China’s P2P crisis? (KrASIA)
Seed deals in Indonesia have flattened for the last 4 years, says Nikhil Kapur, Principal, GREE Ventures. Read more on Indonesia’s early stage fatigue here. (KrASIA)
Singapore payment services firm NETS Group today said that it’s signed a partnership with Chinese financial institution UnionPay to make its cashless wallet app NETSPay usable overseas — for the first time. Consumers will be able to use the NETSPay app to make purchases at over 7.5 million UnionPay QR code merchants and almost 12 million QuickPass contactless acceptance points globally. (KrASIA)
China
China Renaissance is set to list on the HKEx on 27th September. This Chinese investment bank is looking to raise US$400m and has reportedly posted a 100% year-on-year increase in operating income from US$54.2 million in H1 2017 to US$108 million for H1 2018. (KrASIA)
The certified accountant who has been the driving force that transformed Alibaba’s old-school commerce into the ‘’New Retail’’ is now set to take Jack Ma’s place to become the future chairman of Alibaba Group. Under his leadership, Alibaba saw its shares jump by 87%, beating one of Alibaba’s closest rival Tencent Holdings Ltd. (Deal Street Asia)
Fei-Fei Li, the current head of Google Cloud, will leave the company and return to her professorship at Stanford University. She led artificial intelligence and machine learning research at Google for 2 years. Some examples of her key research areas include deep learning, reinforcement learning, and language and vision. (Technode)
Elsewhere
Big tech companies such as Google parent Alphabet, Facebook, and Amazon are impeding competition, and they need to be broken up, a U.S. digital media expert warned on Thursday. He argues that as they diversify their business to venture into new areas, they would easily stifle competitors by utilising their platform strength. (CNBC)
After Baird and Bernstein analysts published bullish reports on Tesla, the company saw its shares jump by 8% on Monday afternoon to reach a price of US$285.5 apiece. Despite the recent boost, its shares are still 20% lower than a month ago. (CNBC)
Snap Inc’s chief strategy officer Imran Khan is the company’s latest top-level exit. This news comes at a time when Snap Inc is facing mounting pressure to stop the falling user numbers, following a controversial redesign of the app. (Reuters)
London-based Ravelin secures 8 million pounds in a Series B financing round. This company relies on machine learning to help e-commerce companies to fight and predict the risk of fraud. Some of the investors in this round include Passion Capital, BlackFin Capital Partners, and Playfair Capital etc. (TechCrunch)
British Airways breach was caused by credit card skimming malware installed on the airline’s website a few months ago, researchers at a security firm says. More than 380,000 credit cards information was stolen over a three-week period. (TechCrunch)
Convenience store chain 7-Eleven says it’s bringing Google Pay and Apple Pay to most of its U.S. stores. 7-Eleven has around 66,579 stores across 17 countries as of this June, while the U.S. accounts for 14% of its market share. On the other hand, it seems most of the chain store’s franchises in China have long accepted mobile payment such as Alipay and WeChat pay. (TechCrunch)