Category: Tech

APAC banking app security report

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

Check it out :: https://letstalkpayments.com/launch-of-the-latest-security-report-on-bank-apps-in-apac-at-singapore-fintech-festival/

Highlights:

The report reveals that 85% of mobile banks were vulnerable to high, medium and low security loopholes and over 50% of apps were found to have at least four to six bugs in them.

Here are the key threats to the mobile banking applications that were studied:

  • 13% of the mobile banking applications had broken trust for SSL
  • 15% of the mobile banking applications had Remote Code Execution through the Javascript interface
  • 10% of the mobile banking applications had insufficient Transport Layer Protection
  • 12% of the mobile banking applications had derived crypto keys
  • 26% had other threats that could harm the security of their mobile banking applications

For more info – you can grab the report here :: https://medici.letstalkpayments.com/research-categories/security-report-of-top-100-mobile-banking-apps-apac

https://www.appknox.com/ and https://devknox.io/

Happy mobile banking day!

Is anywhere ever the capital of anything?

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

Adding this interesting tweet::

Was reading Term Sheet today and came across this.

http://fortune.com/2016/11/15/term-sheet-tuesday-november-15/ :

• The Capital of Fintech: There’s apparently a fight, or battle, or race on between cities to become the Capital of FinTech. Hubs, scenes, ecosystems “capitals,” and various spins on the phrase Silicon Valley are overrated.

I see the benefit of mentorship, available capital, and attracting talent, but I don’t quite see the value in fighting over who has the most and biggest. Berlin’s economy minister launched a letter-writing campaign to beg London fintech companies to move. Singapore and Hong Kong are battling with government-sponsored conferences. Does there really need to be a winner? Can’t fintech just be an everywhere thing? (PS. I can’t help but think this is a sign that the fintech frenzy, and its related valuations, might hitting its peak.)

She is referring to this article :: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/15/business/dealbook/where-finance-and-technology-come-together.html

Several cities around the world are competing to become the capital, or at least one of the regional capitals, of fintech. If the young financial technology industry has the transformative effect that some have imagined, the contest could also determine the future capitals of finance as a whole.

And then of course for Asia the often coffee chat is around Singapore or Hong Kong:

Hong Kong has lots of competition from Singapore, which recently started its own aggressive effort to become a capital of fintech. Singapore has begun offering some of the same inducements as Hong Kong, including its first fintech week.

Last year, more fintech companies in Singapore raised money from venture capitalists than did in Hong Kong, but the Singapore companies raised less money in sum than those in Hong Kong, according to data from Accenture.

Funny enough all this is happening during FinTech week in Singapore. 🙂

My take is just like the blockchain frenzy we are at peak hype cycle for FinTech – in other words, Peak of Inflated Expectations. Buzzword bingo at its finest. I personally don’t think there will be a capital of FinTech but I could be wrong. 

This goes with my feeling that the only Silicon Valley will be …. Silicon Valley. Same as the next Amazon is still most likely Amazon.

As Erin alludes to – the power of a network, capital, mentors and the support system for a given vertical trend is great but products can be built by people anywhere for anywhere but maybe it helps to be in a Singapore or Hong Kong for some things but not always. Example is Abra based in California but product focused on the Philippines. 

In general though I think some of the core advances in FinTech are more practical and structural and may not need to be based anywhere special. In hearing Neal Cross from DBS the other day he mentioned that DBS has 40% profit margins so chasing the hype of FinTech is silly unless it can beat what they already do. Hint, hint – the banks don’t have a lot of interest in disrupting themselves so focusing on them or their financial centers may not be the answer.

I find it funny that the issues still plaguing banks and how fixing them is little to do with hardcore FinTech. Take for example that all the Singapore banks require you to use a hardware token generator. Mine ran out of battery the other day and I filled out paper forms to turn it in and to get a new one. New one had to be mailed to me and until I got it, I was not able to transact. Yes I know they have SMS tokens but they are for view only – not paying my bills.

Why can’t the bank know I don’t have my token for 5 days but allow me to do transactions that I always do? Pay the power bill for example but don’t let me add a new payee since that could be suspicious activity. Why can’t they use a software based token generator? Why can’t they use touchID on my phone? Why can’t they use my voice?

My point is that practical use cases for disruption in finance may not be connected to having to be in FinTech central.

Back to reality …

We’ve had our share of churn.

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

Another Mumbrella post about HOOQ :: http://www.mumbrella.asia/2016/11/hooq-to-launch-in-singapore-in-january/

I have, obviously, talked about this before :: http://www.nokpis.com/2016/11/08/growing-pains-comical-excuse-for-the-truth/

A couple of things in the new post that are interesting. It seems the CXO churn is starting to hurt a little bit and HOOQ is now deciding to try and comment on it some. I think Krishnan is actually being pretty honest here:

Rajagopalan conceded: “We’ve had our share of churn.”

“It’s been combination of what’s natural for a startup, and the unique context of Hooq as a brand. It’s a startup that has deep-pocketed investors who have certain expectations. That has contributed to churn in certain ways, as has different personalities that have joined us.”

High churn has meant that Hooq has taken longer than previously to bring in new people.

“We’ve been careful about replacing the CXO suite. This time we want to make sure have the right people in place,” said Rajagopalan, who said that Hooq staff needed to be comfortable in both a startup and corporate environment.

I think the issue with HOOQ is that people go there expecting it to be like a startup. Unfortunately it is nothing like a startup except for the fact that it is a new company. What happens is employees, like myself, join expecting to work in a place similar to a startup but not knowing that there are three shareholders that are nothing like a startup. All that is okay but HOOQ is essentially just a mini video arm of Singtel and we all know Singtel is not a startup. This culture clash has probably been the major driver of churn across the CXO suite and into many of the other groups at HOOQ. Such is life.

It is also smart that they are being careful about how to replace the CXO team with folks who understand what they are signing up for.

Then this:

He pointed to Singtel’s acquisition of marketing business Amobee, which the telco acquired in 2012, as an example of another company that took a while to settle in to corporate life with the telco giant.

Hard to know from the outside how Amobee is doing. It may take years to know how it all went.

https://adexchanger.com/publishers/amobee-sunsets-ssp-lays-off-around-5-employees/

Lots of ad exchanges are struggling so the layoffs might be needed to compete globally. It is a tough space for sure.

As to HOOQ entering Singapore – this part I am baffled by. I have a hard time understanding how a product that makes sense for the emerging markets, Singapore is NOT an emerging market, would do well in Singapore.

However I think this is actually more akin to what HOOQ is becoming. Just a video product for Singtel to use in their network. Potentially that is the future of HOOQ – as a subsidiary of Singtel, yes it is JV but run like a subsidiary, to be the video product for the Singtel network. This might be a great business – who knows yet. However it means competitors like iFlix are starting to run in a league of their own as they move to be in all emerging countries regardless of their telco partnerships.

This then points to a larger debate to have. Is the OTT market in emerging markets going to be won by a large player cutting across many regions? Will the Netflix/Amazon’s of the world slowly be the global player? Or will a company like HOOQ, focused on servicing their telco parent, be the model? I don’t know.

I wouldn’t profess to see the future but I tend to think that a proper startup might have a better chance but at the same time the global players will probably have the best tech and the best content. However the telcos in Asia are quite powerful.

Let the games begin.

Tools

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

Will leave this right here:

I posted this page yesterday which I will keep updating as I go. Nothing groundbreaking but figured this was easier than banging out an email each time someone asked about Singapore. 

http://www.nokpis.com/singapore-101/

Carrying on. 

What a glorious time to be in the tech biz when it comes to all the tools being made for tech. I will leave on the table for a future post another subject to cover which is all the tools made for non tech and the investment opportunities that will provide.

I tend to break things down into speciality tools (like sketch for example), white collar tools (slack, office) and blue collar tools (stacck).

The white collar tool space is on fire and it is amazing to see old stalwarts like Microsoft make a comeback. Personally have always loved office and the iOS office stack is pretty killer. Makes Google docs look like toys for the most part. One of the crummy aspects of going iPad Pro only as been how lame Google docs is on iOS. Now with Microsoft shipping teams, I am curious to play with it and see how it goes.

Link on FB about all the troubles people are having trying to used teams :: https://www.facebook.com/dsobeski/posts/10157747558430008

As to Slack. I am a fan and have been using it for the past three companies, but honestly it is feeling stale since not much has changed with it over the last year or so. I think they should have moved faster to deal with docs better since no matter how deep I am into slack I still have to find another tool for documents. And for me that default is office. I think Microsoft knows the score here. Slack should have used their cash to buy their way out of this problem. Or innovated. Now I am tempted to check out teams since I already use office.

Google. Well. Not a fan anyway but docs works and is great for collaboration but again it is so stale. Not much innovation and the mobile side of it generally sucks. I would dump it in a heartbeat.

There are other tools I have tried but I just don’t stick with them. Asana is one of those. I give it a whirl each time but it’s just overkill and I usually drop it.

Trello seems to be a winner and I should probably get better at using it. 

Facebook for work I have not tried and I probably won’t. I get it and I can see they have put some work into it but Facebook doesn’t care about the enterprise. Which means this is not a focus for them and I doubt it ever will be.

Personally I have used for a long time and will keep using Evernote but I don’t do the group stuff with it. It’s just my personal brain and I like it that way.

I am sure I have missed some other stuff. However I generally find that email is still a killer app and under utilitized. I think AI is going to make email even more powerful and people will realize that everything as chat is not the answer.

Use the comments to obviously prove me wrong. 😉