Fortune Innovation Forum 2024 - The Future of Finance: Are We Moving Beyond Banks?

As part of the “Financial Mega Event Week”, Fortune hosted a world-class event - Fortune Innovation Forum 2024 on 27 March 2024. 

Below were some key points made during the panel discussion:

1. Based on an analysis by a US-based fintech VC, the financial returns (IRR) of B2B outperformed B2C fintechs by a staggering factor of over 6X! This is because B2B fintech solutions can more easily scale across different jurisdictions (often without having to apply for licenses) and B2B often require much lower customer acquisition costs than B2C fintechs.
2. Roughly 2/3 of fintech organisations in Hong Kong are B2B because Hong Kong, as a leading international financial centre, has thousands of financial institutions for the fintech solution providers to sell to / collaborate with. (I.e., Most fintechs have the mindset of collaborating with the banks / financial institutions, much more so than drastically disrupting the existing financial system order.)
3. While the use case of wholesale CBDC is more obvious (e.g., cross-border remittance), Hong Kong has been pioneering the experimentation of retail CBDC where PoC use cases by different leading financial institutions and fintech firms were announced by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) in Q4 2023 to inspire more innovation.

Revisit the session now.