Kara Tham and Goh Wei Hao of Top Image Systems during their demo at FinovateAsia 2016.

Two of the companies in today’s Fintech Favorites, IBM and ACI Worldwide, led presentations at our developers conference, FinDEVr, earlier this year. FinDEVr returns to New York City, 21/22 March 2017, and will make its London debut in June 2017.

Fintech in Asia

• Thailand’s KBank will deploy IBM’s (FD16) Hyperledger blockchain infrastructure to make it easier to manage complex corporate credit business processes. The bank initially is piloting the technology as a way to certify Letters of Guarantee.

• “Leading by example,” in the words of Lawrence Ang, MAS has published its first set of data APIs this week. The 12 APIs include datasets on exchange and interest rates; they are part of what Ang, executive director of MAS’s IT dept., says is part of an effort to “encourage financial industry players to publish open APIs on their datasets.” Ang says more datasets will be published as APIs “in the coming months.”

Blockchain

• KBank’s use of Hyperledger is part of a growing trend toward deploying blockchain technology to simplify and improve business transactions. IBM Technical Evangelist Stefania Kaczmarczyk discussed the opportunities in blockchain technology during her FinDEVr Silicon Valley presentation last month, “Implementation of the Hyperledger Project at IBM with Blockchain-as-a-Service.”

Payments

• PYMNTS.com interviews W.A. Proctor, VP and product line manager of UP Immediate Payments at ACI Worldwide (FD16) in the wake of the company’s announcement that it would partner with VocaLink to bring end-to-end payments to FIs.

It’s a bot world after all

• Among the four companies to win Best of Show at FinovateAsia was Finn.ai (F16), with its white-label, virtual bank assistant.

• Bots are no longer bound to the two-dimensions of a smartphone screen. City Union Bank in Chennai, India, has launched Lakshmi, an AI bot housed in the body of a humanoid robot that responds in English (“and a range of physical gestures”?!) to “generic questions” on more than 125 subjects. The robot, which stands about 20 inches tall and is being tested at HDFC Bank’s innovation lab, can also provide more detailed information such as transaction history on its display screen.

Regtech

• Mizuho Bank’s subsidiary in the Netherlands is the latest FI to implement risk and regulatory reporting technology from Wolters Kluwer. Along with BGFI, Banco Santander, Taiwan Business Bank, Bank BGZ BNP Paribas, and its parent Mizuho Bank, Mizuho Bank Nederland N.V. will deploy OneSumX to help it meet new regulatory changes from the Dutch National Bank. These changes include providing reports adopting the global standard Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) when producing financial reports.