Based in Taipei, Andy manages an extremely knowledgeable team of associates serving fintech firms, banks and broker-dealers across Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong and rest of Asia . The team has grown under Andy’s leadership to further support their clients’ innovation. He currently serves as the Director of FIDA (The Fintech Industry Development Association), an organization he founded in early 2017. As a Certified Financial Analyst (CFA), he is also a member of The Supervisory Board and Chair of the Membership Committee of the CFA Society Taiwan, a non-profit organization to advance the investment profession by enhancing investment knowledge and encouraging high ethical and professional standards throughout Taiwan.
The Challenge: Fintech for Financial Institutions
It was in 2016 that I was working with Taiwan’s leading broker on their prop desk. I was the trader that researched, invested and traded in the U.S. stock market. As a result of this participation, I discovered several sizable U.S.-based companies evolving their businesses in the brokerage industry using low-cost exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and robo-advisory offerings.
The senior vice president gave me a big challenge: to setup a fintech project within our company. This way of thinking was not unusual for financial services firms just a couple years ago because at that time, the idea of “fintech” was relatively new in Taiwan and our company was also a traditional broker that typically didn’t embrace new ways of doing things. As we were trying to do this fintech project using a B2B solution, my first action step was to take two trips to Singapore to meet with fintech startups.
I felt it was also essential to find a great U.S. fintech partner to work with. Our initial idea was to create a fractional shares service and enable people (especially Taiwan’s younger generation) to invest in low-cost ETFs instead of higher-cost mutual funds. ViewTrade was the primary B2B provider I chose to help us lead this project.
Building a Fintech Trading Platform
ViewTrade was not only our U.S. trading partner, but also helped us better understand the mechanics of U.S. trading and how fractional shares trading worked. We did compare ViewTrade to other well-known firms, but I chose ViewTrade because they took a consultative approach and most importantly, I immediately knew they cared about our firm and our project.
A few years later, ViewTrade offered me a tremendous opportunity to enable Asian brokers to reproduce for their own clients the solution we created. I was hired as ViewTrade’s first employee to head up their Asia operations and to continue my dreams of enabling other financial services companies to create fintech solutions.
Earlier this year we helped Taiwan’s leading broker to launch fractional shares within the Financial Services Commission (FSC) fintech regulatory sandbox. This journey has become more and more interesting since then.
At ViewTrade we offer a consultative approach to help new fintech initiatives thrive. I’ve taken an active role in helping to advance fintech projects in Taiwan:
FIDA: Bringing Industries Together
In June 2019 ViewTrade Holding Corporation organized and hosted the first ViewTrade/Orbis Fintech Challenge at National Taipei University. It was a fintech competition for teams of students in Taiwan to generate and pitch new ideas in the field of financial technology for a chance to participate in an internship program.
Through we have multiple links to the TSS, we met a managing director of TSS in the fintech space (a regulator-sponsored fintech accelerator) and last year ViewTrade was invited to become a corporate member of The Innovators Club,
the first cross-industry corporate innovation community in Taiwan. It is an honor to participate in events alongside several highly-regarded companies such as Roche, Audi, Nivea, Line bank, and EasyCard driving innovation forward in Asia.
If you work with a startup firm or a traditional financial service firms that is interested in expanding your brokerage solutions or innovating through technology, contact us. We have two decades of experience working with banks, broker-dealers, advisors and Fintech firms across four continents, and we would love to help your firm too.
