eXponential Finance

bloXroute created the first high-performance blockchain distribution network (BDN) with the fastest relay solution for Ethereum, BNB Chain, Polygon, and Solana. The bloXroute BDN and DeFi trading tools allow its users to win at crypto trading.

The BDN utilizes a global network of servers optimized for network performance. Nodes access this network through open-source gateways and users can access it through the bloXroute public-API.

The BDN network propagates blockchain transactions and blocks closer to the speed of light. It provides traders with the speed and reliability required for crypto transactions. bloXroute is the leader in mempool services, block streaming and anything Defi performance. The BDN also allows blockchains to scale by speeding the time it takes to communicate the current state. The BDN's fast communication reduces the blocks’ size and frequency limits. This is true for all consensus mechanisms, including Proof of Stake, Proof of Work, and DAGs.

Produced in collaboration with Tokyo FinTech. If you have an interesting story to share with our audience, and would like to appear on the podcast, please contact us via 

Zurich Insurance has made a significant stride in the insurance industry by introducing its cutting-edge suite of solutions for digitally embedded insurance across all Asian markets, Zurich Edge.

Zurich Edge represents an exciting development in Zurich Insurance’s growth strategy across the Asia Pacific region. The company already boasts a robust portfolio of over 200 partnerships in six markets, collaborating with leading brands in diverse sectors such as retail, travel, banking, fintech, e-commerce, automotive, and telecommunications. Among the prominent partners are Japan Airlines, TikTok, Citibank, and MYAirline.

We had the opportunity to discuss the platform, its rollout in Japan, and if/how the Japanese market is different from other markets in the region with Vy Pham, Regional Product Owner Digital Platforms, and Tetsuya Hattori, Head of Digital Partnerships (Japan).

Produced in collaboration with Tokyo FinTech. If you have an interesting story to share with our audience, and would like to appear on the podcast, please contact us via 

Shwetank Verma is a Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Leo Capital, an early stage venture capital fund focused on South and South-East Asia. Shwetank leads InsurTech investments at the fund.

We talk about some of Leo Capital’s investments, where the exciting incumbent insurer vs InsurTech markets are, and the outlook for fund raising going into 2024, among other things

Matthew Van Niekerk is a Co-Founder and the Chief Executive Officer at SettleMint, offering tooling for enterprises, public sector, and technology partners who want to innovate with blockchain and empower their technology organization.

In 2006, Matthew made Belgium his home and eventually worked as the Head of Platform Innovation at KBC Securities Bolero. Under his guidance, Bolero Crowdfunding was the first bank or broker in Europe to launch a publicly available blockchain application in Europe. In 2016, Matthew co-founded SettleMint.

Hugo Phillion is a Co-Founder and the Chief Executive Officer of Flare Network. Earlier in his career, Hugo was a commodity derivatives portfolio manager. When he got bored with traditional finance, he went on to study machine learning at University College London, where he met his two co-founders.

Aaron McDonald is the Chief Executive Officer of Futureverse, a technological and cultural foundation for the open metaverse where creators, companies and communities conjure their future. The Futureverse infrastructure enables companies and creators to deliver the open metaverse experience that they want for their audience. A seamless portal in and out of all apps in the metaverse, Futureverse allows users to travel with a passport, friends, communications, finances and content.

Masako Shiba is a New York base art professional with near two decades of experience, including at Sotheby’s NY, Japan Society Gallery, Asia Society Museum, and Asian Cultural Council where she was inaugural director for ACC Japan Foundation.

Since the pandemic, she has co-founded ONBD, a web3 art & culture platform, also co-founded BEAF an experimental art foundation, and is Chief Artistic Director for SPACETAINMENT PTE. LTD., showcasing art in space and of space. She is also external advisor for Japanese art startup AndArt, mentor for New Museum of Contemporary Art's NEW INC and on the advisory board for HH Dalai Lama official biography art project.

Phillip Lord is the President of Oobit. Oobit allows consumers to pay with crypto on existing Visa and Mastercard point of sale (POS) terminals with merchants receiving fiat money settlements the same way as other credit card payments.

Phillip has more than 25 years experience in global capital markets, where he has invested and structured deals in the US, Europe, Asia and Australia. He also has gained extensive knowledge of crypto markets, including coin/token issuance and decentralised exchanges and platforms.

Yoann Turpin is a Co-Founder of Wintermute, focused on Business Development and Ventures. Wintermute is a leading algorithmic liquidity provider in the digital asset space. Before starting Wintermute with his two co-founders, Yoann spent more than a decade in trading, investing, advising startups and building a few businesses.

Anjali Young is the Co-Founder of Collab.Land, an automated member management system for tokenized communities. Over 50,000 projects use Collab.Land as their primary tool for community management.

Anjali has a 30+ year history with online communities as a creator, member, and in leadership. She has also worked as a lawyer, adjunct professor, and early tech startup employee.

In addition to her interest in community and web3 onboarding, she has a passion for NFTs and the artists who create them.

Anjali is one of only a handful of web3 leaders to have received recognition from Salesforce, and is listed as one of its Web3 Advisory Board Members.

Anton Golub is a crypto serial entrepreneur and ecosystem builder. Anton founded & served as CEO of flovtec, a Swiss market-maker providing liquidity solutions to digital asset exchanges, token issuers & protocols and offering investment products for professional & institutional investors. Anton is also a co-founder of Trust Square AG, a pre-eminent blockchain technology hub located in Zurich's financial district. Previoulsy, Anton co-founded Lykke Corp, a blockchain-powered exchange to trade all assets with zero fees, where he served as a Chief Science Officer.

Dean McClelland is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Tontine Trust, a lifetime income solution. We had the pleasure of hosting Dean before, at our fifteenth Tokyo FinTech Meetup in 2018. This podcast is an edited version of our 182nd meetup. Five years have passed, and the focus has moved from Asia to Europe and now the US, where the launch is expected shortly.

Vishal Dalal is the International CEO at Pismo, a next generation banking and cards technology provider, founded in 2016 in Brazil. Previously a Partner at McKinsey, Vishal has worked in India, Singapore, Australia, and the UK. He discusses with us the origins and culture of Pismo, its positioning in the global next gen core banking market, the competitive advantage of product-focused software engineers in Brazil, and also shares some insights into the markets carrying the most importance for Pismo in the future, in Asia and beyond.

Swaap v2 is a non-custodial RfQ market-making infrastructure. It provides optimal liquidity services with built-in defensive modules – or "safeguards” – allowing for on-chain max drawdown circuit breaker, last look, and other dynamic forms of funds protection. LPs passively benefit from state-of-the-art market-making strategies originating from the stochastic control theory. Liquidity pools automatically compound fees, and are represented as ERC-20 tokens for simpler auditability and composability. The first strategy available will focus on optimizing LPs returns against “HODLing”.

Cyrille Pastour is a Co-Founder & Co-CEO at Swaap Labs, the creators of the Swaap Protocol, and Louis Bertucci is a Research Advisor from the Institut Louis Bachelier. Louis is also the editor of the "Hitchhiker's Guide to DeFi".

Masa Kikuchi is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Secured Finance. Masa is a former head of interest rate and foreign exchange derivatives structuring turned computer scientist, an evangelist of web3 technologies, and a task force member of the trusted web at the cabinet secretariat of Japan.

Secured Finance is on a mission to bring transparency, security, and robustness to the world of finance. With their decentralized finance protocol, they are reimagining traditional financial systems and making institutional-grade products accessible to everyone.

Lisa Nestor is the Chief Strategy Officer at Air TM. Lisa has spent her professional career researching, and then building solutions that economically empower individuals by improving their ability to access and participate in financial markets. At Airtm, Lisa is leveraging her background in digital assets, payments and ecosystem development to continue the expansion of Airtm’s digital dollar account - a first of its kind and category-defining product - and support the company in serving its next ten million users.

Airtm is an e-wallet connected to over 300 bank and e-money systems via a peer-to-peer network and direct bank connections. Users hold their money as dollars or cryptocurrency, and can send and receive funds domestically and internationally. Airtm also offers enterprises facilities to make bulk payments to digital workers in the global economy, paying "taskers" instantly and in a fully compliant way.

Benjamin Quinlan is the CEO and Managing Partner of Quinlan & Associates. He is the former Chairman of the FinTech Association of Hong Kong and currently chairs the Innovation & Technology Committee at the Australian Chamber of Commerce. In this conversation, we are taking a deep dive into a recently published Quinlan & Associates research report on the APAC Digital Banking Landscape, which illustrates the ongoing evolution of the digital banking sector in APAC, the opportunities and challenges facing digital banks in the region, and how they should be thinking about their path towards profitability.

You can download the report here: https://www.quinlanandassociates.com/apac-digital-bank-landscape/

Sam Ahmed is the Co-Founder and CEO of Smartpay, the first all-in-one payment experience and interest free buy now pay later solution built to solve Japanese consumer payment issues and improve merchant conversion rates. Sam is recognized as one of Asia Pacific premier digital economy leaders and investors, and has been on 4 Asia Pacific Executive Leadership Teams for USD +$20 billion businesses before founding Smartpay.

Sam has led blue chip brands across Starbucks (Retail) and Facebook, MasterCard (Technology) in Asia Pacific and Standard Chartered Bank globally driving accelerated revenue growth through Digital, CRM, marketing, communication, product & commercial sales innovation.

Sherry Jiang is the Co-Founder and CEO of Bluejay Finance. Previously, Sherry led growth and incentives marketing for Google Pay in India, where the product grew from 13m to more than 120m monthly active users. She started up Bluejay in 2021 to push the envelope even more when it comes to financial inclusion, outside of existing banking rails.

Bluejay helps investors get access to diversified and consistent returns through a decentralised fixed income protocol. It is a stablecoin based platform that allows people to invest in fixed income assets that are backed by real world financing opportunities like private credit.

If you would like to join Bluejay's private credit investor group to get the latest updates on the world of private credit investing and get connected with other like-minded investors, you can apply through the following TypeForm: https://lnkd.in/g7QfAejN

HomeDAO is the foundation of a network of technology entrepreneurs who live and build together. They have five hacker houses in Oxford and equip founders with all the resources necessary to make visions become reality.

Our conversation with Josh Lavorini, HomeDAO Co-Founder, and outdoteth, HomeDAO members traverses a wide range of topics:

- Introduction to HomeDAO

- Winning the ETHGlobal Hackathon (again)

- Is HomeDAO actually a DAO?

- Sample HomeDAO Projects

- HomeDAO as a mechanism to allocate scarce, highly skilled resources

- The role of ChatGPT & co-pilots at the top end of the software engineering universe

Ben Gleisner is the Founder and Global CEO at CoGo. Previously in a government role, Ben led the team that created Treasury's Living Standards Framework, and represented Treasury on New Zealand Government's International Climate Change negotiating team. Earlier this year, Ben was recognized as the Most Impactful Entrepreneur at the Pacific Basin Economic Council.

Cogo is a carbon footprint management product that helps individuals and businesses to measure, understand and reduce their impact on the climate. Cogo does this through partnerships with some of the world's largest banks to integrate leading carbon-tracking functionality into their banking apps.

Cogo uses best-in-class models to provide accurate ways to measure carbon emissions specific to local markets and cutting edge behavioural science techniques to nudge customers to make more sustainable choices.

Padmini Gupta is an award-winning banker and a World Economic Forum Global Leadership Fellow, who is now re-imagining financial services for 250 million migrant workers worldwide, and the billion people who depend on them through Rise, and now Xare. 

At the heart of finance is a big secret, that all financial products were built for income earners, but only 1/3rd of the world works and they support the 2/3rds with financial products.

Xare began in Jan 2021 to bridge that gap and enable the 2/3rds to better access the finance. Xare was built with the purpose to ‘reclaim the soul of banking for everyone’, and the mission to empower the one-third of the population that has an income, to share their financial resources with the two-third of the population that does not and establishing a fair financial system. We are on a mission to provide people with equal access to financial products.

On the Xare platform anyone can create financial instruments to share access to their money with their loved ones, anyone, anytime and anywhere. The process is seamless, safe and instant.

Dr. Sahin is a fully qualified German Lawyer with more than 15 years work experiences, financial regulatory and corporate legal affairs in Ireland, Germany and Japan with high knowledge in Japanese Law and its legal framework and business. He is currently seconded to KPMG Japan.

Dr. Sahin has earned his PhD in comparative law by analyzing Japanese insurance law, identifying influences and contrasting it with other jurisdictions. By working internationally, he has also developed a nuanced appreciation of the Japanese insurance market. Our discussion covers the origins of Japanese insurance law, and comparative analysis for starting up an insurance company, launching new products, and distributing said products in Japan vis-a-vis the EU.

Betterdata won the Silver Medal at the Tokyo Financial Awards 2022 (hosted by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government) in the Financial Innovation category!

Betterdata is a Singapore-based startup that applies Generative AI to create synthetic data that is privacy-preserving. This can be used to simulate ‘what-if’ situations for analysis, remove biases from datasets and enable open access to data with 100% compliance. In light of ever-increasing data privacy-regulations, the technology allows for a fast and cost-efficient handling of sensitive data, allowing Betterdata's clients to focus on business outcomes.

Charles d’Haussy is the CEO of the dydx Foundation, an independent not-for-profit foundation created to promote dYdX, the most powerful decentralized cryptocurrency exchange protocol.Previously, Charles was Global Head of Business Development at ConsenSys, a leading blockchain engineering company and the Head of Fintech with the Hong Kong government.

In our conversation, naturally, we cover the state of the dydx development from Version 3 to Version 4, the implications of moving from a Layer 2 implementation with Starkware to its own blockchain based on the Cosmos SDK, and why Charles has chosen dydx when he made a career change last year. We quickly move on towards forms of centralized and decentralized finance, and a hybrid form that Charles sees emerging. He is also optimistic with regards to Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), which he sees as the right human organization form at scale for the algorithm and digital age. Our host is a little skeptical given current fragmentation trends in globalization, but in the end it is the optimists who innovate and change the world, right?

Jonas Thürig is the Head of Tenity, a FinTech Incubator and Accelerator, in Singapore. Tenity has the mission to unite tech startups with big business to shape the future in banking and insurance. Previously Jonas worked at the Embassy of Switzerland in China as the Deputy Head of the Science, Technology, Education and Innovation Section. He also founded his own startup, and worked for the Swiss Stock Exchange.

Our conversation will cover Singapore, the broader ASEAN context, and some comparisons to China. From the Tenity Singapore Incubation Batch 4 that finished at the end of 2022, Jonas highlights Rocket Capital and TEORRA. Doconomy is also mentioned as one of the Tenity investments when we talk about ESG. 

Nicholas Wilde is the Managing Director APAC at Thought Machine. In his role, Nick works with banks and fintech firms to help them implement a built-for-purpose modern core – Vault - at the heart of their business. Vault, built by former Google engineers, helps organizations to solve some of the hardest problems in banking, discard the shackles of their legacy systems and reimagine their business for tomorrow.

At the Singapore FinTech Festival 2022, Nick was recognized as one of the Top Ten FinTech Leaders in Singapore. In this conversation, he shares with us his perspective on banking across the region, how incumbents vs challengers are positioned, and what drives the adoption of modern, cloud-based banking stacks, whether from a technical or business perspective. One path to implementation for incumbents is the roll up of "orphan cores" into a platform like Vault, consolidating various product-specific legacy systems that become hard to maintain onto a single core. With Standard Chartered as one of his clients, Nick also shares examples how Mox in Hong Kong has launched incrementally.

Rob Leslie is one of Ireland’s most well-known technology entrepreneurs. He is the Founder and CEO at Sedicii, and a Co-Founder and President of Nillion. Rob started working on zero knowledge proofs in 2011, and founded Sedicii in 2013, with the aim of creating the world's first distributed, public utility to facilitate the storage and processing of all kinds of data without the need to expose or share it, thereby protecting the privacy and confidentiality of the data. A true pioneer.

Nillion allows nodes in a decentralized network to work in a unique, non-blockchain, way. While Nillion represents a revolutionary leap from a predecessor technology known as Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMPC), unlike SMPC, network nodes do not have to communicate with one another. Unlike blockchain, nodes do not run immutable ledgers designed to store transaction data. Instead, new Nillion technology, called Nil Message Compute (NMC), is purpose built for decentralized secure storage and computation and thus opens up new use cases (on the Nillion native network), while also enhancing existing blockchains.

Jan Denecke is the Co-Founder and CEO of twelve by twelve, a Berlin-based startup at the intersection of Web3 and music. We will discuss in depth about what impact Web3 technologies will have, and also about how regulated securities token can support project financing in the music industry.

twelve x twelve combines expertise from different markets into an innovative online platform that transforms music into digital collectibles and community-accessible digital assets to be marketed to music fans, collectors and crypto enthusiasts.

The name twelve x twelve derives from the vinyl. The twelve inch by twelve inch masterpiece that carries both delectable sounds and visuals on its cover, finds itself at the grass root of their cause: in a world of streamed content and blurred ownership, twelve x twelve are shaping the Web 3.0 revolution and hope to reignite appreciation for music and visual arts in a whole new way.

During this episode of the Exponential Finance podcast, we have the opportunity to discuss the importance consumer empowerment across location, payments and loyalty with Batu Sat, Co-Founder & CEO of Mall IQ.

Mall IQ, Inc. is a San Francisco based company offering a highly scalable Location Intelligence & AI Platform for mobile applications that is store-level accurate indoors & outdoors without any hardware deployments.  Mall IQ is privacy-first, compliant with GDPR and equivalent regulations, empowering Financial Institutions & Fintechs, Loyalty Platforms and Retailers in delivering anonymous personalization.  Mall IQ solutions measure the purchase intent of customers in the physical world and makes it insightful and actionable for mobile apps.

This episode is a recording of our premiere on LinkedIn Audio, where we exchange our impressions from the Singapore FinTech Festival held the week prior. We get to discuss the state of payments and crypto, and the coming convergence of these sectors, central bank digital currencies, the emerging opportunity for credit & lending, the surprising lack of AI during the festival, the hype of ESG, some aspects of digital banking, and last but not least, the regional rivalry between Hong Kong and Singapore.

During this episode of the Exponential Finance podcast, we have the opportunity to take a deep dive into the Klaytn universe and David’s perspective on content distribution in a Web3 environment, the concept of “Proof of Me” as a decentralized identity, and some other topics.

Kevin Shimota is a leading specialist in digital products and platforms, having been a senior executive at WeChat (Tencent) with over a decade of experience in the industry. His ongoing work includes understanding innovations and trends coming out of Asia and how they will impact and adapt to the global community.

Having recently published "The First Super App", Kevin traces with us WeChat's history from the beginnings as the QQ desktop messenger, to the launch of WeChat through an internal competition as a mobile internet platform, the addition of "push to talk", company pages, payments, and finally mini-programs. Kevin reveals the secrets of Tencent's platform strategy and finally, answers the question "How does WeChat actually make money?".

In this episode, we talk about Sleek, the SMEs’ all-in-one digital platform, helping over 6000+ entrepreneurs to start and manage their businesses. Sleek effectively operates as the SMEs’ co-pilot for all back-office processing, so that the entrepreneurs can focus on growing their business.

Sleek is registered with the company registry and tax authorities of Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia and the United Kingdom. They are also regulated by the Monetary Authority of Singapore under the Payment Services Act, and have recently been issued a Major Payment Institution (MPI) license. Sleek has raised a USD 25m Series A in December 2021 from investors White Star Capital, Jungle Ventures, and EDBI. 

Adrien Barthel is a co-founder of Sleek, and the Chief Growth Officer. In addition to covering the company from its origins in Singapore through the expansion in different markets, and the building of a FinTech stack by obtaining the MPI license, we also talk to Adrien about the business intelligence generated on its platform, in comparing the Singapore and Hong Kong ecosystems, and some on-the-ground intelligence how the HK has reacted in the face of security laws and the pandemic (spoiler alert: Cathay Pacific's layoffs during the pandemic led to a spike in new entity formation).

In this episode, we first have the opportunity to discuss Japan's monetary policy under Bank of Japan Governor Kuroda, whose term expires next year, contrasting Japan's zero-interest-rate policy with the increasingly highly inflationary environment in the rest of the world. In the second part, we discuss certain aspects of the book "The Future of Financial Systems in the Digital Age", such as the payment system in Japan, and the approach to digital currencies.

Professor Franz Waldenberger has researched the Japanese economy since 1992, when he joined the German Institute of Japanese Studies (DIJ) as a senior research fellow, focusing on Japanese industrial organization, the employment system, and the financial system. Since 1997, as a professor for the Japanese economy at Munich University, Franz has extended his area of research to include corporate governance, Japan’s international economic relations, and most recently, fiscal and monetary policy. In 2014, he returned to Japan to head the DIJ as its Director.

In this episode, Tiffine Wang, Partner at MS & AD Ventures, an early stage venture fund backed by one of Japan’s – and the world’s – largest insurance groups, shares with us the stages of her career, and how this has shaped her investment approach. Tiffine is passionate about investing in big market bets that positively impact humanity and was voted as one of the Emerging Leaders in Corporate Venture Capital in 2021 and 2022. Most recently, Tiffany has been named “Women of Influence” by the Silicon Valley Business Journal.

MS&AD Ventures portfolio companies mentioned in this podcast (please check https://msad.vc/portfolio):
- Carro
- Paceline
- Socotra
- Geosite
- Blueberry
- Xare
- Multiplier
- Poko

In this episode, we explore the Latin American FinTech ecosystem through a conversation with Mariana Franza, Chief Operating Officer at Uala, a fintech app focused on driving financial inclusion. Founded in 2017 in Argentina, Uala started as a payment wallet, and has just obtained a banking license in its home market. Uala expanded to Mexico in 2020, where it is also currently in the process of acquiring a bank, and to Colombia in 2022, where it applied for a banking license organically.

"65% of our active users have never had a credit history."

"Cash is our worst enemy since it does not allow an economy to develop."

"In 2021, we digitalized USD 1bn in Argenina."

"Our lending facility grew 24 time year-on-year, even in a high inflationary environment."

"Of Latin America's 650m population, 25 percent are deemed as 'young', and approximately 50% are unbanked."

In this episode, we are going to talk about private markets with Oi-Yee Choo, Chief Executive Officer at ADDX. 

ADDX is among a few Singapore-based platforms dealing in private market securities, offering global funds, real estate investment trusts, structured products and pre-IPO shares at fractional ownership to investors. ADDX offers issuance, custody and trading of digital securities using distributed ledger technology and counts South Korea’s Hanwha Asset Management and Tokai Tokyo Financial Holdings among its backers.

Oi-Yee Choo has had a distinguished career in capital raising and mergers & acquisitions advisory before joining the startup world, most recently heading the investment banking business for UBS in Singapore.

In this episode, we are going to talk about compliance for crypto with Javier Tamashiro, Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer at Ospree.

Ospree has been founded in 2019, and bootstrapped ever since, launching their integrated suite of crypto compliance tools at the end of 2020, covering client onboarding, blockchain analytics, and the travel rule. Ospree has been initially focused on startup clients, and expects to rapidly grow with their successful ones. Their enterprise-scale product for first and second tier banks is also about to hit the market.

In this episode, we are going to take a close look at the FinTech ecosystem in Brazil. If you have not had this market on your radar screen yet, that likely changed with the record-breaking IPO of Nubank on the New York Stock Exchange towards the end of last year, making the company the largest digital banking platform outside of Asia.

The second focus of our conversation will be the work of the Brazilian Central Bank, which has been executing on a variety of initiatives at once, from Open Banking to a fast payments system called PIX, to a pilot of a central bank digital currency to commence soon.

Bruno Diniz is a partner at Spiralem Innovation Consulting, and Director of the Financial Data & Technology Association (FDATA) for Latin America. Bruno is also a columnist for magazines such as Exame magazine, FEBRABAN's Noomis portal and Cointelegraph, in addition to being a professor of innovation focused on the financial market at the USP/ESALQ MBA, speaker and author of the books "O Fenômeno Fintech" and " The New Financial Logic".

DIA is a decentralized, open-source data and oracle platform for DeFi that enables market actors to source, supply and share trustable data. DeFi applications are reliant on trustable and scalable data feeds to build reliable products and avoid exploitation and manipulation. DIA leverages crypto-economic incentives and the wisdom of the community to source, validate and deliver trusted financial data.

Paul Claudius is one of the Co-Founders of DIA and a Board Member of the DIA Association. 

In Japan it's called the "Ghosn Shock"—the stunning arrest of Carlos Ghosn, the jet-setting CEO who saved Nissan and made it part of a global automotive empire.

Even more shocking was his daring escape from Japan, packed into a box and put on a private jet to Lebanon after months spent in a Japanese detention center, subsisting on rice gruel.

This is the saga of what led to the Ghosn Shock and what was left in its wake. Ghosn spent two decades building a colossal partnership between Nissan and Renault that looked like a new model for a global business, but the alliance's shiny image fronted an unsteady, tense operation. Culture clashes, infighting among executives and engineers, dueling corporate traditions, and government maneuvering constantly threatened the venture.

Journalists Hans Greimel and William Sposato have followed the story up close, with access to key players, including Ghosn himself. Veteran Tokyo-based reporters, they have witnessed the end of Japan's bubble economy and attempts at opening Japan Inc. to the world. They've seen the fraying of keiretsu, Japan's traditional skein of business relationships, and covered numerous corporate scandals, of which the Ghosn Shock and Ghosn's subsequent escape stand above all.

Expertly reported, Collision Course explores the complex suspicions around what and who was really responsible for Ghosn's ouster and why one of the top executives in the world would risk everything to escape the country. It explains how economics, history, national interests, cultural politics, and hubris collided, crumpling the legacy of arguably the most important foreign businessman ever to set foot in Japan.

Code Chrysalis is a software engineering immersive and consultancy in Tokyo, teaching computer science fundamentals and modern web application development through a project-based curriculum that promotes career longevity, autonomy, and teamwork.

Yan Fan is a co-founder and chief technology officer of Code Chrysalis, and Mio Maeshima a recent graduate. In this conversation, we are looking at software engineering and computer science, the role of diversity, and the digital skills gap that Japan is facing. With Maeshima-san being a trained translator and interpreter, we are also touching on the transformation of one’s own career, possibly later in life, and the role bootcamps like Code Chrysalis can play in such transitions.

Romain Zanolo, Managing Director APAC, Financial Institutions at IDEMIA, discusses with us the payments & identity landscape across Asia.

- What is augmented identity?

- The value proposition for FinTech startups to work with IDEMIA and other companies made accessible through Visa's Partner Connect program

- How Razer FinTech used IDEMIA to launch the "hottest" payment card in Singapore

- How JCB and Digital Garage apply IDEMIA technology in Japan

- Whether and how Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) might change the payments game

IDEMIA is the global leader in Augmented Identity. IDEMIA provides a trusted environment enabling citizens and consumers alike to perform their daily critical activities in the physical as well as digital space.

On top of his expertise in the payment industry, Romain has a strong experience in corporate financial advisory, including valuation, financial modeling, transaction support advisory and strategic consulting. He is also a FinTech start-up mentor at Plug and Play Tech Center in Singapore.