Asian Private Banker 2020 Technology Awards Winner

Bondlinc is very honored to be awarded Best Regulation Reporting Solution in Asian Private Banker’s 6th Technology Awards for the fourth consecutive year!

We would like to thank Asian Private Banker for recognising our efforts this past year. In 2020, we launched our Private Wealth Management Association (PWMA) endorsed Product Due Diligence Utility (PDDU) to standardise and simplify Product Due Diligence requirements for Financial Institutions, namely Complex Product requirements, and to ensure an industry-wide streamlined approach is adopted.

The Best Regulation Reporting Solution is awarded to the solution that best enables private banks to provide clear audit trails that adhere to regulators’ standards, and equips private banks with sufficient agility to keep up to date with regulatory changes across multiple jurisdictions.

Technical Indicators of this award category include:

• Facilitates compliant record-keeping which could facilitate rapid response to regulators’

• Record access requests

• Possesses data aggregation, storage, and analytics capabilities

• Provides clear audit trails by tracking and recording documentation

• Adheres to regulatory standards across different jurisdictions

• Creates regulatory reports that are compliant with different regulators’ requirements

A big congratulations to all the winners of this year’s Asian Private Banker Technology Awards!

Our PWMA endorsed Product Due Diligence Utility is now LIVE!

We are pleased to announce that our platform was officially endorsed by the Private Wealth Management Association (PWMA) for its Product Due Diligence Utility (PDDU)!

Being the only Fixed Income solution endorsed, the platform is aimed at helping PWMA members comply with Hong Kong Securities & Futures Commission (HKSFC) Regulatory Guidance, pertaining to product due diligence, specifically pre-trade disclosures relating to unsolicited and execution-only trades of complex products.

The tool provides easy access to standardized product data, prospectuses and dynamic risk disclosure reports, facilitating product due diligence, risk rating and the sales procedures for financial institutions.

To further understand the importance of determining complex products and our partnership with PWMA, please take a look here.

To subscribe or if you have any questions regarding the PDDU, please reach out to Neha at neha@bondlinc.com.

Asian Private Banker 2019 Technology Awards Winner

Bondlinc is very honored be awarded by Asian Private Banker for the third consecutive year.

This year, Bondlinc has been awarded Best Regulation Reporting Solution and Most Innovative Solution in Asian Private Banker’s 5th Technology Awards.

The Best Regulation Reporting Solution is awarded to the solution that best enables private banks to provide clear audit trails that adhere to regulators’ standards, and equips private banks with sufficient agility to keep up to date with regulatory changes across multiple jurisdictions.

The Most Innovative Solution is awarded to the vendor that has successfully employed emerging technologies or uses existing technology in a novel way to generate unique solutions for private banks across various channels, including but not limited to product distribution, internal processing, and digital delivery.

Congratulations to all the winners of this year’s Asian Private Banker Technology Awards!

Important Announcement - May 2019

Effective immediately Eng Keong Ong will be stepping down as the CEO of Bondlinc and cease to have any managerial or operational role within the company. He will also be resigning from the board of directors. Given the recent MAS announcement and press articles, it is prudent that his involvement cease as we are promoting our regtech initiatives to our clients whom all perform regulated market activities. This definitive measure is to avoid any unnecessary concerns or hesitations existing and potential clients may have as they consider Bondlinc as a business partner. This will also curtail any reputational risk of being associated with Bondlinc both internally and externally.

Effective immediately, I will be assuming the role of CEO in addition to my current role as chairman. Since 2014, I have been sharing the vision and value proposition of Bondlinc to potential investors and industry participants. Perhaps it was too early for fintech, but sharing that vision spurred EK Ong to join the company and help operationalize the first phase of the business starting in 2016. We thank him for his efforts and contributions.

As a client or business partner, there will be no operational difference in your daily business and I will now become the point of contact for any feedback, suggestions and future business opportunities. Bondlinc’s product pipeline is evolving rapidly and we are very excited to share these new functionalities with our clients in the near future.

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to reach me at my direct numbers +65-9271-5711 (Singapore) +852-9726-9680 (Hong Kong).

News articles: https://www.straitstimes.com/business/three-finance-professionals-slapped-with-multi-year-bans-for-dishonesty-mas

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/monetary-authority-singapore-bans-hsbc-worker-insurance-agent-11429566

http://www.mas.gov.sg/News-and-Publications/Media-Releases/2019/MAS-issues-Prohibition-Orders-against-three-individuals-for-dishonest-conduct.aspx

Regards,

Daniel Yu

Founder & CEO

daniel@bondlinc.com

Asian Private Banker Best Growth Strategy Technology Awards 2018

Last year, we were Asian Private Banker’s Most Promising Fintech Startup. This year, we've been awarded the prestigious title of Best Growth Strategy by Asian Private Banker's Technology Awards 2018. Bondlinc has indeed grown and expanded into Hong Kong, where there is a growing demand for technology to meet the banks’ regulatory requirements. We are truly thankful for the recognition of our hard work and vision to standardize and automate bond trading processes. This is another milestone for us as we strive to spread our solutions throughout the private banking industry. Congratulations to all the other winners!

Looking forward to 2019!

To the Bondlinc Family, investors, clients, and partners:

Thank you for all the belief and support you have invested in Bondlinc. We started the year 2018 with a couple of awards: the Zamma Award at NTT Data’s Open Innovation Contest as well as Asian Private Banker’s Most Promising Fintech Startup Award. In July, we opened Bondlinc Hong Kong to spearhead sales of our RegTech solutions, with Fixed Income expert Dr. Edward Chan. At the Singapore Fintech Festival 2018, we were recognized as one of the finalists for the Fintech Awards. To wrap up a fantastic year, we signed BNP Paribas Wealth Management as our 4th client since our inception in early 2017.

As we look back upon the past year, we would like to thank all those who have helped us shape our business. Thank you all again for a great 2018, and we wish everyone a Happy New Year! Looking forward to an exciting 2019!

BNP Paribas WM onboards Bondlinc for FI operations

BNP Paribas Wealth Management (WM) has onboarded a new fintech firm to fulfil its bond trading needs, Lemuel Lee, Asia deputy head of investment services told Asian Private Banker.

The French lender is working with Bondlinc — a trading automation platform that aims to digitalise private banks’ and securities houses’ access to bond market intel — to automate the process of creating updated fixed income prospectuses in a bid to comply with regional regulations.

Lemuel Lee, BNP Paribas WM “Bondlinc has extensive sell-side experience and works with a number of distributors,” said Lee. “Their cloud-based database that aggregates bond prospectuses in the market is one of their offerings that really caught our attention.”

“This is critical in soliciting fixed income products as we need to have up-to-date prospectuses ready for clients. Bondlinc’s automation is much more efficient than manually uploading prospectuses, which we have been doing.”

The parties are currently finalising the integration and aim to roll out the solution across BNP Paribas WM’s Asia offices before the close of 2018.

Committed to fintech

According to Lee, BNP Paribas WM welcomes working with fintechs as they allow the bank to better allocate its resources and shift away from “inefficient manual labour” and invest more in “adding value such as advisory and services”.

“Regulations and technology are constantly evolving; we need to keep abreast of the changing technology in the market and stay ahead of the competition,” he said, adding that the wealth manager constantly assesses its capabilities, considers what it can build, and scans the market for new developments.

“If a solution in the market is more mature and makes sense as a complement to our platform, and we believe we do not have the expertise to build it in-house, then we work with fintech providers,” he explained.

Currently, Lee said, projects with “a couple more external vendors across multiple fronts, spanning from research to execution” are underway.

Earlier this year, BNP Paribas unveiled new digital tools which were developed at what it calls its ‘factories’, located in Singapore, Geneva, and Luxembourg. At the time, Pierre Vrielinck, head of global Asian markets at BNP Paribas WM, said partnering with fintechs is “essential”.

Bondlinc will be at Singapore Fintech Festival 2018!

Bondlinc is revolutionizing the entire bond trading process with AI, ML, Data Analytics, Automation, and even a Chatbot! All features are modular and customisable to fit your needs. To know more, visit us at the Bondlinc Booth ZV04 SG Expo Hall 4 (Asean Startup Kiosks) from 12-14 Nov 2018.

Vincent Caldeira featured on Lightbulb Capital's survey-style publication on 2018 Singapore FinTech Champions

How would you explain what you are currently doing to a person who doesn’t know anything about it?

At a high level, my work is to oversee the design and development of technology solutions to business problems faced by the banking industry in the domain of fixed income product distribution

What is the most important thing you are working on right now? How are you making it happen?

At the moment, my team is developing a real-time data streaming platform that allows us to collect, process, and analyse product reference data, corporate action events, market pricing and financial news. This is crucial piece of technology as the streaming data allows us to generate and deliver timely notifications and actionable insights to our trading solution, and ultimately help us move towards some form of distributed electronic exchange for fixed income products.

What is one trend in the industry that you are most excited about? Why?

I am excited to see that more and more banks are finally starting to understand the benefits and required approach towards using cloud technology, not just for infrastructure but also leveraging Platform-As-A-Service offerings. With this trend, both internal technology teams and external partners get the ability to move more quickly to establish more agile delivery practices, adopt new technology components or architecture models, and progress in the DevOps space towards Continuous Delivery Models

What do you think the industry is struggling with? Why?

The industry is struggling with a current system landscape whereby a high number of proprietary, Vincent Caldeira Chief Technology Officer Bondlinc legacy systems built on monolith architecture have been integrated or rather interfaced through service layers using either data replication or point-to-point messaging approach. As a result, it is hard to evolve or replace components and additional layers of data replication. Business logic has to be built to serve new digital needs, with complexity and maintenance costs increasing over time.

If you were not involved in the finance industry, what would you be doing right now?

Likely going back to the Healthcare industry where I started my career, as I believe it is probably one of the top 3 industries right now in terms of possibilities to improve processes and outcome (in terms of quality of service) with the right use of new technologies. Or if I follow my passion, go full-time into performance sports management as I am already involved through my kids in both the tennis and running communities.

Recommend one thing (a book, a blog, a video, anything) that has a major influence on you.

Being skeptical by nature, there isn’t really a particular source of influence for me as I tend to keep reading and comparing different viewpoints. Right now, I am reading The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups by Daniel Coyle which shares some interesting findings about organizational performance that could seem quite contrary to what a lot of leadership and organizational theory books have been teaching us.

What is your most useless talent?

Making cynical jokes.

Read full Lightbulb Capital’s full publication here: download



Welcoming Edward Chan to the Bondlinc Family!

HSBC Private Banking’s former regional head of fixed income has resurfaced at a Singapore-based fintech firm, Asian Private Banker can reveal.

Edward Chan has joined Bondlinc — a trading automation platform that aims to digitalise private banks’ and securities houses’ access to bond market intel — as executive chairman of its Hong Kong office.

As well as working closely with co-founder and chairman Daniel Yu to lead the Hong Kong office, Chan’s new role will see him spearheading the sales efforts of the bond trading platform in the city.

“We’re very excited to have Dr Edward Chan join the Bondlinc team,” said Yu. “With over 20 years of experience in fixed income and private wealth management, Edward brings insights that will help improve client experience while enhancing regulatory adherence and efficiency for institutions.”

Previously, Chan spent 23 years at HSBC Private Banking, playing a major role in building the bank’s fixed income platform for both advisory and discretionary products. Prior to his departure, Chan was global head of fixed income and had also held regional management roles in HSBC’s fixed income and equities businesses.

Bondlinc is no stranger to hiring from within the private banking sector. Last year, the fintech firm hired Vincent Caldeira, Bank of Singapore’s former technology and strategic programme head, to be its chief technology officer.

Read Asian Private Banker article here: Ex-HSBC PB regional head of fixed income joins bond trading platform

Top 40 Finalist for FinTech Awards 2018!

We are honored to be picked as one of the Top 40 Finalists for the upcoming FinTech Awards 2018 for our innovative bond trading solutions!

Bondlinc’s Product Repository System (PRS) is one of the modular solutions that help financial institutions automate and digitalize the bond trading workflow.

Financial regulators mandate that sufficient sales documents are to be provided to Accredited / Professional Investor clients of Private Banks before a trade can be recommended and a bond instrument can be traded. Bondlinc's PRS provides and automatically manages a centralised database of prospectuses and offering documents for bonds in the primary and secondary market. In general, PRS provides easy access to bond prospectuses and where available, other documents including but not limited to term sheets, pricing sheets in the form of unique distributable hyperlinks for our clients to distribute to their customers. 

PRS is modular and has the ability to integrate into existing banking infrastructure for delivery through other front-end mediums of our client's choice.  The system also automatically extracts information from emails or PDF attachments within them, by leveraging on multiple proprietary technologies - it creates a bond record, flags out relevant special/risk features from the prospectuses, and generates customised bond factsheets. It notifies the Financial Institution through social messaging applications, SMS, email, or BondChat when a deal is ready for distribution to their customers - leveraging on analytics to provide greater granularity over traditional distribution methods.

View our other products here: https://www.bondlinc.com/summary

CTO Vincent Caldeira, one of the expert panelists speaking on the new TRM guidelines set by MAS

From left to right: Chia Ling Koh (Managing Director, Osborne Clarke), Demetris Booth (Cybersecurity Consultant), Angus Thorn (Head of Incident Response and Threat Intelligence, Horangi), Phoram Mehta (Head of Information Security APAC, Paypal), Vincent Caldeira (Chief Technology Officer, Bondlinc).

"Cause or Cost for concern? If you're in or working with fintech or financial institutions, and you don't quite know yet know why the new Monetary Authority Of Singapore TRM guidelines matters: this is for you. We've gathered the experts from Horangi, OC Queen Street, PayPal and Bondlinc to share more about how in the world this impacts you AND your customers.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has indicated in a recent speech that changes to the Technology Risk Management (TRM) Guidelines are underway. What is the likely impact of these changes, and how can mid-size financial institutions and Fintech companies prepare themselves? 

Join us in this insightful discussion where leaders in mid-size Fintech & Financial Institutions share their challenges & strategies whilst leading cybersecurity and legal experts share their advice."

Held at ICE71 on the 19th of July, 4pm-6pm, the panel discussion will cover the changes, challenges, and solution with regards MAS Technology Risk Management (TRM). Our CTO Vincent Caldeira will be among the expert panelists leading the discussion. 
 

Establishing appropriate controls for Order Management on Instant Messaging channels

By CTO Vincent Caldeira 

Recently the Securities and Future Commission (SFC) in Hong Kong issued a circular to Financial Intermediaries (FIs) regarding the key controls and procedures expected to be in place when using Instant Messaging (IM) applications to receive client orders. This is not a new business practice, but I believe the wide discrepancy on how these risks are being assessed and addressed has called for some level of standardization across the financial markets.

While using IM applications introduce several challenges in terms of specific technology, information security, and operational and regulatory risks, such tools are still being widely used by clients and FIs to communicate. This is because they provide a direct channel to distribute relevant and actionable information on a timely basis, while allowing to introduce process efficiency in the interaction between customers and the bankers. As such, we at Bondlinc have enabled IM channels as an inherent part of our solution. Our platform integrates natively with the FIs' clients’ chosen channels (such as Facebook Messenger or WeChat) while providing all the appropriate controls that would be expected of a secure and compliant banking solution.

Secure login to request for a quotation

This article describes some of the key measures and controls implemented in the solution to meet the requirements described in the SFC Circular.

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Centralized Record Keeping

·        The solution provides one central point of interaction for the bank’s employees (Relationship Manager, Dealer) to interact with customers using multiple IM applications. Our solution achieves this with Identity Brokering and User Federation components implemented using some of the most popular security standards for Web single sign-on (SSO) such as SAML 2.0, OpenID Connect and OAuth 2.0. This enables integration with 3rd-party Identity Providers from the FIs as well as leading IM solutions as identity sources.  

·        All order records and contextual information for the order (chat between the institution and its clients) are transmitted and stored for future reference using industry-accepted cryptography standards, in a form that cannot be altered or tampered with.

·        Data retention for all order management data can be specified and managed according to the FI’s internal policies and regulatory requirements.

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Security and Reliability

·        The solution manages step-up authentication with an ability to use zero, one or two-factor authentication where appropriate. For example, public information such as details about a new bond issue can be viewed by a customer, without requiring an additional mobile application download or client login. However, access to indicative quotes would require a simple, one-factor authentication. Furthermore, any transaction confirmation will require step up to a second factor of authentication to complete the final transaction. This allows validating the identity of the client at the appropriate time along the transaction process and getting an authenticated digital acknowledgement for audit trail purposes.

Appropriate zero, one, and two factor authentication requirements

·        Transport security (SSL) is used to protect the communication channel between the IM application and Bondlinc services. This ensures that the end-to-end transmission of order messages is safe.

·        Message-level security is used to ensure confidentiality by digitally encrypting the message itself, authenticating the originating entity using X509 certificates, and enforcing integrity by using digital signatures.

Secure communication relay between the customers' and the banks' IM applications

Compliance Monitoring

·        All messages and order information are securely routed to our central event management pipeline. This allows Compliance to perform real-time monitoring against a set of pre-configured rules (including unusual trading patterns, specific restricted keywords used in conversations with the Relationship Manager or Dealer, etc…), and securely store the information in a data warehouse for reporting, reviewing and auditing purposes.

·        A specific module for Compliance officers allows reviewing of all historical order conversations and messages. To support any required investigations, dynamic search criteria can be used to search through a specific period of time or particular clients’ accounts.

 

Conclusion

Bondlinc’s solution natively provides critical controls for our customers to efficiently manage the specific technology, information security, operational and regulatory risks that trading bonds over IM channels entail. For more information or for a demonstration, do not hesitate to contact me at vc@bondlinc.com.

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As the CTO Bondlinc, Vincent oversees the technology design and development of the company’s Software-As-A-Service bond trading platform. The comprehensive solution aims to standardise, improve and automate the traditional bond trading workflow.

CTO Vincent Caldeira interview with Temenos

Explaining the challenges Bondlinc faces automating the fixed income market

CTO Vincent Caldeira takes a trip to HongKong to deliver his keynote speech!

The Innovation Jams help Temenos to identify the very best fintech companies, those that add real business value to its customers. Following the success of previous years' events, Temenos is holding a series of regional Innovation Jams to showcase the most impressive demos of financial services software to financial institutions.

On 22nd March 2018, our CTO Vincent Caldeira traveled to the Temenos Jam HongKong to deliver his keynote speech "Innovation or Exnovation?" In his speech he covers five principles on how banks can survive in the future. He also shares his insights on the different ways to manage innovation (or exnovation) whether it be through Fintech investment, Partnerships, Innovation labs, or Banking-as-a-service. 

Download here: Keynote Slides: Innovation or exnovation? 

Bondlinc - Awarded Most Promising Startup by Asian Private Banker

We are on a roll with these awards! 

"Launched in 2015, the Asian Private Banker Technology Awards celebrate the innovations and achievements of Asia’s rapidly growing financial technology sector.

The Awards are open to all tech vendors that provide solutions for private banks, institutions with private banking facilities and wealth managers in Asia."

Sincerest thanks to Asian Private Banker for this award and also a big congratulations to the other winners of the 2017 Asian Private Banker Technology Awards! 

Bondlinc – Winner of the ZAMMA AWARD at NTT Data's Open Innovation Contest 7.0

Kotaro Zamma, Head of Section and Kaz Okada, Senior Expert for the Open Innovation and Business Incubation for NTT DATA Corp.

INTRODUCTION TO NTT

“Let’s change the world together.”

"The global community is facing a variety of challenges, including poverty, hunger, health, hygiene, education, gender and national inequality, energy, climate change, destruction of nature, and peacekeeping. In order to solve these challenges, open innovation will play greater roles than ever so that people throughout the world can work together across national borders in advanced technology and new business models to create solutions.

NTT DATA originally started as a public corporation to play a role in the Japanese communication infrastructure. Since the transformation to a private corporation, we have played an essential role in the Information and communication technology (ICT) social infrastructure as the leading system integrator in Japan. Currently, we promote ICT business in over 50 countries across the world."

Details on the Singapore Contest

BONDLINC'S PARTICIPATION AND RESULTS

After being invited to participate in NTT's Open Innovation Contest 7.0, Bondlinc submitted a comprehensive business proposal which was subsequently chosen as one of the ten Finalists. The Pitching Day in Singapore was held on 11th Jan 2018 at the artistic co-working space at The Working Capitol on Robinson. Ten startups pitched their innovative solutions to the five judges for that one ticket to the Grand Finale held in Tokyo.  

The results? Bondlinc won the ZAMMA AWARD, named after Mr Kotaro Zamma himself! 

We would like to thank everyone who made this event and experience possible! 

Bondlinc goes to KL!

Shortly after our Echelon experience, BondLinc is back for more FinTech fairs! BondLinc will be going to Kuala Lumpur from the 5th to the 6th of July. We will be participating in the event Building Global FinTech Connections: Singapore with Kuala Lumpur organised by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS).

This is a great opportunity for us to meet other FinTech startups and parties interested in FinTech developments. We are always on the lookout for potential partners that would work with us and help us extend our reach in the region. 

We will be manning our booth in the event as one of the finalists of The Finlab (Cycle 2). Do look out for our booth located in the UOB cluster and drop by if available! 

Details about the event can be found here.