Executive Summary

This part is dedicated to giving you a global perspective on WealthTech innovation happening across China, Japan and Latin America and future trends in those regions.

While digital payments are dominated by debit or credit cards in many Western countries, China’s consumers have jumped directly from cash to mobile. More than 70% of Chinese internet users say carrying cash is no longer necessary – payments are made with Alipay and WeChat. Few foreigners realize how fast and advanced the development actually is in new payment features and mobile financial services in China.

One chapter focuses on the development of WealthTech in emerging markets and especially in Latam, where activity has started and the potential for further WealthTech growth is huge. It may take some time before Latam embraces completely the benefits of digital wealth management platforms as we know them in the USA, but it is coming sooner rather than later.

One chapter focuses on Japan, which has (as in many other countries) a serious savings problem caused by the low financial literacy, and exacerbated by an unfavourable population demographics. In order to achieve societal break-even levels of savings, individuals will need to invest in potentially higher yielding, unsecured assets outside of bank savings deposits. The authors propose a WealthTech solution for this in the form of a peer-to-peer real-estate equity crowdfunding marketplace.

Another chapter describes strategies to unlock WealthTech in Turkey. Although the country is the 18th largest economy in the world, only a few WealthTech firms can be found so far.