Latest news with #bankinginfrastructure
Associated Press
06-08-2025
- Business
- Associated Press
Audax CEO Kelvin Tan & Digijanus Founder Laksh Gangwani discuss Playbook for Scaling BaaS & Reinventing Digital Banking in Digijanus' In-The-Grill
Kelvin Tan, CEO of audax, sits down with Laksh Gangwani, Founder of Digjanus, to dissect the evolution of Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS)—from a five-slide pitch inside Standard Chartered to leading a high-growth B2B fintech that's rewriting banking infrastructure across Asia. Singapore, August 6, 2025 -- In an electrifying series of episodes of In-The-Grill, Kelvin Tan, CEO of Audax, sat down with Laksh Gangwani, Founder of Digjanus, to dissect the evolution of Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS)—from a five-slide pitch inside Standard Chartered to leading a high-growth B2B fintech that's rewriting banking infrastructure across Asia. The Birth of BaaS: 5 Slides That Changed Standard Chartered In 2017, before 'BaaS' became a buzzword, Kelvin posed a simple but powerful question to Standard Chartered's CEO, Bill Winters: How can a global bank scale without building 10,000 branches? Armed with just five black-and-white slides, Kelvin laid out the entire vision—scaling ROE without CapEx-heavy models, embedding banking into lifestyle platforms, and turning SC into the world's largest hidden retail bank. That conversation marked the Day 1 of Standard Chartered's BaaS journey, with a six-month sprint of technology reviews, talent acquisition, and early partner conversations. Early Challenges: From SC Nexus to Audax The first challenge? SC's legacy platform wasn't built for elastic, on-demand scaling. Kelvin's early review revealed that to onboard millions via digital platforms, the bank needed to rethink its core infrastructure, scalability, and compliance workflows. Building SC Nexus, Kelvin's team faced hurdles in hiring product & tech leaders, securing partnerships, and overcoming internal inertia. Yet, partnerships with Bukalapak and Ola in Indonesia proved transformative—showing how BaaS can drive financial inclusion by banking rural, unserved populations. Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand became natural launchpads, combining market scale with digital adoption. Audax: The Spin-Off & Reality Check Seeing an opportunity to commercialize Nexus technology beyond Standard Chartered, Kelvin spearheaded Audax's spin-off—a Bank-in-a-Box platform designed for banks across Southeast Asia and the Middle East. But Day 1 of Audax came with a stark reality: the B2B fintech sales cycle is a 600-day marathon. Despite early wins with Tier 1 banks like Maybank Islamic, the slow decision-making pace of banking clients became Audax's 'Batman vs. Bane' challenge—requiring a balance between fintech agility and enterprise-grade trust. What is BaaS (and Why Synapse Failed) Kelvin emphasized that BaaS is the ability for a bank's products and balance sheet to become native to another platform's ecosystem. But not all models are built equal. The intermediary model, popularized in the U.S. by firms like Synapse, collapsed due to lack of direct control, compliance failures, and fractured accountability between banks, intermediaries, and front-end partners. Kelvin's belief: Only banks can run BaaS properly. Direct bank-led BaaS models, as seen in Asia, are more sustainable and less prone to systemic risks. BaaS Beyond 2025: Data Ecosystems & Digital Transformation Looking ahead, Kelvin sees BaaS as the precursor to data ecosystems, where banks not only offer financial services but also monetize insights across e-commerce, ride-hailing, and payment platforms. But talent is key. Building next-gen products requires a 50-50 blend: seasoned banking compliance experts and non-bank technologists who challenge the status quo. Kelvin also called for regulators to enforce stringent standards on security and cloud governance, ensuring BaaS models remain robust while fostering financial inclusion. The Digital Transformation Imperative Laksh and Kelvin explored why legacy digital transformation fails: He also outlined how to improve transformation success rates: Leadership & The Fintech Ecosystem: Kelvin's Playbook On Singapore's fintech leadership, Kelvin shared: His advice for intrapreneurs: 'Focus on solving your own 'exam question' inside your firm before chasing shiny innovation titles.' For entrepreneurs: 'Validate product-market fit before scaling.' To bankers eyeing fintechs: 'Understand that fintech's speed comes with operational trade-offs.' And to VCs: 'Invest in B2B fintechs solving core infra problems—not just front-end UX plays.' Kelvin also discussed funding challenges, emphasizing that capital is drying up for vanity metrics-led fintechs, but will flow to infrastructure players delivering hard ROE impact. From Guinea Pigs to Industry Transformers By 2025, Kelvin believes fintechs are no longer guinea pigs for banks—they are the 'testing grounds that push banks to modernize faster.' However, the AI hype cycle is a distraction unless firms solve their data infrastructure problem first. Leadership & Gen Z: Bridging the Gap Reflecting on his leadership style, Kelvin stressed: About Audax Audax is a digital banking infrastructure provider spun out of Standard Chartered, offering a comprehensive Bank-in-a-Box solution that enables banks to rapidly deploy BaaS, embedded finance, and digital banking models across Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Audax is redefining scalability, reducing total cost of ownership, and enabling banks to rewire their business models for the future. You can watch all 4 Episodes on Digijanus' Youtube channel. About Laksh Gangwani Laksh Gangwani serves as Global Managing Director (Growth, Solutions, and Marketing) for a global financial institution. As the first exec hire in the region, he has played an instrumental role in expanding their footprint to APAC and Middle East, including setting up of offices in Singapore, Australia, Thailand, Dubai, and India (IFSC). Previously, Laksh built and scaled Symphony's award-winning wealth management proposition from scratch helping wealth managers save millions of dollars lost to inefficient processes and communication. In 2021, for his work in the Wealth Management industry, Laksh was recognized as the Leading Individual by WealthBriefing Asia. As a passion project, Laksh also hosts Digijanus (Asia's largest chatshow focussed on Digital transformation), where he invites fellow industry leaders to discuss ways to transform & grow the financial industry. The chat-show is followed by 80,000 people across social media platforms. Prior to this, for over a decade, Laksh has launched and scaled businesses in APAC for firms such as Thomson Reuters, LexisNexis, Threatmetrix, and Symphony. About the company: Digijanus is named after Janus - the Roman god of Transformation. Digijanus was founded in 2020 by Laksh Gangwani with the aim to expedite the transformation of the financial industry. Digjanus with 80,000 followers, across social media platforms, has now become Asia's leading platform for conversations reshaping the financial industry. Contact Info: Name: PR Team Email: Send Email Organization: Digijanus Website: Video URL: Release ID: 89166339 If there are any deficiencies, discrepancies, or concerns regarding the information presented in this press release, we kindly request that you promptly inform us by contacting [email protected] (it is important to note that this email is the authorized channel for such matters, sending multiple emails to multiple addresses does not necessarily help expedite your request). Our dedicated team is committed to addressing any identified issues within 8 hours to guarantee the delivery of accurate and reliable content to our esteemed readers.
Finextra
15-07-2025
- Business
- Finextra
Clear Junction launches fiat rails for crypto firms with vIBAN service
Clear Junction, a specialist in global payments and banking infrastructure for regulated financial institutions, has extended access to its named virtual IBAN (vIBAN) services to licensed virtual asset service providers (VASPs) – a functionality previously only available to banks and electronic money institutions (EMIs). 0 This content is provided by an external author without editing by Finextra. It expresses the views and opinions of the author. A named vIBAN is a unique code assigned to an individual customer for sending and receiving payments, without creating a separate payment account. This approach enables full traceability of funds, streamlined reconciliation, enhanced AML and KYC processes, and greater institutional trust. By offering this capability to European and UK-licensed crypto asset providers, Clear Junction aims to strengthen the fiat infrastructure available to regulated crypto firms and help them overcome long-standing barriers to accessing reliable account services. It forms part of Clear Junction's broader strategy to bridge the fiat and digital asset ecosystems through enterprise-grade, compliance-focused infrastructure. As regulatory clarity improves across key markets – including the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework and the UK's new crypto registration requirements – crypto companies are under growing pressure to meet higher standards of compliance, AML screening, and auditability. Yet many still face institutional gatekeeping and outdated banking systems that restrict access to essential fiat services, often forcing them to rely on high-friction workarounds or intermediaries. Clear Junction's named vIBANs solve these challenges by giving digital asset providers direct access to fiat settlement capabilities and customer-level account referencing. This unlocks a range of crypto-specific use cases, including me-to-me transfers, fiat-to-crypto conversions, and automated treasury operations. In turn, it boosts operational efficiency, reduces risk, and enables crypto-native institutions to deliver bank-like services on par with traditional fintechs and EMIs. Dima Kats, CEO and Founder of Clear Junction, commented: 'The virtual asset ecosystem has matured rapidly, but fiat infrastructure has often lagged behind. We're closing that gap, and this launch is another step toward normalising crypto within the global payments ecosystem. 'We've long understood that VASPs face an uphill battle accessing fiat services, even when they're fully licensed and compliant. This launch is about solving that pain point with a practical, scalable solution. By extending named vIBANs to digital asset providers, we're giving regulated crypto institutions the tools they need to scale responsibly, with full compliance and greater operational clarity.' Example use cases include: • Wallet operators assigning unique vIBANs to individual users, enabling fiat deposits/withdrawals with reference-free reconciliation • Crypto exchanges managing multiple jurisdictions and currency pairs with cleaner fund flows • OTC desks executing high-volume fiat-to-crypto conversions under tighter operational controls • Token issuers streamlining fiat treasury flows across ecosystems This service complements Clear Junction's broader digital asset offering, which includes: • Instant fiat deposits and withdrawals • EUR and GBP payment rails via SEPA and FPS • On/off-ramp solutions for fiat-to-crypto transactions • On-chain transfers via its stablecoin payment service supporting USDT and USDC on Ethereum, Solana, and Tron networks The expanded vIBAN service is backed by Clear Junction's deep regulatory expertise and technology platform purpose-built for regulated institutions. The group is one of the few UK-based entities licensed both as an EMI and a crypto asset service provider by the Financial Conduct Authority, uniquely positioning it to support the evolving needs of the digital asset sector. Founded in 2016, Clear Junction enables financial institutions to access accounts, vIBANs, payment networks, FX services, and e-wallets quickly, securely, and in full compliance with regulatory requirements. Its infrastructure is built to reduce time to market, expand access to new regions, and power faster, safer global payments.
