Currently ranked: 40
Previously ranked: 32
In 2014, Singapore was on the way to establishing itself as Asia’s most active fintech hub, and Janos Barberis didn’t want Hong Kong to be left behind. That year he founded FinTech Hong Kong to create networking opportunities for entrepreneurs and the financial community. In 2015 he started SuperCharger, a fintech accelerator, in the semiautonomous Chinese territory.
Barberis isn’t confining himself to his Hong Kong base. SuperCharger has opened a branch in Malaysia and is scouting the world for the best teams and companies. It went on a road show from September through mid-December in Tel Aviv, Toronto, Melbourne, Manila, Mumbai, Singapore, Tokyo, New York, London, Paris, and Zurich.
SuperCharger’s founder, meanwhile, is making a difference at home on the regulatory front. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority on September 29 announced a new “sandbox” initiative, alongside the Insurance Authority and the Securities and Futures Commission, to encourage innovation in the agencies’ respective jurisdictions. Barberis is a member of the SFC’s Fintech Advisory Group.
He is helping to shape the fintech landscape in other ways as well.
For example, Barberis sits on the academic board of the Center for Finance, Technology and Entrepreneurship, which seeks to educate financial professionals on how to adapt to the tech world. He also helped launch the University of Hong Kong FinTech Massive Open Online Course, the first of its kind in Asia, according to InvestHK, a Hong Kong government department whose mission is to attract foreign investment deemed strategically important to the city’s economic development.
In the publishing world, Barberis and Susanne Chishti co-edited The FinTech Book, a crowd-sourced handbook released in 2016 that has spawned a series of related titles. The co-authors’ The RegTech Book is due out in 2018.