The Top 25 Financial Technology CEOs Of Asia For 2020

The Financial Technology Report is pleased to announce The Top 25 Financial Technology CEOs of Asia for 2020. The exemplary leadership of these individuals has driven their companies toward continued success and innovation in the financial technology sector. The companies represented have become industry leaders in Asia and worldwide and have produced products and solutions that are defining new ways for corporations and individuals to manage their finances. Each of these CEOs have been able to successfully adapt to rapidly changing market demands, which have been even further heightened by a global pandemic.

Many of the CEOs on this list have seen their companies through massive growth and new product development. Notably, under the leadership of awardee Simon Hu, Ant Group saw a $3.2 billion profit in the first half of this year, with year-over-year growth of 1,000%.

There were several hundred nominations this year and thorough research using qualified information sources was conducted to evaluate each nominee’s leadership capabilities. Evaluation focused on factors such as career achievements and prominence in the field, the reach of the company’s offerings, and the significance of their products for the financial technology industry as a whole. The Financial Technology Report team is thrilled to be able to highlight the incredible achievements of these individuals and the companies they lead.

 

1. Simon Hu
Company: Ant Group
Country: China

Simon Hu is the Chief Executive Officer at Ant Group, an innovative provider of inclusive financial services headquartered in Hangzhou, China. The company was established in 2014 and originated from Alipay, the world’s largest payment and lifestyle platform. Hu leads the core of Alibaba's financial segments and oversees its widely used Alipay and Credit Sesame services.

Before being appointed CEO, Hu worked to develop new businesses within Alibaba Group and started AliFinance, which provided loan services to small and micro businesses and was eventually adopted as the prototype of China’s internet finance model. Hu was also previously the president of Alibaba Cloud, the largest cloud computing company in Asia and third ranking IaaS provider worldwide. Hu joined Alibaba Group in 2005 as the founder of Ant Microloans within Ant Financial, where he spent almost a decade. Before joining Alibaba, Hu held several roles at financial institutions like China Construction Bank and China Everbright Bank. There, he garnered over 10 years of experience with business and personal finance, financing for small and micro enterprises, and online credit systems. Under Hu’s expert leadership, Ant Group revealed $3.2 billion in profit in the first half of 2020 and a year-over-year growth of 1,000%.

 

2. Abhimanyu Munjal
Company: Hero FinCorp
Country: India

Abhimanyu Munjal brings over 15 years of experience to his role as the Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Hero FinCorp, one of the fastest growing nonbank financial companies in India. Headquartered in New Delhi, the company is one of India’s biggest retail and commercial loan lenders, disbursing a loan every 30 seconds. Munjal has considerable experience in strategic leadership and people management and has guided the company through international joint ventures, mergers, and acquisitions as well as complex transformations within the company.

Hero FinCorp aims to be “India’s next Generation, ultra-lean, credit champion,” and under Munjal’s leadership, the company has grown to establish a presence in more than 3,000 touch points across 1,000 cities, towns, and villages, with a team strength of 4,000 people. Guided by Hero Group’s belief in growth and nation-building, Munjal has brought financial services to customers in India who may not have any banking history. Munjal is also a strong believer in leading the next generation of entrepreneurs and innovators through his VC fund, AdvantEdge Partners. He fosters a development-focused work environment, were employees are encouraged to take ownership and set career goals.

 

3.Harshvardhan Lunia
Company: Lendingkart
Country: India

Harshvardhan Lunia is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Lendingkart, a working capital fintech startup headquartered in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. Since its founding in 2014, Lendingkart has issued more than 60,000 loans to over 55,000 small and medium-sized enterprises across India. Before Lendingkart, Lunia was the founder and director of domestic finance and investment for the U.K. and Germany at ICICI Bank and was the city manager for SME banking. With over 17 years of experience in the financial sector, Lunia has worked with large private sector and multinational banks within their small loan divisions.

Now in his current role, Lunia drives Lendingkart’s growth by designing creative credit solutions for SMBs. Earlier this year, Lendingkart raised $42.1 million in a Series D investment round, which the company plans to use to expand its lending base and reach underserved enterprises. Looking to the future, Lunia hopes to incorporate big data credit scoring with analytics and artificial intelligence.

 

4. Sergey Sedov
Company: Robocash Group
Country: Singapore

Sergey Sedov is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Robocash, a group of companies that issues microloans in Singapore, Spain, Russia, Kazakhstan, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Sedov founded his first IT company in 2002 when he was still studying at university, and after gaining experience and newfound confidence in the real estate, commerce, and production markets, Sedov raised sufficient funding to co-found the lending company, Finterra. This company marked the start of Robocash. Robocash was founded in 2013 and operates non-bank lending with a focus on online and offline consumer lending and on marketplace funding.

Notably, Robocash is financed through its own assets, with no banks or investment funds involved. Prior to establishing Robocash, Sedov founded Prestamer S.L.U., a fully automated online lending service. He is also the Founder of LLP Zaymer, MFC Zaymer, and MCC ProstoDENGI. These are all part of the international holding Robocash Group. Today, the group comprises eight companies and more than 1,255 employees and has issued more than 3 million loans. Sedov plans for the company to develop new products and technologies to finance online trading operations, as well as expand its lending operations in Asia.

 

5. Sreekanth Nadella
Company: KFin Technologies
Country: India

After joining the company as the chief operating officer in 2018, Sreekanth Nadella is now the Chief Executive Officer of KFin Technologies, one of India's largest registrars and a market leader in the investor servicing industry. Headquartered in Hyderabad, Telangana, the company was founded in 1978 and has since grown to service over 90 million investor accounts spread over 1,300 issuers including banks, PSUs, and mutual funds. Nadella has 20 years of experience, with leadership across areas including finance, operations, IT and ITES, strategy consulting, transformation, and delivery. As the CEO of KFin Technologies, Nadella leads pioneering financial services for over 60% of mutual fund houses in India and several AMCs in Southeast Asian economies.

Prior to joining KFin, Nadella was the chief operating officer at CallHealth, India's leading home healthcare service provider. Nadella began his career as a management trainee at K&S Chartered Accountants. He then went on to become a managing director at Accenture, senior transition manager at Capita, delivery lead and transition manager at IBM Global Services, and finance manager at the Indian School of Business. Nadella hopes that KFin Technologies will continue to lead the investor services industry in India and beyond.

 

6. William Li
Company: Akulaku
Country: Indonesia

William Li is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Akulaku, a financial services provider for the urban working class in the SEA market. Headquartered in Jakarta, Akulaku (formerly Silvrr) was founded in 2014 and is one of Indonesia’s most well-funded fintech startups. Today, its “buy now, pay later” e-commerce platform offers online services that span cardless shopping, cash loans, bill payments, mobile and game top ups as well as travel and leisure packages. The startup offers three major services – online credit, wealth management, and digital banking.

Li was previously an investment manager at Ping An Insurance, and an associate at King & Wood Mallesons before joining Akulaku in 2016. With more than six million users and counting, Akulaku’s current annual transaction value stands at over $1.5 billion. Today, Akulaku is the largest online financing company in Southeast Asia and the first online mobile installment application with operations in the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Li is passionate about making banking affordable, and to that end, Akulaku has also recently teamed up with Union Bank and Igloo to make insurance affordable to citizens in the Philippines.

 

7. Caecilia Chu
Company: YouTrip
Country: Singapore

Caecilia Chu is a risk-taker whose entrepreneurial spirit is the catalyst for the success of YouTrip, the fintech startup she co-founded in 2016. Along with her colleague Arthur Mak, Chu launched the next-generation payments platform with Southeast Asia in mind as an expanding market for innovative digital banking. The resulting product is the first multi-currency digital wallet, a commission-free exchange designed for the region’s frequent fliers. During the COVID-19 pandemic, YouTrip saw an increase in cross-currency e-commerce, a feature that enables consumers to similarly bypass digital exchange fees. Her foresight into the booming Southeast Asian digital finance market was brought about by years of experience spanning continents, from Silicon Valley to Zhongguancun, China.

During her formative years, she attended The Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania, before obtaining a Master of Business Administration from Harvard Business School. Later, years of globetrotting drove her to put down roots in Singapore. Chu has her sights set on expanding YouTrip’s technologies across the region.

 

8. Haryati Lawidjaja
Company: LinkAja
Country: Indonesia

After less than a year as chief operating officer, Haryati Lawidjaja is the new CEO of LinkAja, one player in Indonesia’s rapidly growing e-wallet marketplace. One of the market leaders in the country, LinkAja is an integrated e-wallet service backed by several Indonesian state-owned enterprises and institutions and created by the merger of the group’s existing payment processing platforms. The platform was built to compete with other driving forces in the country’s monetary digitization, including booming private enterprises DANA Wallet, Ovo, and GoPay. LinkAja’s stated goals include expanding beyond payments and into additional financial services, as well as providing digital financial transformation opportunities throughout rural and urban regions of South Asia’s largest economy.

Lawidjaja brings two decades of experience in financial technology and services to her role as LinkAja’s top executive. Previously, she was executive vice president and head of marketing for Jenius, a competing digital banking organization, in addition to marketing roles with AdParlor and Telkomsel. Notably, she also spent several years with mobile telecom pioneer Nokia, where she led its expansion into Indonesia.

 

9. Satish Kumar Gupta
Company: Paytm Payments Bank
Country: India

Satish Kumar Gupta is the Chief Executive Officer of Paytm Payments Bank, a mobile-first bank with zero balance-zero digital transaction charge accounts. Previously, he was the chief project officer at the National Payments Corporation of India, which manages payment products like Unified Payments Interface. There, he created the country’s own card, RuPay, launched in 2012. He was also integral in the launch of several digital payments and financial inclusion products in coordination with the government. Gupta was also the former deputy general manager at the State Bank of India where he worked for over three decades.

Gupta has how applied his decades of experience in the fintech sector to Paytm Payments Bank. Launched in 2017, the Noida, Uttar Pradesh-based company is proudly Indian-owned and run. Recently, the company integrated an Aadhaar Enabled Payment System, which will allow users to access basic banking services such as cash withdrawal, balance enquiry, and the ability to obtain a mini statement. Gupta has experienced the disruption and growth that the Indian economy witnessed in promoting digital payments over almost four decades and aims to help the company bring financial inclusion through digital payments.

 

10. Prajit Nanu
Company: Nium
Country: Singapore

Prajit Nanu founded Nium in 2014 with a vision to ease international money transfers for everyday consumers across Asia and beyond. The Singapore-based company, formerly known as InstaReM, has expanded to serve businesses and individuals around the world, fueling a global remittance market rapidly approaching $1 trillion annually. In his capacity as CEO, Nanu drives the company’s expansion worldwide, including end-to-end B2B and B2C services that enable greater financial flexibility for international organizations spanning industries. In August 2020, Nanu’s firm added support for Google Pay for its corporate card solutions, further enhancing its platform’s services in Asia, Australia, and Europe.

Prior to founding Nium, he honed his executive expertise with multinational business service management organizations, serving as director of global business development for TMF Group and as sales leader for WNS Group’s India offices. Before his nearly twenty years of hands-on experience, Nanu earned a Bachelor of Commerce and Economics degree from the University of Mumbai.

 

11. Joey Kim
Company: PeopleFund
Country: South Korea

Under the leadership of Founder and CEO Joey Kim, PeopleFund has used creative and efficient strategies to lead the company to consistent year-over-year growth. Founded in 2015, PeopleFund is South Korea's fastest growing marketplace lender and is creating better alternative investment opportunities through their tech-driven platform. The company became the first peer-to-peer lending platform to start offering its investment products directly on KakaoTalk, Korea’s most popular messaging app which is used by 93% of smartphone owners in South Korea.

Kim started his career with the corporate finance team at Macquarie Securities’ Investment Banking Division. He was then a venture capitalist working at Softbank Ventures, focusing on the internet/mobile industry. After his experience in banking, Kim spent five years in management consulting at Bain & Company, conducting multiple corporate M&A, vision and portfolio strategy, and operation re-engineering projects, from both the Seoul and Boston office. Kim then went on to found PeopleFund in 2015. Kim is also currently serving as the President of the Korean FinTech Industry Association, an organization established for the advancement and growth of the fintech and Korean P2P finance industry. The association is currently made up of nearly 300 Korean FinTech companies ranging from payment services, blockchain, P2P lending, crowdfunding, and insurer tech, among other technologies. Next on Kim’s agenda is to expand PeopleFund’s offering to other Asian markets outside South Korea.

 

12. Khalil Alami
Company: Telr
Country: UAE and Singapore

Since 2019, Khalil Alami has served as CEO of Telr, a provider of a ground-up, secure online payment platform focused on growing markets across the Middle East and North Africa. However, Alami characterizes the company as more than merely a payment gateway. With a vision to grow e-commerce in the region, Telr’s platform provides customized business-enhancement features that promote scalable growth for small and medium-sized enterprises.

Telr’s proprietary technology has already made it an appealing processor in the region, and Alami is committed to bringing digital payment solutions to traditionally cash-based markets. Alami began his career after attending Purdue University’s Krannert School of Management where he earned a Bachelor of Science in economics and management information systems. Over the course of almost 20 years, he rose through the ranks of Jordan-based payment processor International Cards Company (ICC), ultimately serving as CEO and member of the board. He has also served as a board member of the Young Entrepreneurs Association of Jordan, where he promotes economic development through independent business leadership.  Alami earned an MBA from the American University of Beirut.

 

13. Dmitry Voronenko
Company: TurnKey Lender
Country: Singapore

Dmitry Voronenko is the CEO and Co-founder of TurnKey Lender, which specializes in cloud-based online lending for retail and SME loans.  The company's solutions include cloud lending, retail, payday loans, microfinance, in-house lending, lease financing, medical, dental, MFIs, student loans, factoring, invoice financing, and telecom.  Dmitry leverages his breadth of technology experience to drive the company's global growth and performance. Prior to founding TurnKey Lender, Dmitry led three successful software start-ups that were serving Fortune 100 companies and leading banks across North America, Europe and Emerging Markets.

With more than 20 years’ experience in FinTech and AI-based B2B software, Dmitry writes for leading financial and fintech magazines, speaks at industry events. In 2019, Dmitry Voronenko was recognized as the FinTech leader of the year by Singapore FinTech Awards and listed among top 25 leaders in lending by Canadian Lenders Association. Dmitry holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from Kharkiv Polytechnic University.

 

14. Atul Shinghal
Company: Scripbox
Location: India

Scripbox CEO Atul Shinghal is on a mission to guide a million families to a happy retirement, one courageous consumer at a time. Shinghal, an alumnus of Mayo College, IIT Madras and IIM Bangalore, founded Scripbox in 2012 with colleague Sanjiv Singhal as a solution for their collective frustrations with Indian investment products. The resulting platform is a financial road map for everyday users for their wealth management and financial well-being, based on personal investment goals. Shinghal’s company specializes in Systematic Investment Plans (SIPs), strategies that take advantage of smart and safe mutual fund investments that don’t require a huge monetary commitment.

Shinghal has faith in the long-term nature of the world’s markets, which has kept the company steady through the volatility that has come with COVID-19. He also understands the growing power of information, which is what led him to co-found Probe Information Services, a reservoir of insight into India’s business financial data. Scripbox came about after Shinghal took a year-long sabbatical in 2009 after nearly twenty years working for financial institutions. With this successful venture, he aims to help to fulfill the financial aspirations of Indians across the globe.

 

15. Shengqiang Chen
Company: JD Digits
Country: China

JD Digits is a Chinese company connecting financial and physical industries with digital technology. Founded in 2013, the Beijing-based company (formerly JD Finance) has been helping the industry improve the way it uses the internet to accelerate digitization. Shengqiang Chen is the current CEO of JD Digits, and has helped the company to become a global leader in data processing. Chen joined JD Finance as its chief financial officer, where he oversaw the company’s financial management structure and optimized its management integration while boosting its investments and financing platforms.

Chen was appointed CEO of JD Digits in 2013 and worked to establish the new internet finance business. The company has six labs across China and the U.S., including its Silicon Valley AI Lab. With over 15 years of experience in financing and accounting management, Chen has excelled while holding several prominent roles at the company.

 

16. Guang Zhu
Company: Du Xiaoman Financial
Country: China

Guang Zhu has held several leadership roles within Chinese search engine Baidu and is now the Chief Executive Officer of Du Xiaoman Financial, the fintech arm of Baidu. Formerly Baidu Finance, the Beijing-based company was established in 2013 and provides short-term loans and investment services. Since joining Baidu in 2008, Zhu was promoted to senior vice president in 2016 and served in several roles. During his tenure, he has overseen the company's financial products and operations, as well as its marketing, government relations, and brand strategies, and has been responsible for Baidu’s internal and external communication initiatives. He remains the Senior Vice President of Baidu and General Manager of FSG in addition to his role as CEO. Before joining Baidu, Zhu was the senior director of public relations and integration promotion for Lenovo Group in China.

Zhu’s leadership has been crucial in guiding Du Xiaoman Financial’s success, and it is currently one of the three most highly valued fintech startups in the world. Zhu’s vision for the company includes leveraging its AI capabilities to work with financial institutions and provide secure, technology-driven services to Chinese consumers.

 

17. Leon Li
Company: Huobi
Country: Singapore

Leon Li is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Singapore’s leading global blockchain company, Huobi. Li was an early innovator in the fintech sector, and before establishing Huobi Group in 2013 and building it into one of the world’s leading providers of financial services in digital assets, Li was a computer engineer at Oracle, the world’s largest database provider. In 2019, Li was named chairman of the board, CEO, and executive director of the board for the electronics company, Plantronics Holdings. There, Li utilized his skills and experience to facilitate the management of the company and help Plantronics explore new opportunities. Huobi acquired a controlling stake of Plantronics in September of 2018.

Huobi has become one of the world’s largest digital asset exchanges with an accumulated trading volume of $1 trillion. Huobi Group currently includes Huobi Global, one of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges by trading volume, as well as numerous other upstream and downstream businesses in the digital asset ecosystem. These include Huobi Japan, Huobi Korea, Huobi Capital, Huobi Labs, Huobi DM, and others. Huobi Global has most recently launched a crypto savings product. Under Li’s leadership, Huobi has garnered a reputation for serving and prioritizing its users.

 

18. Deddy Oktomeo
Company: KinerjaPay
Country: Indonesia

Deddy Oktomeo is the Chief Executive Officer of KinerjaPay, an Indonesian IT consulting company. Oktomeo’s 17 years with the company have allowed him to gain expertise in a range of areas, including product design and development, operations, sales support, marketing, and finance. Oktomeo was previously the chief technical officer at Azec Indonesia Management Services, where he was responsible for developing enterprise resource planning systems for major shipping, pharmaceutical, and telecom companies. He also served as the company’s chief executive officer.

KinerjaPay was founded in 2010 and is best known for its platform, KinerjaPay IP, an e-wallet service for bill transfers and online shopping that also allows top-up phone credit for users. Oktomeo’s ability to consistently deliver strong results has earned him a reputation as a one-of-a-kind CEO. Armed with a deep understanding of how IT companies work, his agile leadership style has been vital to the success of KinerjaPay. The company now hopes to expand into other eCommerce verticals such as travel, delivery services, and online gaming.

 

19. Daisuke Sasaki
Company: Freee
Country: Japan

Daisuke Sasaki, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Freee, has fostered the company’s success by taking a risk and relying on inbound sales. The company is currently a leading pioneer of cloud-native, integrated ERP software solutions for SMBs. Founded in 2013, the Japan-based company is an automated online accounting software that syncs with users’ bank accounts and automatically categorizes entries to create financial reports. Today, it is used by over 200,000 businesses across Japan, and allows users to share and manage the accounting records of a company with other colleagues.

Previously, Sasaki was the head of APAC SMB Marketing at Google and helped Asian SMBs to adopt Google’s ads product. Before his tenure at Google, he was the chief financial officer and vice president of product management at ALBERT, a Japanese recommendation engine startup, private equity investment analyst at CLSA Capital Partners Japan, and an account planner at Hakuhodo. Now with Freee, Sasaki aims to create a network of SMBs who can easily make transactions within the Freee system.

 

20. Kim Tae-hoon
Company: Rainist
Country: South Korea

Kim Tae-hoon is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Rainist, a South Korean money management startup. Rainist was founded in 2012 and launched its app BankSalad in 2014, which offers an open banking platform for customers by pooling a user's financial information from different banks and financial companies. The app tracks expenses, income, bills, and savings to help users to budget effectively. The all-in-one money management service also makes recommendations for credit cards and other financial products based on each user’s finances and spending patterns.

Former owner of a street food vendor, Kim founded Rainist by manually compiling a list of products from each financial company to produce a database of over 4,200 financial products available online for customers. Today, BankSalad is being used by millions to manage and analyze their financial information. To further serve his mission of preventing retail financial consumers from being marginalized in South Korea, Kim launched an online magazine on the BankSalad website that offers financial tips to boost consumers’ profit and minimize cash losses. Kim’s next goal is to develop analytical frameworks for outgoing transactions and analyze users’ investment risk appetite.

 

21. Sameer Nigam
Company: PhonePe
Country: India

With almost 20 years of experience, Sameer Nigam has created a highly scalable and flexible technology-driven solution for startups and internet businesses through PhonePe. PhonePe is a mobile payments app that allows users to transfer money instantly to anyone. Before establishing PhonePe, Nigam served at Flipkart.com for almost four years where he held several roles, initially as vice president of business development, eventually taking on the role of senior vice president of engineering. Previously, he was the founder and chief executive officer of Mime360, a next-generation digital distribution platform solution and was the director of search product development at Shopzilla, now known as Connexity.

Founded in 2015, the Bengaluru, Karnataka-based PhonePe is passionate about making digital payments so easy that people never carry cash or cards again. Under Nigam's leadership, the company has developed partnerships with UPI, Visa, and Mastercard as it anticipates taking the company into different markets globally. In 2021, the company plans to enable e-payments for over 25 million small merchants, with a focus on the rural and semi-urban areas of the country.

 

22. Sanghoon Seo
Company: HonestFund
Country: South Korea

Sanghoon Seo is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of HonestFund, a fast growing South Korean fintech company offering an alternative investing platform. The company was founded in 2015 and provides individuals and institutional investors access to alternative investment opportunities across a wide range of asset classes, such as residential and commercial real estate, infrastructure financing, and unsecured personal loans. Today, HonestFund has provided more than $300 million in cumulative loans.

Before founding HonestFund, Seo was a business analyst at Collaborative Fund, an early stage venture capital firm helping creative businesses, and was an early investor in Kickstarter, Genius, Lyft, Hampton Creek and other notable companies. Before this he was a software developer intern at Samsung SDS, a consulting team leader at Prepay Nation, an intern at McKinsey & Company, and an aircraft controller at the Air Force Operation Command Center in the Republic of Korea Air Force. In his current role as HonestFund’s CEO, Seo is responsible for business development, strategy development, and company-wide management.

 

23. Chung Chun Lim
Company: iFAST
Country: Singapore

Chung Chun Lim co-founded the Singapore-based company iFAST in 2001 after the launch of the B2C division of Fundsupermart.com in Singapore in 2000. He is now iFAST’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. iFAST is a wealth management fintech platform that combines financial solutions with the capacity of a licensed financial institution to provide multi-product offerings. The company offers access to over 9,400 investment products including funds, bonds, Singapore Government Securities, stocks, and Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs), as well as insurance products and services including discretionary portfolios, research and investment seminars, fintech solutions, investment administration, and transaction services..

Before founding iFAST, Lim was the head of research at ING Barings Securities. Now at iFAST, Lim has been pivotal in the company’s regional expansion efforts, and under his leadership, iFAST has extended its presence beyond Singapore into Hong Kong, Malaysia, China, and India and built a well-established fintech ecosystem across the five markets. Most notably, Lim successfully led iFAST to a successful listing on the SGX-ST Mainboard in 2014. Recently, iFAST obtained approval-in-principle from Malaysia’s Securities Commission to commence stockbroking operations in 2021, adding to its stockbroking businesses in Singapore and Hong Kong.

 

24. Zac Cheah
Company: Pundi X
Country: Indonesia

When Zac Cheah and Co-Founder Pitt Huang started Pundi X in 2017, the goal was to make blockchain a part of everyday life. Since then the Singapore-based multi-cryptocurrency point-of-sale solutions provider, has expanded its global presence with offices in Jakarta, São Paulo, Seoul, Shenzhen, Taipei, and Tokyo. Its most notable offering is XPOS, the world’s first point-of-sale solution that enables merchants and consumers to conduct in-store transactions instantly on the blockchain. Pundi X recently announced that XPOS is now capable of supporting PayPal after a Twitter survey indicated that PayPal was the mobile payment app users would most like to see supported.

Before Pundi X, Cheah was the founder and chief executive officer at Wozlla, a cross platform HTML5 gaming production and distribution company. Before this he was the chair of interest groups at W3C, where he coordinated web standards adoption with 700 technical specialists. This was preceded by four years spent at Opera Software AS as chief standard officer and web evangelist. Cheah began his career as an intern at Google where he coded JotScript for JotSpot (variant of JavaScript) through the Google Summer of Code intern program. JotSpot was later acquired by Google and rebranded as Google Sites. Cheah’s vision for the company is for it to help make cryptocurrency accessible to everyone.

 

25. Chang-Hun Yoo
Company: SsenStone
Country: South Korea

Chang-Hun Yoo is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of SsenStone, a South Korean company specializing in fintech, authentication, and cybersecurity. Previously, he was the head of security solutions at MarkAny. Before that, he was the vice president of DreamToReality, founder and CEO of Unistreet.com, and assistant manager at Samsung Heavy Industries. Yoo has over 20 years of security field expertise and is also a seasoned ISO expert who owns over 130 patents.

Yoo founded the Seoul-based company in 2015. At that time, the company started with its first product, a 2-way dynamic key matching algorithm. Since then SsenStone has won a slew of prizes, has become FIDO UAF and FIDO2 certified, and accumulated an impressive list of government clients. In 2018, Yoo founded swIDch where he is also currently the Chief Executive Officer. The technology company aims to eliminate CNP fraud through its patented algorithm. In less than two years, swIDch has attained 19 patents across six countries.