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In my forty-five years in industry, I have spent 33 of it in industry and the other 12 in academic and professional education. I enjoy both sides of the street and think there is value in having both perspectives. When I was teaching investment management at university I was also creating and running professional/industry courses on all aspects of financial markets. I am no longer a Professor at a university but am working on new training/professional education for entrepreneurship given my role as one of three Chapter leaders in Hong Kong for Founder Institute (FI) and running the ASEAN FinTech industry ‘vertical’ there.
The FI Core Program is basically a business course teaching Founders the key concepts they need to understand and apply to make their start-up successful, and it is industry agnostic.
I noted that many Founders who were involved with FinTech start-ups came from a technology background and had little or no experience with financial markets. This reminded me of a previous decade when I ran a large financial markets training business for investment banks in Europe and the Middle East. We had very good attendance on our courses but I was surprised to see that only a minority were from sales, trading and investing and more were from legal, accountancy and IT reflecting all the other skill sets a large bank must have with the growing regulatory and technology requirements. But these people, though highly educated and trained, did not have a financial markets background and needed a ‘crash course’ on financial markets and products to be effective inside the bank.
To be successful in an industry, like finance, you need industry knowledge to identify opportunities and talk knowledgeably with people (customers) in the industry. So, when we first offered the FinTech vertical we decided to supplement the Core Program with extra sessions to teach FinTech Founders about financial markets.
FinTech Vertical (2012) =
We used to say that a business was two businesses, the subject matter expertise specific to that industry and the business knowledge that any company must have to be commercially successful.
But times change.
As mentioned, I was running financial markets executive education from 2004 – 12. What I discovered when I started professional training for start-ups in 2017 was how much technology has changed – advanced – and how it has become all pervasive in everything we do. This is particularly true in the financial industry, which is an industry of intangibles and so often the ‘first mover’ in new technology.
Here are just a few fundamental changes I have had to update myself on to remain relevant in the financial education industry:
I now understand there are three (not two) core competencies that must reside in any new company:
FinTech Vertical (2025) =
Much of today’s technology, whether it is SaaS, AI, blockchain or something else will become essential in the running of any business. We can be certain that the financial industry will be an early user of most and a large user of all over the longer term. So, having this knowledge from day 1 has become a ‘must have’.
But there is only so much we can throw at a Founder at one time without the risk of overwhelming them. So, we had to think carefully about the delivery of these three competencies. My personal view, which you may or may not agree with, is that 3. Technology is about ‘build and implementation’. Whereas the initial problem identification, market research, and conceptual prototype can be done and designed before we get into the details of the technology used for implementation. So, we are working with other partners who are specialists in the field, for our graduating Founders to move onto a further, technical accelerator to learn, design and build the actual technology they will launch their MVP with. We hope to announce these partnerships in the upcoming weeks and months. But when they are firmly in place, we believe our ‘three competency model’, though demanding to go through, will provide the FinTech Founder with all the knowledge and experience to launch – and that is our goal.
John D. Evans, CFA
Founder & General Manager, SEIML
Hong Kong, 10 March 2025
If you have thought of operating a business in Asia, or already have one, then do not hesitate to contact us to see how we might be able to help you set up, raise private capital, and manage your company’s local administration.
©2025
Snowdonia Evans Investment Management Limited (SEIML)
Benny has worked in the financial markets of China with an emphasis on fixed income, currency and asset-liability management. He is currently Vice President of Longly Capital, a medium-sized, Ningbo-based private fund management company. The firm’s strategies include various types of fixed income portfolio management and convertible bond portfolio management. In addition, Benny offers financial investment services to professional investors such as Fund of Funds (FoF) of securities companies, enterprise investors and high net worth (HNW) individuals.
Benny has also been active on the commercial side of the securities business managing client business development strategies, marketing programmes and roadshows and developing and delivering financial markets training programmes for small and medium-sized banks and other financial institutions.
Benny is fluent in Mandarin, English and Japanese.
Since returning from graduate studies in France to China in spring of 2014, Jina has been continually working in the field of e-commerce and its applications to the financial, entertainment and automotive industries. She is a multi-functional talent and fluent in Mandarin, English and French.
Jina is SEIML’s key relationship manager between foreign clients and the Chinese administrative authorities and has held many responsibilities dealing with international companies and executives operating in China. As a result, she manages all of the company’s Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) activities with clients
With her graduate degree in economics and completion of the Investment Foundations certificate from CFA Institute, she has the knowledge to assist foreign companies in China market research, including reviews of potential customers, suppliers or other third parties. She is also quite savvy in the use of Chinese social media.
Jina is fluent in Mandarin, English and French.
John spent the first 24 years of his career in investment banking, first in Toronto, briefly in New York and then London. He was involved in DCM, ECM and strategic investment advisory to large funds in EMEA.
In 2004 he moved into academia and designed and ran MSc programs in investment management at universities in the UK and China. He also created and managed one of the larger financial professional training organizations in Europe while at the UK university (that was a JV partner in the training firm).
In 2016, John returned to industry to work with start-ups and various platforms and eco systems to support these early and middle stage companies. Initially he pursued this venture in the Shanghai region but then moved to Hong Kong in 2024 to build SEIML’s footprint in Southeast Asia. John is also a Director of the Hong Kong Founder Institute (FI) eco system and Program Director for the FI ASEAN Fintech accelerator.
