FintechCEO of Bankorus Says It Will Be the Amazon Marketplace for Blockchain Assets
Earlier this week, JD.com, a Chinese e-commerce business, unveiled its AI Catapult, an accelerator programme to bring blockchain and AI into real-world use. JD hopes to use the technology, developed by six blockchain or AI companies, throughout it business, which is worth an estimated $100bn.
One of the six companies, Bankorus, is a wealth management platform, built on a blockchain protocol that was founded in Beijing in 2013. Using a combination of blockchain and AI, Bankorus essentially enables its clients to convert real-world assets into cryptocurrency tokens.
Speaking from the Bahamas, the company’s CEO said Bankorus was “very excited” to be working with JD.com; Gregory “Greg” Van den Bergh, initially came up with the basis of the idea whilst studying for an MBA at the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business.
Greg says that mainland China’s financial services were far behind what was happening in the West. “In terms of infrastructure, there was nothing for the HNWI (High Net Worth Individual) market,” he said.
“The issue [in the Chinese private banking sector] was that budgets didn’t put much aside for risk management or for portfolio analysis”, Greg says. The ones that were around used Microsoft Excel to manage risk as well as for portfolio analysis which according to Greg, “was fine for investing in real estate or fixed income projects which at that time had never seen a principal risk or loss.”
However, this all began to change as more private banking firms in China began to recognise the importance of diversification. “They realised Excel was not sufficient anymore for all their calculations and monitoring”, Greg says.