End of Summer, Autumn Beckons

After 2 hectic weeks of overseas travel to Myanmar and Seoul, this week was a slower than normal one for me. I have 3 more weeks to prepare for my next half marathon run and am also getting ready for a busy trip to Yangon next Mon.

Started this Mon with a meeting of potential business partners I had organized a few weeks ago. A uni mate had suggested a few years ago that if I had a banking idea which his team of programmers can work on, we could look at a JV arrangement. My ex-Citi colleagues had such a idea and hence this meeting was arranged.

This was just a preliminary meet up for both sides to size each other up. I do believe that it went relatively well as both parties were honest about their expectations and put everything on the table. Whether any business opportunity will eventually come up or that it will result in more future followup meetings will be determined in the next few weeks. The business team will also be talking to another developer in KL to assess a 2nd potential tech partner this week.

Managed to get a single ticket to attend the Bicentennial exhibition at the Fort Canning Center on Thurs. Pretty impressive set up which I would encourage more citizens to visit. It gives a brief 1 hour summary of the country’s history over the last 600 years. The visuals and CGI were quite good but due to the limit in time and too much data to compress, I felt that they did not go too much in-depth for certain important subjects, being superficial at best. But overall, it was a nice feel good experience.

My first Angel investment experience kicked into the next stage this week as the capital call was announced by AngelCentral. The Fintech firm Tourego aims to revolutionize tax refunds for overseas tourists by making it seamless. The idea seemed good at the pitching session and I believe that this firm could be ripe for acquisition by big boys like Alibaba at a later stage. It will be my first 25K into this new asset class and for me to get my feet wet.

I had some self-doubt on the investment last week when I was leaving Seoul. My wife was trying to claim some tax refunds at the airport. I was amazed that it had become so easy in Korea. She basically went to the many self-operated booths that were set up to scan all the bar codes from the receipts. Instantly, the total refund amount was credited back to her via cash like an ATM machine! The booth can also credit back via Alipay, since the China tourists were the biggest group of visitors to Korea.

Friday was another long lunch and drinks with my group of good friends, talking about everything under the sun and bitching about politics as usual. Another week has passed and we are now going into Autumn and preparing for our family vacation to Japan.

I will have an intensive Yangon trip in the first half of next week as we formulate new Treasury strategies and start our digital transformation journey to engineering a quantum leap into the next stage of growth via fintech – AI, Blockchain, Cloud and Data.

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