Being a FinTech CTO in Hong Kong Day 81

I was delighted to be asked to speak at Red Hat’s FinTech Executive Roundtable at the opulent Mira in Hong Kong. A big thank you to Peter Man and Andy Ho for inviting me to speak about my experiences around the selection and deployment of OpenShift in both Enterprise and FinTech environments.

FinTech

Before I summarise my presentation, a tip of the Red Hat to the other speakers. Albert Li’s opening speech painted a detailed picture of the FinTech scene here in HK and the broader region. It is a very exciting time to be in Southeast Asia, given the capital flows into the FinTech sector (which I understand exceed that of the US in 2016) and fast evolving regulatory environment, technology will have a huge impact on future success and it will be the best informed executives, making the best technology decisions, that will be the most successful.

DevOps and API Management

Vishal Ghariwala described in detail how DevOps and API Management support time to market. Everything in his presentation resonated with my own experience. If Enterprise IT is going to have any hope of competing in today’s marketplace the absolute minimum it must do is to adopt DevOps and implement a coherent API strategy with a laser like focus on time to market.

Blockchain

Victor Wong, CEO and Founder of BlockApps gave a highly informative presentation on how Blockchain is maturing to the point of becoming a viable option for the Enterprise and how its availability on the OpenShift PaaS is an expression of this maturity. I have no doubt that, in due course, we at YOU Technologies Group will have a need for an Enterprise class blockchain solution so it was great to see BlockApps is positioning itself in this space.

Infrastructure as Code

Anirban Mukherjee’s presentation was on a subject that is close to my heart namely, automation and Infrastructure as Code. I need no convincing of the merits of automation and Software Defined Everything and it was a pleasure to have Anirban’s perspective on the matter.

Digital Transformation

My own presentation presented a case study of the Why, What and How of Digital Transformation in Multinational Bank, where I drew on elements from the previous presentations and described them in a context where they were successfully implemented. For those that are interested in Digital Transformation you I suggest reading my previous series of posts on Enterprise IT in 2020: A Minimal Viable Vision (I, II, III). My presentation was summary of this work with a large dose of NoDev, NoOps and NoIT because DevOps methodology is great, but it is far more powerful when combined with NoDev, NoOps, NoIT ideology.

In Other News

My context is switching to security for the next couple of weeks. There are some amazing developments occurring in Cyber Security which I hope will afford an unparalleled level of protection without disrupting the business or bankrupting it. Right now I’m in the process of creating a proposal to put forward to multiple Cyber Security vendors with a view of taking a systematic and partnership based approach to delivering on our security requirements. While I have done this sort of thing in the past, the scope and scale of the current proposal is very ambitious, welcome to FinTech!