Earlier this week a delegation from Hong Kong visited Skolkovo, the international tech hub under completion on the outskirts of Moscow, to exchange experience amid an ongoing cooperation program.
As reported by the Skolkovo foundation, the delegation was led by Professor KC Chan, Secretary for Financial Services and the Treasury of Hong Kong, who outlined how the government there supports the fintech sector.
Russia is home to 150-180 fintech startups, of which 18 are residents of Skolkovo, said Pavel Novikov of the Russian tech hub’s IT cluster. With 660 active banks, the country offers plenty of opportunities for such startups, he said.
The Hong Kong delegation got acquainted with three of Skolkovo’s fintech startups: Cashoff, which provides individual users with a way of seeing all their accounts and transactions in one place, and helps banks to improve their service by (anonymously) analyzing clients’ cash flows and spending habits; Doubledata, which provides big data solutions for retail banks that allow them to perform credit scoring, fraud detection and other operations; and Cardsmobile, which aims to replace bank, loyalty, transport and other ID cards with a mobile service, eliminating the need for a wallet altogether.
In Russia, following the fall of global oil prices and the collapse of the ruble, investment in the IT sector has dropped from $611 million in 2013 to $206 million in 2015, with just $10 million invested over the last year into six FinTech startups, according to Novikov’s calculations.
Hong Kong successes for Russian startups
While it may have become trickier to secure financing from private investors at home, Skolkovo residents are among those to have benefited from Hong Kong’s flourishing startup ecosystem, Maxim Mikhailov, Skolkovo’s director of acceleration programs, told the delegation.
“We did our first test of Hong Kong in 2014, when we brought 10 IT companies for the ICT Expo,” said Mikhailov. “That was probably the most successful one-week trip abroad we have made,” he added, explaining that all ten companies achieved concrete results.
“Two companies [including DigiFLAK] began small-scale production in [the nearby manufacturing hub] Shenzhen,” he said. “Two or three opened an office in Hong Kong, one of them [SiRus] also found a franchising partner, and some of them found foreign partners in the Middle East or India,” he added.
Building on that success, Skolkovo is now trying to move beyond IT and help companies from its other clusters (biomed, nuclear, energy and space) enter the Hong Kong or surrounding markets, said Mikhailov.
Chinese prospects
“At some point there was discussion in Hong Kong that all clinical trials done there would automatically be accepted in China, and that would definitely be a big step, not only for Skolkovo,” he said. “That’s what we’re really eager to pursue.”
Chan said he looked forward to seeing more cooperation between Hong Kong and Russia in innovation projects, as well as exchange programs between universities.
Skolkovo is currently building up its relations with mainland China, and is in the process of opening representative offices in Beijing and Shanghai to help Skolkovo residents do business there. The Russian tech hub signed recently an investment agreement with the major Chinese foundation Cybernaut Investment Group.
Over the past years, Skolkovo has also been developing technological and business ties with Argentina, Cuba, Ethiopia, France, India, Singapore, South Korea and several other countries.
