Fazz Financial Group Deputy CEO and Xfers CEO and co-founder Tianwei Liu, an engineer by training, founder by experience, and angel on the side, goes on call to share how gifting Kindles and a LinkedIn search led him to return to Southeast Asia to pioneer fintech infrastructure through Xfers, how a Slack message from fellow Y Combinator alum Hendra Kwik led to the formation of regional fintech group Fazz Financial, and how being early adopters of crypto led Xfers to building Singapore's first stablecoin.

Transcript

Timestamps

(00:12) Paulo recaps the Fazz Financial Group evolution through the podcast;

(02:53) Paulo introduces Tianwei;

(03:57) What excites Tianwei about Southeast Asia;

(05:46) How Tianwei decided to return from Silicon Valley to start Xfers in 2015, 2016;

(10:05) Driving the evolution of fintech in Southeast Asia through payment infrastructure;

(13:49) Three reasons why Xfers joined forces with Payfazz to form Fazz Financial Group;

(18:13) How the evolution into Fazz Financial has shaped Tianwei as a leader;

(20:08) How Xfers works to support Payfazz agents and users;

(21:35) Why Xfers ventured into developing Singapore’s first stablecoin through StraitsX;

(24:45) The value of localized ventures in crypto;

(27:13) What the future of crypto and payments infrastructure is in Southeast Asia;

(29:20) Rapid Fire Round;

About our guest

Tianwei Liu is the CEO and Co-founder of Xfers, and Deputy CEO of Fazz Financial Group. Along with the management of Xfers in Singapore, he is currently driving Xfers’ expansion into Indonesia and engages closely with Xfers‘ banking and merchant partners to accelerate the growth of fintech and digital businesses in the region. After his receiving his Bachelors in Computer Engineering in 2011 from the National University of Singapore, Tianwei returned to Silicon Valley (having studied at Stanford University under the NUS Overseas College (NOC) Programme) as a Software Engineer working on developer tools at WIMM Labs, a start-up that built the world’s first Android-based smartwatches. His team at WIMM Labs laid the foundation for Google’s WearOs™ that powers its smartwatches (WIMM Labs was acquired by Google in late 2012). After WIMM Labs’ acquisition, Tianwei worked at Amazon Lab126 from May 2012 to June 2015, when he and his team built the big data ingestion infrastructure that allows for real-time processing and analytics of the health status of all Kindles devices used daily by Amazon’s customers.

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