Lawmakers across party lines and start-up ecosystem builders yesterday urged the government to improve its approach toward fostering the local development of financial technology (fintech) and other innovations, beginning with “regulatory sandbox” legislation.
The nation’s window of opportunity to become a major regional hub for innovative technologies might be closing soon, given the government’s penchant for following international trends, AppWorks Ventures (之初創投) founding partner Nice Cheng (程九如) said at a forum in Taipei.
The five years it took local developers to receive government approval to operate third-party payment services delayed adoption by consumers, Cheng said, adding that the legislative process has been bogged down by a requirement to hold redundant public hearings that do little to promote consensus.
While progress has stalled in Taiwan, innovative services have flourished abroad, he said.
About 415,000 credit cards were registered on Apple Inc’s electronic payment platform, Apple Pay, in its first two days on the local market, he added.
Regulators have arbitrarily set high barriers to entry for many start-ups, such as minimum capitalization and revenue requirements, Cheng said.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Jason Hsu (許毓仁) said at the forum that the government should stop fixating on establishing a full set of regulations for fintech and other innovative industries.
Instead, the government should establish a basic law that would serve as a guideline for the development of a digital economy and as a basis for legislation to adapt to changing market trends, in a bid to resolve disputes over sharing-economy services, such as those provided by Uber Technologies Inc, Hsu said.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Karen Yu (余宛如) said that while the Financial Supervisory Commission has been receptive of the idea of supporting fintech development and has promised to encourage state-run banks to prioritize procurement of locally developed fintech solutions, it remains to be seen whether the regulator would be able carry out the task, which would require cross-departmental efforts.
The commission’s “regulatory sandbox” bill gleans insights from precedents in Britain to promote experimentation in new financial services and products, but there could be disastrous results if the government misunderstands and deviates from examples it is trying to learn from, Yu said.
Efforts to foster innovation remain challenged by the nation’s immense bureaucracy, she said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day