Fintech solutions must be tailored to keep pace with evolving customer needs – Kearney’s Kevin Kwek

He emphasised that balancing innovation with sustainability is now key to fintech’s growth trajectory.

The fintech industry in Asia is evolving significantly, shaped by shifting investor expectations, evolving consumer needs, and tightening regulatory frameworks. Amidst this dynamic landscape, innovation must now be balanced with sustainability and long-term value creation.

Kevin Kwek, Southeast Asia Head of the Financial Institutions Group at Kearney, offers expert insight drawn from his years of experience in financial institutions strategy, digital banking, and fintech innovation.

He brings industry expertise from his time as Managing Director at Alliance Bernstein (AB), where he advised global institutional investors on long-term developments and investment opportunities in Asian financials and fintech, as well as his time with Standard Chartered Bank in strategy and M&A. He authored six Black Books on banking, digital banking, and payments during his tenure at Bernstein, accurately forecasting the structural challenges facing fintech firms.

As a judge at the ABF Fintech Awards 2025, Kwek highlights the need for Fintechs to align innovation with long term commercial viability, operational resilience, and purpose-led impact to stand out in a competitive environment.

How would you characterise the current state of the fintech industry in Asia, and what key drivers are shaping its development today?

In several countries, fintechs are starting to mature, in particular being better able to balance innovation against the need for stakeholders to see sustainable and profitable models. Just 5 years ago, any innovative idea would easily get funding, and all they needed to show was a rapid user base increase. Today, the focus is much sharper on what the customer needs, whilst being more commercial for long-term success. Technology and how it is deployed remain a key shaper, but with incumbents – be it more mature fintechs or financial institutions such as banks – continuing to invest heavily, the challenge has also risen for newer fintechs. Overall, this is a good thing for the industry, in that funding will go to the most sustainable areas that are of value to the end consumer. The other driver is regulations. Regulators everywhere better understand the need for guardrails, and these ultimately help the industry develop.

Given your background in digital banking and payments, how can companies effectively integrate fintech solutions into traditional banking models?

Most critical for traditional banks will be to think more like Fintechs in terms of unique ways to address old – or even new – needs. What do Fintechs try to disrupt or disintermediate? What do they do differently, innovatively? And to be able to think like them, having the right leadership mindset changes is, I would argue, the most critical. DBS’ digitalisation journey, for instance, started with the CEO’s question on why banks can’t be like tech companies, and getting the board to go along with discovery and experimentation. Almost as important is the need to then infuse with new talent and retrain at least part of the current workforce. Then the tech investments need to come into play, once the strategy and ambitions have been set. Ultimately, though, the solutions have to be tailored to customer needs and how they are evolving, and do this rapidly, learning and adjusting along the way.

How can Fintechs better leverage advanced technologies like data analytics to deliver hyper-personalised customer experiences and improve financial outcomes?

All Fintechs and banks hope to derive value out of this. The issues are several. One of them is Data Quality. This cannot be over-emphasised. Second would be the ability to drive practical use cases from analytics – and this requires strong collaboration between business units, IT, and the Analytics team (which sometimes are within business areas, and sometimes with IT, depending on the stage of development and organisational imperatives). At a fundamental level, analytics should be used to answer “what would you do with the deep understanding you have of the client, from the data and analytics, as an individual? How do you make client-relevant decisions, on an ongoing basis”. Last but not least is execution. What looks good on paper often finds limited results if the hyper-personalised customer experiences don’t have clear goals and KPIs set, including an ability to assess ‘how well was this done compared to BAU?’

As Fintech firms grow, how can they maintain innovation whilst building operational and regulatory resilience?

Setting clear ‘ground rules’ helps – ensuring education is done early, that innovation without operational resilience may fail — potentially catastrophically — from operational risks or regulatory intervention that comes into play. If, for instance, an otherwise good idea is implemented without considering customer risks, it gets clamped down. Having cross-functional and agile teams involved early on is one way to ensure good ideas can be implemented.

Looking ahead, what do you foresee as the most transformative shifts or opportunities that will define the industry in the region?

To me, the ones that will in some way address fundamental, bigger picture trends and issues will get the additional funding and regulatory support. For instance, financial penetration and inclusion areas will always get attention. Additionally, areas that help underlying challenges such as ageing and wealth gaps, will also see sustainable interest and funding. A wealth growth app, for instance, done well and helps educate customers, will also be helping with national purpose such as income gap narrowing, and hence, will continue to get attention.

As a judge at the ABF FinTech Awards 2025, what key criteria will you use when evaluating the nominees?

In line with the above, firstly, innovation, obviously. Secondly, the innovation is sustainable and profitable. Thirdly, doing so whilst serving a broader purpose, or helping address a societal agenda, would help. In addition to the usual criteria, these would be key for me.