This startup lets high-net-worth individuals manage their assets crypto-style

Photo credit: Anastasia Nelen / 123RF

This article is part of Tech in Asia’s partnership with Decrypt Asia where we publish the revised transcripts from the show’s podcast interviews related to blockchain. This is heavily revised from the original transcripts. For the full interview, go here or here.

Greg Van den Bergh is the CEO of Bankorus, a private wealth management platform in China that’s built on the NEM blockchain platform. The company aims to make traditional banking products for high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) accessible in the crypto market. Bankorus recently got accepted into JD.com’s inaugural Beijing-based accelerator for AI and blockchain startups.

In 2013, Van den Bergh launched MiCai (a robo-advisory system) in China, then re-branded it to Bankorus as they penetrated the crpyto space.

In this interview, he shares what got him excited to get into crypto, how Bankorus and its token work, and his thoughts on blockchain’s future.

Why did you enter the crypto market?

There are three main reasons. First of all, there’s client demand. Over half of HNWIs are looking to take a position in crypto moving forward. Most family offices talk about crypto investments. But from the surveys that we’ve done with our Asian clients, only about one or two percent has a crypto allocation.

I think this trend is really irreversible because:

• There are a lot of benefits for HNWIs to own crypto, first of which are the returns.
• There is diversification of portfolio.
• Blockchain provides a much safer way for HNWIs to invest.

The second reason is that when we first started the robo-advisory business, we realized that we had been spending a lot of time cleaning up the data and centralizing them for the companies we were working with. So, we decided that there has to be some way to centralize or decentralize data so we can have different permissions for different users.

Then, blockchain came up. Last year, we realized, why don’t we just securitize or tokenize the actual end product so that the entire asset is fully managed on the blockchain?

The third reason is that the world is getting much more decentralized, which is a good thing. With the compliance happening recently with the SEC and the different regulators, this market has become really hot all of a sudden. Currently, about 99 percent of all the tokens out there are utility tokens, and we believe this will change.

Tell us about what Bankorus offers.

We divided our product offerings into three modules. The main module is called the bMarket, which is like Amazon for security tokens. We want to be the “everything store” for any type of security token. Having a marketplace model, we work primarily with third-party vendors that issue security tokens.

The next module, bLoan, creates securitized loans that are backed by particular assets set on the blockchain. For many HNWIs, rather than selling assets for cash then moving that cash into crypto, they can come to us and say, “I have certain assets I would like to borrow against that crypto.” And we take those assets, put it on the blockchain, put a smart contract against it, and issue a loan to them in crypto.

The other module, bTokenized, essentially allows HNWIs to tokenize assets for liquidity. The underlying asset in this case could be real estate or anything that’s not easy to value. So, how would an investor who is looking to buy some of these tokens evaluate the value of the underlying asset? That’s where we’re helping.

Tell us about your real-time reporting tool, bReport.

Why did you build your product on NEM?

Tell us about your token called BKT.

Where do you see the blockchain space heading in the next couple of years?