Chetan Karkanis leads venture investments in Asia Pacific at Franklin Templeton. He is responsible for building corporate ventures into promising fintech and wealthtech companies that can add value to Franklin Templeton’s asset management business, from data analytics to AI and blockchain.
Chetan says DigpinJames DiBiasio explains how fintech continues to provide opportunities for asset managers and where it poses disruptive challenges.
He talks about the lessons he learned from investing in startups, especially when they go wrong. And he provides a window into how AI and blockchain can shape industries from operations and IT to distribution and even how investment teams build portfolios.
- Time code:
- 0:00 – Chetan Karkanis, Franklin Templeton
- 01:48 – How fintech is shaping the wealth management industry and lessons learned from the firm’s various investments in Asian wealthtech companies for “web2”
- 7:19 – How Franklin Templeton decides when and how to integrate technology or startups into his company
- 8:31 – Are fintechs disrupting asset managers, or are they just a new breed of service providers?
- 11:12 – What happens when fintech investments fail, and what does that tell us about what works and what doesn’t work in Asia?
- 13:54 – Cryptocurrencies, Tokenization, DLT, Bitcoin ETFs and how they apply to traditional businesses
- 18:08 – Looking to the future, how will blockchain transform asset management?
- 20:43 – Outlook for Separate Management Accounts in Asia
- 24:06 – How Chetan thinks about tokenization in payments from an asset manager perspective
- 26:26 – The impact of technology on the front office and how investment teams use data and AI
- 30:48 – RoI or other ways to measure the relevance of a technology
- 32:04 – Obligatory questions about generative AI