We are currently near the beginning of our second wave of substantial improvements in business differentiation. These improvements include having a digital bank within our Group’s Fintech ecosystem, having a clear strategy towards achieving a truly global business model, and adding additional services that are complementary to our digital banking and wealth management platform such as payment related services and a bond market place.
We believe that as we make progress in this second wave of substantial improvements in business differentiations, our business model will become more scalable and we will be able to enjoy robust growth rates over the next five to ten years.
We believe that several years down the line, shareholders will be able to see that our decision to buy a full-licensed UK bank in early 2022 has been a transformative move which substantially raises the Group’s long-term growth potential. In our view, banking is the least competitive part of the financial sector, as there tends to be very few new players in the banking industry in most countries. There are far more players in fund management, stockbroking and wealth management distribution and advisory, and many new players are emerging every year.
We also believe that compared to most banks and big financial institutions, we have a clear advantage in our technological capability in terms of speed and costs of rolling out new technologies. In today’s digital world, this substantially improves our ability to become a leader in our business segments.