Interview with Bankera’s Japanese Community Manager Austėja

Earlier this week we shared with you our interview with Bankera’s  former Japanese community manager Austėja, where she commented on Japanese culture and their views on the new technological banking.

If you have not seen the video yet, you can check it out down below. As always we are thinking about our worldwide contributors so we have enabled Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Brazilian-Portuguese, and Spanish subtitles in addition to the English ones and we have more languages coming soon.

If you are more of the reading kind, we have prepared a transcript of the interview just for you.

Could you briefly introduce yourself?

We can do it in Japanese. (Speaks in Japanese) Hi, I’m Austėja, and I’m a Lithuanian born and brought up in Japan. I’m interested in things such as maths, statistics, machine learning, data science, and also interested in blockchain applications in business, especially in the financial industry, and that is why I work here.

First of all, what are the most common questions from our Japanese community?

I found out the Japanese Community has a very good understanding of our project. They read our whitepaper very well and they ask very constructive questions and most questions are long-term questions about, let’s say our RoboChats that we want to introduce in the future or other banking services: what it’s gonna be like in Japan, what it’s gonna be like elsewhere, in Europe, in other continents. That’s very good about them and another very unique thing about them is that they’re very supportive, not only of the project itself but they’re very supportive of each other. They encourage very positive comments and they’re not just seeking a return as a participant in the ICO but they want to be a part of Bankera and see how the project expands.

You know Chinese community, actually there are a lot of Chinese, they also like this project a lot, but since Chinese are having ICOs ban, one of the most common questions in Chinese community is “if it will affect them to join this ICO”. Actually it will not because this ICO, it’s in Europe. The next question is: Do they see the advantage of blockchain or digital banking compared to the traditional ones?

One thing, first of all, is that, I think such digital banks are very accessible to individuals especially for people who come from countries where banking is heavily regulated by the government or in a very unfair way. That’s definitely a plus. And from a bigger perspective, compared to other banks, I think such digital banks are very flexible to new technology. Traditional big massive banks have massive funds that they accumulated over the years but because of their legacy system, once they have new technology that they want to build in, it takes a massive amount of money and a lot of time just to change that one system, even if they had the best engineers. So I really agree with Bankera’s vision that they want to build a very flexible infrastructure from the very beginning that they can develop and adapt to new technology as they come in.

While working with Japanese community of Bankera how do you see our Japanese client’s view about digital/blockchain banking?

Digital banking might be a new concept but digital payment is already very familiar to us. We have these pre-paid IC cards, we call them Suica and Pasmo. They’re basically cards that we can tap on machines and make payments instantly so we use them on public transport or in restaurants, grocery stores, convenience stores, even on vending machines. We just tap and payment is done. A lot of people expect that Bankera can introduce more services that make daily payments easy. Not just paying for one good or one service but also incorporating a lot of other banking services and they do expect Bankera to be a pioneer in that area.

While working with Japanese community of Bankera, what is the reason why they contribute to Bankera?

They do find our management team and the advisory team very trustworthy, especially because NEM is very popular in Japan and we have Lon Wong who is the president of the NEM foundation, so that’s definitely one reason. Also, there is another advantage that we are accessible to the Japanese clients we have full support in Japanese which is not very common with other foreign ICOs for them so they can easily get into the community, discuss anything, ask questions and they find it very accessible and kind to them.

We hope you enjoyed the interview. We will be back with more updates in Bankera’s Q&A video part two, so stay tuned!