How hard is it for a foreigner (and especially Chinese) to form a local fintech company in Taiwan? Has anyone gone through this process? The company would handle processing customer money, think something related to crypto.
I was told by my CPA that it needs special approval by the investment committee and should be handled by a larger CPA firm like Deloitte and that they don’t have the resource to help me.
A regular Taiwan company took 3 months for me to register. I’m wondering if anyone has gone through this process for a company in fintech?
Don’t have real data, but I can safely assume that’s even if it’s not hard to start it’ll be hard to sustain. Taiwan doesn’t have proper support at the institutional and regulatory levels for developing the fintech ecosystem. They only keep talking about it.
Fintech regulations must be absolutely absurd. I don’t actually know any details, but a lot of well funded international fintech companies looked at the regulations for Taiwanese market and decided not to go forward. It would probably screw with their business model and standard procedures.
Look, even PayPal is completely crooked in Taiwan. Only supports one bank and can’t transfer between two Taiwanese accounts.
Skype from Microsoft … try to up your balance for a Taiwanese account
Good luck trying to follow their regulations and not have ridiculous procedures like local banks have for international transfers and foreigners.
So two of the paltry number of successful applicants named for the regulatory sandbox, which sounds like some sort of program to encourage startups and innovation, were existing Taiwanese banks! Comedy gold.
In fairness it’s not quite that bad. Being banks, they had existing licenses that their new services could be migrated to, I guess. The other startups couldn’t “graduate” because no license type existed for them, which was the point of the sandbox.
I worked at one of them, and implemented the FSC reporting. There was quite a lot of it, mostly because Taiwan is obsessed with money laundering (for obvious reasons). And some things are still rather old-fashioned, like having to fill out paperwork at at the bank all the time. But in general I found the FSC to be pretty reasonable, and willing to bend a little to help us streamline things. Change is slow, but it’s happening.
I have no specific advice for the OP because I don’t know what license a crypto exchange would operate under (what is Maicoin registered as?). But a good place to start would be the FSC’s own fintech accelerator space: 金融科技創新園區 | FinTechSpace
Well then maybe they should start with the 1000s of landlords who hide their money rather than worrying about an innovative fintech trying to make it easier to transfer NT 100 to your friend.
The fintech sector needs an accelerated pace, not glacial rate of changes.
The landlords are small fry compared to the “organizations” the FSC is worried about. But sure, this is definitely one of those “Taiwan gonna Taiwan” things.
Reply meant for @Brendon. They weren’t that obsessed with money laundering when they permitted those 4 local banks to bank Bitfinex. It was the US who put an end to that charade.
It’s actually kind of the opposite. There’s a reason the remittance companies in the sandbox can only serve foreign workers from three SEA countries, and not other foreigners or Taiwanese people.
I’m not familiar with the Bitfinex story, but I’d imagine they were unlicensed and were misrepresenting their activities to their bank. So maybe that’s a KYC fail on the bank’s part, but it depends what kind of volume they were doing here.
Even companies like Transfer wise and remitly don’t service Taiwan. Hell my home bank can send money to over 100 countries but not Taiwan. I always figure there must be so much red tape fintechs say forget it
In this pdf of a court filing, there are details to the exact nature of the relationship between the Taiwan banks, Wells Fargo, and the exchange/s. The dollar flows would not have been small, remember bitcoin is the currency of choice for the underworld.
Just did it yesterday. It only works on specific things due to FSC’s regulations
You can load your TW account with a credit card or wire transfer - no problem. Did it yesterday. But only in USD. Your outgoing account needs to be a USD account. CC no hassles other than conversion fees by your bank.
You can transfer money into your Taiwan USD - no problem
The only issue is liquidity of TWD which is restricted. But who cares - just use global currencies.
Swift yes. But banks in Canada now have a service that is much cheaper. Most Asian banks are covered… Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc but Taiwan has been left out by all of them for a decade now. I always wondered what the catch was with Taiwan
So the system was designed to make the application impossible to graduate from the sandbox to the open market unless you had existing licenses? Makes perfect sense.
