Steve Jobs famously said: “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower”. Whether it is a scientific or technological advancement, innovation is increasingly being seen as an important determinant of a firm’s success. Boston Consulting Group’s annual survey on the topic found that 79% of corporates ranked innovation as either the top-most priority or a top-three priority at their company in 2015, the highest percentage since they began asking the question ten years prior. Leaders in their own industries, the four companies being awarded The Asset Best Initiative in Innovation Award are breaking the mould.
The digital banking division of the Taiwan entity, E.SUN Bank presented their mobile payments or mPay project launched in November 2015. They are the first bank in Taiwan to offer online mobile payment solutions and the first to be licensed to provide assistance for offshore e-wallet services.
They lead in terms of the number of affiliated merchants and the volume of their mPay transactions relative to their peers. Currently more than 6,000 merchants in Taiwan are using E.SUN mPay solutions with more than 80% of these signing up in the first month of launch. The project partners with China’s largest mobile wallet provider Alipay and since it came online the cross-border collections from China grew by more than 400% on an annualized basis.
Fubon Securities, the equity house and subsidiary of Taiwan-based Fubon Financial Holdings launched a big data application to respond to customer demand and enable salespeople to effectively serve them thereby transforming them into wealth management consultants. They provide customers with clustering and differentiated marketing services for spot, margin and options trading among others.
One example is if a customer is losing money in the futures market Fubon will use clustering to offer them discretionary trading or insurance products. The rate of return post-notifying them of the new services was 5.6% for mandate trading and 2.2% for endowment life insurance. As a consequence of better segmentation, a customer satisfaction survey in the first quarter of 2016 revealed that customers are most happy with the salespersons’ recommendations for entry and exit points.
PTT Exploration and Production launched the first-ever hybrid communication concept applied to the safety system in the oil and gas industry aimed at providing fire and gas protection, emergency shutdown and process shutdown functions. Their Intergrated Control and Safety System (ICSS) uses wireless communication to enhance the reliability of their Montara plant in Darwin, Australia.
The hybrid model prevents production interruption when fibre or wireless media fails to operate by providing fibre-wireless switchover functionality. This improved the oil production dependability by 5% or US$18 million equivalent and has opened up opportunities for future field developments.
PTT, the parent group, invented an ECO-CURE water system to prevent energy loss from continuous blowdown in the boiler steam production system of their gas separation plant. The demineralized water processing unit produces ultra-high purity water reducing the boiler blowdown rate by 30% or 71, 659 GJ per year.
Aside from energy saving, the project achieves cost savings of US$ 653, 531 per year with a payback period of less than six years. Environmental sustainability is improved as hazardous chemical usage is decreased by 99.5%. The technology can also be applied to other industries with boiler systems such as power, automotive, manufacturing, petrochemicals and steel.
To view the awardees of The Asset Corporate Awards 2016 – Best Initiative in Innovation, please click here.
