Tokio Marine Asia has partnered with Singapore-based venture capital firm Arbor Ventures to accelerate innovation in the insurance industry.

Founded in 2013, Arbor Ventures is focussed on FinTech and InsurTech ventures, especially companies which leverage advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing, composable service offerings and blockchain applications.

The VC has offices in Singapore, USE, Japan as well as a presence in EMENA.

Tokio Marine said the partnership, which was established through its Innovation Lab in Singapore, marks its commitment to accelerating the digital transformation of the global insurance industry.

The Tokyo-headquartered insurance group has been promoting transformational digital initiatives on a global basis, leveraging on collaborations with startups and service providers with key strategic capabilities.

Tokio Marine said Arbor’s global connectivity and portfolio as well as its engagement in local markets will further enable its innovation labs, spread across seven cities, including Singapore, to collaborate broadly with synergy beyond borders.

Group chief digital officer at Tokio Marine Holdings, Masashi Namatame said, “Arbor’s target to create the future of FinTech resonates with Tokio Marine’s digital strategy. With Arbor’s network and astute scouting of startups with strong potential in the FinTech space, it will greatly complement Tokio Marine’s collaborative efforts to serve innovative products and services in insurance industry and beyond.”

Managing partner of Arbor Ventures, Melissa Guzy added, “Tokio Marine is a world-renowned leader that Arbor is proud to add as a strategic partner in building the future of FinTech / InsurTech. Arbor looks forward to building the next generation of transformational InsurTech startups together.”

Earlier this year, Tokio Marine launched the Tokio Marine Future Fund to support early stage startups across InsurTech, FinTech, mobility, healthcare, cybersecurity, AI/ML, climate risk and sustainability.

The company committed US$42m to the initial fund with plans to deploy more capital into subsequent fund cycles.

Commuters walk past an advertisement for Ant Group Co.’s payments app Alipay at a subway station in Shanghai, China.

Financial technology giant Ant Group’s valuation was trimmed again by global investors that bought private shares ahead of its suspended initial public offering.

Fidelity Investments cut its estimate for Ant to US$70 billion at the end of May, according to Bloomberg calculations based on filings. That’s down from US$78 billion in June last year, and US$235 billion just before Ant’s IPO was torpedoed by regulators in November 2020.

BlackRock lowered the value to US$151 billion as of March from US$174 billion, while T. Rowe Price Group trimmed it to US$112 billion as of May, compared with US$189 billion last year.

The woes for Ant and its investors are adding up. The company’s profit fell 17 per cent for the March quarter amid an ongoing, yearslong regulatory overhaul. The US$150 billion price tag marks an important threshold since investors, including Warburg Pincus; C$523 billion (US$408.5 billion) Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Toronto; Silver Lake; and Temasek Holdings, were said to have invested in Ant at that price four years ago.

Ant declined to comment in an emailed statement. BlackRock and T. Rowe Price also declined to comment. Fidelity didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Hangzhou, China-based firm has been restructuring its operations to meet a list of demands from Chinese regulators over the past year, including beefing up capital, curbing consumer lending and shuffling its management. Billionaire Jack Ma is considering ceding his control of 50.5 per cent voting rights in the firm, people familiar have said.

In a filing in July, Alibaba Group Holding reiterated that Mr. Ma “intends to reduce and thereafter limit his direct and indirect economic interest in Ant Group over time” to a percentage that does not exceed 8.8 per cent.

Ant Chairman and CEO Eric Jing said last year that the company would eventually go public, but as of June the company said it had no plans to initiate an IPO yet.

China’s campaign to rein in its tech businesses kicked off with snuffing out Ant’s planned US$35 billion initial public offering. The crackdown snowballed into an assault on every corner of China’s technosphere as Beijing seeks to end the domination of a few heavyweights and create a more equitable distribution of wealth.

As part of the government-ordered restructuring, Ant has ramped up its capital base to 35 billion yuan (US$5.2 billion). It’s building firewalls in an ecosystem that once allowed it to direct traffic from Alipay, with a billion users, to services like wealth management, consumer lending and delivery services.

Consumer loans jointly made with banks have been split from Ant’s Jiebei and Huabei brands. Assets under management at its proprietary money market fund Yu’ebao — once the world’s largest — dropped about 35 per cent from a peak in March 2020 to 813 billion yuan as of June.

Alibaba removed Ant executives from its important partnership committee, a group of people who can nominate the majority of the board.

Ant has yet to apply for a financial holding company license to be regulated like a bank — a major move widely seen as an indication on whether it has satisfied Beijing’s requirements and that might set the stage for a resumption of its share sale.