Overseas news briefs: Goldman loses Asia retail banking head, crowdfunding gathers pace, foreign inv

Sindy Wan, a managing director in Goldman Sachs' Hong Kong Office, has left the bank. Wan, who spent 13 years with the company, specialised in the Asian consumer and retail sectors. Goldman Sachs has been cutting its headcount on the investment banking side but those losses have previously been centred on Southeast Asia, where its deal flow has lagged.
FundedByMe, a Stockholm-based crowdfunding platform has kicked off a pilot project for bitcoins. The aim is to check the level of support in paying via the internet currency. The test will take 45 days. The platform recently collected more than 100 million SEK (A$15 million) for entrepreneurs based in most European countries and some Asian nations. The first case - an ecological sushi shop - took just 56 hours to get 100 per cent of funding.
Indonesia's deputy chairman of the parliamentary commission XI, Gus Irawan Pasaribu, called for the revision of the country's laws allowing "foreign investors to own up to 49 per cent of a bank", saying the current law allowed "foreign investors almost without limit to control the country's banking sector." Pasaribu said Indonesian banks were not ready to step into a free trade era after the implementation of ASEAN Economic Community by the end of 2015, adding it was not easy to revise the banking law but "we have to improve efficiency and competitiveness."