When Giovanni Casinelli and co-founder Andrea Baronchelli launched Aspire - a business-to-business multicurrency financial platform — in Singapore in 2018, they envisioned a multi-region footprint in a modest four-desk office.

Casinelli, a computer science graduate of Politecnico di Milano — Italy's largest science-technology university — soon realized that Hong Kong would be their first step beyond the Lion City for his startup.

Aspire's journey to the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region could be traced back to November last year when the HKSAR found itself in the crosshairs of geopolitical conflicts. But Casinelli had a vision for his business to gain a strong foothold in the city's booming financial technology sphere. He found his manager in Hong Kong, Ian Lee, a local veteran professional with a solid background of work experience at global tech giants, Oracle and SAP.

Three months after Casinelli — an Italian-born IT genius — ventured into Hong Kong, the Western media started another round of their doomsayer chants, fermenting a pessimistic sentiment about the city's future. Casinelli, Lee and their team stood their ground, eager to fast-track their business in Asia, especially in Hong Kong, and make their strategic stronghold expand in the region. In the past five years, Aspire, described as an all-in-one financial platform for modern businesses, has seen the number of its corporate customers grow from zero to 20,000. In May, the company secured a money service operator's license from Hong Kong's Customs and Excise Department.