The Singapore FinTech festival, which took place on the 2nd to 4th November, is the World’s largest FinTech festival with over 60,000 attendees from 140 countries1.
At Envestnet® | Yodlee®, Tim Poskitt, ANZ Country Manager, and a few other colleagues were fortunate enough to attend the festival as members of the global FinTech community to engage, connect, and collaborate on issues relating to the development of financial services, public policy, and technology.
The event was a tremendous success, but for those of you who couldn’t attend, here are a few key points Tim thinks you should know:
- The importance of ESG and the Triple Bottom Line
Fintech companies are taking the consumer and business climate problem seriously. Most companies, if not all, are considering how they can positively impact society and the climate beyond their profit margin, and how data can be used as a means of powering ESG initiatives. With over 200 Unicorns at the event in the ESG space, this was proof that financial growth can be purpose-driven.
Jonas Thurig, head of F10 Singapore, a startup incubator and accelerator for FinTechs, said companies are looking to use transactional data to automate and create an accurate carbon footprint, as well as addressing the issues of ‘greenwashing’. Mastercard also talked to “connected interactions” and how they measure and reduce their carbon offset based on data from customer credit card transactions. Ultimately, new data sources can provide big opportunities to leverage transaction data for carbon scoring and offset.
- Super Apps are the future
With the emergence of web 3.0, hyper-personalisation and automation of personal profiles using crypto payments, have emerged, and can be found in so-called “Super Apps”. Super Apps have become the focus of banking, as payments and lending in one platform encourages consumer spending based on rewards mechanisms and personalisation.
Wui Ngiap Foo, Head of Technology at Grab, a multinational technology company, said he is exploring the idea of super apps to incorporate both health and well-being around lifestyle into one app, as well as linking in rewards and fractional investments linked to customer purchases. Whilst Australian companies such as PieRewards, and Upstreet are already doing this, Australia is considered to be a largely untapped market, as they do not have the same level of encompassing consumer information as companies across Asia.
- There needs to be an alignment of regulation
With the growing range of payment services, varying from credit options, DeFi, Crypto or Digital Wallets, there is a need to align regulation based on how this will affect consumer protections. Regulation can be complicated and is defined for different regions. Although one area in which regulators are catching up on is Open Banking initiatives.
David Hanna (Co-Founder) at Finmo, a fintech payment processing, and gateway platform, says it’s interesting to see how FinTechs are tackling regulation and compliance with international cross-border payments for businesses, as well as the increasing the need for global Open Banking data capabilities to enable faster and easier customer onboarding.
- Real-Time Everything
Lastly, real-time services have the opportunity for growth. Sectors to look out for are embedded finance in terms of payments, real-time cross-border payments and crypto payments, and real-time transaction fraud detection. These areas are growing as banks are investing in internal data platforms such as for real-time fraud detection. One example of this is OCBC bank which has invested in Data Platforms for real-time transaction fraud detection. Tech companies are also building scalable platforms to support innovation and fraud detection.
1Singapore FinTech Festival (https://www.fintechfestival.sg/)
