Insights from Singapore
Valocity Global’s CEO, Carmen Vicelich, recently attended the Singapore FinTech Festival, where her company was named runner-up Global FinTech of the Year — a very impressive accolade from one of the biggest FinTech festivals in the world!
Carmen will be sharing her global insights from offshore markets at the FinTech Hui Taumata next February. She’s kindly agreed to share some thoughts from her time in Singapore in advance.
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The overarching focus for the Singapore market is the sustainability of our planet and how to connect that back to financial technology. Another thing I was particularly impressed by is the way the community is coming together — across government, technology and business — to collaborate and find ways to solve these problems.
There are 5 key focus areas for FinTech that came up again and again during the festival.
Instant Remittance —
Although things have improved with regard to mobile payments, there is still a lot that is slow, opaque and inefficient about payments. For the Singapore market, there’s a big focus on linking data, technology and agencies to deliver instant remittance, and this kind of tech could have a huge impact, particular for small business.
Atomic Settlement —
Generally it takes 2-3 days to complete settlement, it involves intermediaries and there are multiple points of failure. I noticed a lot of work going into blockchain solutions that can turn those days into minutes. There are several projects going on in the sector that are looking at reducing the risk and creating standards across platforms when it comes to distributed ledgers. Think of an automated maker market that enables settlement for automated digital assets and smart contracts. It's really about digitising the process of settlement end-to-end.
Programmable money —
This is about embedding rules within the medium of exchange. It’s really interesting if we think of an example, like donations reaching their intended beneficiaries and tokenised bank deposits.
Tokenised assets —
Imagine using software to confirm value on any exchange or platform… There are many many projects going on with banks like HSBC that are looking at creating a future where any asset can be fractionalised, monetised, and have a fractional ownership model. At its heart, this kind of tech is about encouraging financial inclusion.
Sustainability data —
This is probably the biggest trend I noticed, and it's for our planet. Quality data is key in the fight against greenwashing. Think climate data to manage against physical assets. Access to data today is fragmented and data verification is still at a nascent stage. When it comes to the planet, we can’t afford to wait for it to be perfect. We have to start talking about what are we measuring and what impact it's having. That’s a global trend, and one our New Zealand FinTech sector should be part of.
