(Nov 20): Over the week of Nov 13, more than 25,000 bankers, investors, founders and regulators from 100 countries descended on Singapore for the second annual FinTech Festival held by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS).
The event was jammed full of announcements, with at least 16 cooperation agreements signed between MAS and various authorities around the world.
Among them: a link between local cashless payment system PayNow and Thailand’s equivalent, PromptPay; a research and development collaboration between MAS and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; a cross-border platform with the Hong Kong Monetary Authority for trade finance using distributed ledger or blockchain technology; and a tie-up with the World Bank’s International Finance Corp, establishing the Asean Financial Innovation Network to help banks and fintech players collaborate via a cloud-based industry platform.
At the event, MAS managing director Ravi Menon highlighted Singapore’s improved standing in the fintech space. There are over 400 fintech enterprises in the country today, he says.
He also emphasised the improvements MAS is making to accommodate a changing financial industry. It is working on a data analytics platform to analyse the 3,000 suspicious transaction reports filed each month. And it hopes to make its compliance requirements less painful for banks. “If we ask for the same data twice, the institution will be allowed to gently turn us down,” he says.
Local banks, too, chipped in with announcements of their own. DBS Group Holdings launched a cloud-based data centre. The week before the festival, Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp claimed to be the first Singapore bank deploying artificial intelligence and machine learning to combat financial crime. United Overseas Bank announced it now supports contactless payments over the Fitbit Ionic smartwatch.
The buzz, however, belies how much catching up the country’s fintech industry has to do when it comes to innovations that reach the masses.
China’s largest money market fund today is a fintech — Yu’e Bao, an affiliate of Alibaba Group Holding, had RMB1.4 trillion ($286 billion) in assets under management as at June 30. That also makes it the largest money market fund in the world.
Alibaba’s mobile payment unit Alipay had more than half of the mobile payments market in 1Q2017. Competitor WeChat Pay accounted for 40%. China’s mobile payments hit US$5.5 trillion ($7.5 trillion) last year. For some context, its GDP last year was US$11.2 trillion.
Even the country’s biggest banks are stealing a march on our local players. This past week, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China announced a robo-adviser service that provides investment advice to retail investors over its mobile banking platform.
Undoubtedly, China’s rapid pace of fintech adoption puts it ahead of most other countries too. But its accomplishments have also come amid tough regulation and an often unfriendly administration. Without festivals or government funding, China’s fintechs have managed to roll out forward-looking and useful products.
Why hasn’t Singapore seen the same? Part of the reason may be because our financial system already works well. We do not need mobile payment systems because most people have a credit card, or can use the highly efficient national payment system, NETS. Very few Singaporeans would be considered unbanked, and we have a dense ATM network.
As a result, many of the innovations that MAS, the big banks and fintech start-ups talk about represent nice-to-haves rather than significant improvements to the retail customer’s experience. Other initiatives, such as the use of blockchain for clearing payments, are likely to mean very little to the person in the street.
Of course, there is plenty of room for improvement in the local financial sector. For instance, previous stories in The Edge Singapore have highlighted the very high costs associated with credit card transactions today and how those need to come down for the vision of a cashless nation to be realised. Also, local banks lag behind some of their international peers in allowing third-party app developers to build apps that integrate customer financial data. And, innovations in fintech have the potential to motivate a greater proportion of millennials to invest some of their income in the financial market.
Such innovations may seem mundane, but they would encourage more participation in the fintech revolution. The FinTech Festival has been hugely successful at putting Singapore and MAS on the international fintech circuit. But for it to mean more to locals, it needs to bring innovations that make a difference to their lives.
