As the annual Singapore FinTech Festival (organised by Monetary Authority of Singapore) returns on 13-17 November 2017 it comes with strong elements of Nordic participation, including a Swedish business delegation.
By arranging the festival Singapore is out to benefit from Fintech (financial technology) – and learn from its peers. The festival features workshops, a 3-day conference (13-16 Nov), an Investor Summit, an ‘Innovation Lab Crawl’, industry networking events, a ‘Hackcelerator’ as well as the Fintech Awards.
The Investor Summit ‘Deal Day’ aims to enhance access to funding for start-ups and improve the quality and quantity of Fintech investment deals in Singapore. Deal Day will showcase promising Fintech start-ups and innovative technologies to local and global investors, with a view towards facilitating FinTech investment deals.
The Lab Crawl will kick off at Visa Innovation Centre and there will be over 20 innovation labs across the island opening up for visitors, with demos, tours, and exhibitions that have been prepared. This also enables great opportunities to network and get to know more about the up-and-coming innovative Fintech solutions.
Held on 16 November 2017 (Day 4 of the FinTech Festival) the ‘Global FinTech Hackcelerator’ Demo Day takes place, including a Danish fintech start-up Ernit among the selected finalists within the ‘Customer-facing’ category. Ernit empowers children with essential lifelong skills by using technology to spark a global conversation creating financial tools so that kids can connect with each other and reach their goals.
Ernit and 19 other shortlisted teams that have participated in a 12-week virtual programme will, on the main stage, present their respective working prototype (each start-up was matched with industry champions to customise their market-ready solutions into contextualised prototypes ready for adoption).
Following on the Hackcelerator programmer teams will work with industry champions to plan for actual adoption and integration of their solutions into a real client context.
Then, the FinTech Awards (comprising the MAS FinTech Awards and ABS Global FinTech Award) recognise innovative financial technology solutions that have been implemented/deployed by FinTech companies, financial institutions, and technology companies.
As Singapore looks to Sweden as role model within Fintech this a fact that must be highlighted, as pointed out by the Embassy of Sweden. In the wake of Sweden’s business delegation to the inaugural Singapore Fintech Festival 2016, with Sweden’s Minister for Financial Markets and Consumer Affairs, Mr Per Bolund holding a keynote presentation of the Swedish fintech journey at the RegTech Forum, this Nordic country returns this year.
Finansinspektionen, Sweden’s financial supervisory authority, leads a business delegation to Singapore and Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, with the purpose to gather stakeholders of the Fintech ecosystem, including regulators, financial institutions, investors and start-ups to enable sharing of knowledge and best practices.
There is great interest in Sweden’s experience within digital payment systems, since the country is at the forefront of development, and a leader in digitalization.
“Sweden, Singapore and Malaysia share many similarities in that we both focus on the importance of creativity, research and innovation. We value high tech and have a high level of ICT maturity,” states Team Sweden (Business Sweden and the respective embassies in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore).
“We hope that the delegation will provide a starting platform for Swedish Fintech companies to meet with Fintech Stakeholders in Singapore, Malaysia and Asia Pacific, and will encourage fruitful collaborations going forward.”
Singapore is a financial hub and ranks as fourth on the Global Financial Centre Index 2017.
Several large Fintech initiatives have been launched in Singapore recently. Among other things, a Fintech Office has been set up, to serve as a one-stop virtual entity for all Fintech matters and to promote Singapore as a Fintech hub. Also a regulatory ‘sandbox’ has been set-up in order to make it easier for innovators to experiment with new financial products or services in a safe regulatory environment.
In Malaysia banks are pushing Fintech development as they seek to harness innovation and technology to improve the financial services. In particular, a Central Bank Financial Technology Enabler Group has been launched to formulate and enhance regulatory policies to facilitate the adoption of technological innovations in the Malaysian financial services industry.
Leading Malaysian commercial banks are strongly engaging in developing capabilities within Fintech creating “sandboxes” to encourage innovations within the sector. Malaysian stakeholders are currently evaluating various areas to define key enablers for future Fintech development, states Team Sweden.
At Singapore FinTech Festival Erik Thedéen Director General, Finansinspektionen will participate in the ‘Regulatory Insights’ session, along with Ong Chong Tee Deputy Managing Director, MAS, and Motonobu Matsuo Deputy Director General, Credit and Insurance Systems, JFSA. The topic of this session is: Has technology made the markets a safer place? What are the costs and risks? What are the challenges that technology alone cannot solve?
Furthermore on the programme: On 16 November the ‘FinTech Northern Lights’ session takes place. Is the FinTech light shining brighter in the Nordic region than before? What are the opportunities there? The panel consists in: Aleksi Grym Head of digitalization, Bank of Finland; Iren Tranvag Chief Executive Officer, Nordic Finance Innovation; and
Thomas Krogh Jensen CEO, Copenhagen FinTech Lab.
The fintech festival also includes the Nordic Networking Event (sponsored by: Nordea, Saxo Bank, Copenhagen Fintech), held on 13 November, 17:00 at Kinki Rooftop Bar. Thinking about scaling to Europe? Or do you want to connect with the biggest banks in the Nordic? The event is the golden opportunity to connect with the Nordic finch ecosystem, meet finch thought leaders, regulators, industry power players and start-ups.
Participants in the Swedish business delegation are:
Finansinspektionen
As Sweden’s financial supervisory authority, Finansinspektionen’s role is to promote stability and efficiency in the financial system as well as to ensure an effective consumer protection. They authorise, supervise and monitor all companies operating in Swedish financial markets.
Covr Security
Covr Security is the Next-Generation, User-Centric Mobile Security Management Platform. Covr Security meet the growing demand for highly secure, user-centric control over mobile security and digitized personal information.
BehavioSec
BehavioSec is a leading cyber security platform, providing a multi-layered, customer security solution known as behavioral biometrics. A market leader in its native Scandinavia, Stockholm-based BehavioSec is the subject-matter expert for behavioural biometrics solutions, with growing numbers of customers in American, Asian, and European markets now bolstering their security with the technology. Billions of transactions have been completed using BehavioSec verification, protecting the interests of over 35 million end users.
BIMA (Milvik)
Bima is a groundbreaking Swedish company that uses mobile technology to deliver affordable and easy-to-use insurance and health products that emerging consumers need but cannot access through traditional channels.
Bima combines the power of mobile technology, key partnerships with Mobile Operators, and a human approach to education to achieve scale and profitability. Its proprietary technology platform is used to digitalise registration and automate premium payments whilst using its dedicated agent force to educate customers. Bima has revolutionised the insurance industry in emerging markets, already reaching more than 24 million customers in 14 countries.
Bokio
Bokio is automated accounting for SMEs founded with the belief that accounting should be free. At the core of Bokio’s technology is powerful machine learning that automates bookkeeping faster, cheaper, and easier than traditional accountants, bookkeeping software, or finance departments.
In the hands of business owners, Bokio is a business controller in your pocket – a beautiful mobile-first tool that answers your big accounting questions, while tackling receipts, invoicing, and payroll with ease.
Collectius
Collectius is a credit services management company that continuously invests in Technology and People. It offers standalone and integrated services that help grow the business. Collectius has a valuable expertise and experience in different areas of debt collection and debt purchase. Having worked in this field for 17 years and served corporate clients, local banks, international banks, financial institutions and telecommunication companies the company is renowned as a market leader in South East Asia and has a good reputation in the region.
Collectius global reach is prominent with offices in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and an international partner network in 160 countries. Collectius headquarters are in Singapore with regional offices in Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok (Thailand).
ChromaWay
ChromaWay is one of the companies that started the blockchain revolution. Known for pioneering work since 2012, creating one of the first blockchain protocols, for the first blockchain projects with a bank in 2014, for a working with the country of Sweden since 2015 on a project to improve the process of buying and selling real-estate.
ChromaWay is releasing a completely new architecture of blockchain called Consortium Databases, combining enterprise database technology with blockchain. The first product in this field is PostChain, a radically simpler yet more powerful way to do blockchain projects leveraging the proven technology of market-leading SQL databases. Activities in South-East Asia includes working with a bank in Thailand, attending the OCBC Accelerator in Singapore for three months in 2016.
Dreams Nordic
Dreams is a Stockholm based Fintech company, that offers a unique banking platform that helps its users save money for the things they want and invest in the moments that matter (methodology based on Nobel Prize awarded behavioural science).
Dreams combine the latest research with innovative design and award-winning UI to enable a digital generation to save and invest with the tap of a button. Dreams have gamified the experience with engaging micro savings, automated transfers and the possibility to save together with friends. It takes Dreams users 90 seconds to open a bank account and to start saving with Dreams.
The Dreams Enterprise Solution (DES) enabling banks outside of Europe to license Dreams’ full-service platform for saving and investments. DES enables a bank partner to launch a fresh millenials-brand or product within six months that increases real engagement, strengthen the brand and generates increased revenues.
Zentro Finmarket
Finmarket is a Swedish company with a global Fintech platform, based on the Scandinavian success model. It is a digital loan broker platform that connects the right customer with the right bank. Finmarket does this by comparing consumer loans; such as mortgage, car and unsecured loans.
By taking responsibility for the complete user journey, from customer acquisition to the final paid-out loan, Superior value is created thru empowering the consumer, whilst at the same time delivering high quality customers to partner banks.
The business model is based on commission from the banks, which is paid out after the loan is approved and fully paid out. Hence, Finmarket’s service is free-of-charge for the consumer and a risk-free customer acquisition model for partner banks.
Finmarket has ramped up its global launch plan and is now securing funding in Africa and SEA, among other regions.
GRC Watch
GRC Watch is a Swedish RegTech company focused on raising efficiency within the area of governance, risk and compliance (GRC). GRC offers a neutral information hub which will speed up the work in relation to due diligence. GRC focuses on the type of due diligence, which is required by national laws, EU directives and international rules related to areas such as client protection and anti-money laundering.
Nexus Group
Swedish-owned Nexus Group is an innovative and rapidly growing product company, developing identity solutions for physical and digital access. Solutions for IoT (internet of things) security is also an important part of their portfolio. Nexus has enabled trusted identities for people and things since 1984, and their technology is today relied upon by a large number of organizations, within the public sector, armed forces, industry, health care, education, energy, and finance & e-commerce.
Nexus has 300 employees across 17 offices in Europe, India and the US, as well as a global partner network. In India, their head-office is located in Mumbai, with a development centre in Pune. Nexus mission is to contribute to the formation of a secure society, and everything they do is guided by their core values: we care, we innovate, we are committed.
See also:
Swedish fintech start-up completed Bangkok Bank’s InnoHub accelerator
Danish start-up finalist in Singapore’s Global FinTech competition
