The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) today announced three winners of the Global Fintech Hackcelerator, selected from the 20 finalists that presented their solutions at the third annual Singapore Fintech Festival. The Hackcelerator was supported by KPMG Digital Village.
The demo day culminated a 12-week programme that called for problem statements from the financial industry to be matched with market-ready solutions.
MAS had published 80 problem statements under four categories (insurtech, financial inclusion,regtech, suptech, and general problems), and received 304 applications from over 40 countries. Twenty teams were shortlisted by a panel of industry judges to work with corporates, investors, partners, and regulators from the Singapore fintech ecosystem to conceptualise, build and refine their prototypes.
On Demo Day, each team made a five-minute pitch before a judging panel, followed by a question-and-answer segment.
The three winners are:
BetterTradeOff
BetterTradeOff, a homegrown company, presented a holistic life-planning solution named Aardviser, which uses advanced statistical models and AI to help individuals make better decisions when attempting to finance their future. This flexible, modular, white-label solution can capture a client’s financial situation, digitise the traditional data capture with financial advisors, and reduce the time taken to a matter of minutes.
It can dynamically adjust the financial plan of the client via investment products based on financial ambition such as supporting children’s education, purchase of property and readjust after life triggers such as loss of income.
Billion Group
This South African company’s technology encodes national (i.e., fiat, not crypto) currencies via blockchain to allow for zero-cost payment transactions. The system is composed of blockchain nodes, where each node is essentially an application installed on an end-user device (smartphone, tablet, computer, server) and each new user brings its own device (typically a smartphone), which adds processing power to the system as a whole.
Transactions are processed directly between the nodes, without any central system being involved. Currency gets transferred peer-to-peer with no third party intervention, no intermediaries, thus it flows at zero cost. Consequently, the systems scales without any incremental transaction costs, and recent tests proved the ability to process over 160 million payment transactions per day.
Mosabi
Mosabi works with financial institutes to help low-income entrepreneurs who have little or no knowledge about basic business management skills to deliver relevant curriculum and campaigns via modular learning. These lessons are delivered in lightweight video format as well as chatbot integration, quizzes and surveys all available with customised cultural context and available in local languages.
Their solution enables narrative mobile learning for topics related to financial inclusion, financial literacy and digital financial services (DFS). These meaningful engagements enable performance analytics to be derived from the data creating a unique credit score which financial institutions can use to determine the creditworthiness of a user. This creates a new customer segment for financial institutes provides access to financial serviced to thin file or no file clients.
Featured image via SG FinTech Festival
