The often spoken about APIX has finally come to fruition, something the Monetary Authority of Singapore has been quite vocal about. It was launched following Narendra Modi’s keynote speech at the Singapore Fintech Festival, said to be one of the biggest fintech-based festivals in the country.
APIX here is a platform designed to facilitate collaboration between financial institutions and fintechs, by putting different fintech offerings into a democratised marketplace, and allowing all fintech-affiliated firms—be it financial institutions to startups—to access a service that suits their needs, regardless of distance.
This project is a collaborative effort between ASEAN Bankers Association, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), and MAS.
The aim is to create a more collaborative ASEAN fintech ecosystem, where fintechs from different areas can help bolster each other by helping with discovery, design and deployment of innovative solutions together. There will also be an APIX sandbox in a bid to help fintechs more quickly develop prototypes and bring them to financial institutions.
Overall, the hope is that there is a boost in cross-border reach and collaborations for all financial industry participants in ASEAN,
While it just saw its official launch, APIX has already undergone real-life trials, with tangible results.
Hyperverge, an India-based fintech startup registered their OCR and image recognition API on the APIX marketplace, where it was discovered by Vietnam-based FE Credit, which was looking to enable self-onboarding for their snap-loan app. Similarly, Active.ai, a Singapore-based fintech startup put Triniti, its natural language processing AI engine onto the same marketplace, which was discovered by India’s Axis Bank. Now, both are collaborating on a conversational interface to add to Axis Bank’s Unified Payments Interface offering.
More information about APIX can be found here.
Featured image via MAS
