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A Guide to Singapore Fintech Festival 2016: Conferences, Workshops And More

In just a few weeks, Singapore will be hosting its inaugural Fintech Festival, a week long event that will bring together the global financial community for a series of conferences, workshops, startup competitions and awards ceremonies to celebrate fintech and discuss the future of finance.

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Organized by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) in partnership with the Association of Banks in Singapore (ABS), the Singapore Fintech Festival 2016 will be running between November 14 and 18, 2016, and promises a number of engaging events intended at the overall fintech community. Over 6’000 people have already registered.

The Fintech Festival, which will bring together the startup community, industry leaders, government agencies and policymakers, coincides with Singapore’s ambition to become a front-runner in fintech.

Throughout the year 2016, MAS has made a number of moves aimed at encouraging fintech startups to set up in Singapore; proposing an attractive regulatory framework for payments innovation, launching a fintech regulatory sandbox and opening its very own fintech innovation lab called Looking Glass.

As the Singapore Fintech Festival 2016 promises to be a busy and intensive week for all attendees, we have made a summary with the key events and highlights of the event.

Fintech Conferences

The Singapore Fintech Festival 2016 will host two Fintech Conferences on Wednesday, November 16, and Thursday, November 17.

The Fintech Conference Day 1 will start off with a keynote by Ravi Menon, MAS’s managing director, who will introduce and present Singapore’s Smart Financial Centre initiative.

This will be followed by a number of talks and presentations by other government representatives, as well as executives from leading tech, fintech firms and financial institutions including IBM, Digital Asset Holdings, DBS Group, McKinsey and Company and Mastercard, among others.

The conference will address the impact of some of the hottest fintech topics and technologies including blockchain technology and distributed ledgers, Big Data, authentication and advanced sensors, cloud computing, and digital and mobile payments.

A series of workshops will be dedicated to tackling financial regulations, fintech career, fintech APIs and data science.

The Fintech Conference Day 2 will cover the state of venture capital investment in the fintech sector, consumer banking, corporate banking, financial markets and insurtech, featuring executives from the likes of Allianz, Ping An, ANZ, Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi UFJ, Baker and McKensie, Goldman Sachs and Fidor Bank, among others.

Four workshops will tackle programming for finance, regulations for fintech startups, communicating with coders and overcoming legal obstacles in collaboration.

ABS-MAS Conferences

ABS and MAS will be hosting two conferences on Thursday 17 and Friday 18.

The ABS-MAS Tech Risk Conference will be the 4th edition this year and will focus on technology risk issues including cybersecurity, online fraud monitoring, authentication, IT outsourcing, among other topics.

Speakers will include representatives from MAS, ABS, PwC, Singtel, StarHub, Standard Chartered and government officials.

The ABS-MAS Regtech Forum, on November 18, will focus on regtech developments around the world and will be the first regtech-focused conference in Asia. The forum will include keynotes, presentations and panels, covering topics such as combating financial crimes, regtech deployments, regulation innovation and data challenges in compliance.

Speakers will include executives from Citi, DBS Bank, as well as government representatives from the Deputy Minister for Finance of Sweden and the UK Financial Conduct Authority.

Alongside the conferences and workshops, the Singapore Fintech Festival will also host the Fintech Awards grand finale – comprising the MAS Fintech Awards and ABS Global Fintech Award – for which 40 finalists startups have just been announced today.

The Global Fintech Hackcelerator, taking place on November 14 and 15, will welcome the 20 selected teams which will compete for a S$20,000 development stipend and additional US$50,000 cash prize, access to development infrastructure and API catalogues and have the opportunity to get matched with industry buyers/investors.

Throughout the week, a number of networking events will be hosted, including the Innovation Lab Crawl and Fintech Asia 100 on November 14; Demo Day for the Hackcelerator finalists teams on November 15, as well as numerous networking sessions organized by SGX, Baker and McKenzie, Singapore EXPO and DBS on November 15 and 16.

Attendees and ticket holders will also have the opportunity to get 1:1 meetings with other participants throughout the week long event.

The festival closing party will be on November 18th

Singapore Fintech Association Launch

The Singapore Fintech Festival 2016 will take place a few days after the Singapore Fintech Association (SFA) is expected to host its launch party.

The newly announced cross-industry non-profit initiative aims at being a platform that facilitates collaboration between all market participants and stakeholders in the fintech ecosystem.