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The Singapore Fintech Consortium Promises to Help Turn Singapore Into a Global Fintech Hub

The Singapore Fintech Consortium is an independent organization that aims to build Singapore’s fintech startup ecosystem and help the city-state become a leading financial technology hub.

Gerben Visser, Founder and Director of the Singapore Fintech Consortium – Image credit: http://pultage.incubasia-ventures.com/

Led by Gerben Visser, the Singapore Fintech Consortium provides market participants with platforms that facilitate the interaction and engagement between startups and stakeholders to “further the market intelligence, partnership creation and the development of the broader fintech ecosystem in Singapore and Southeast Asia,” Gerben Visser, co-founder and director of the Singapore Fintech Consortium, explained in an interview with Futurebooks.

According to Visser, “financial technology is a crucial infrastructure layer for the Southeast Asian region,” as well as an opportunity for Singapore to “maintain and strengthen its leadership in financial services.”

Singapore is strategically the best-positioned country to become a global leader in fintech, the organization argues, firstly because the city-state is already a global financial center; and secondly because it is a technology hub. This combined with the significant support provided by public and private initiatives, Singapore has a real potential to become a global fintech hub.

Hence, the Singapore Fintech Consortium has developed types of platforms to foster relationships between the market players by offering resources, networking and showcasing events and education.

These platforms include:

An online platform that consists of a dashboard with several functionalities such as analytics tools, deal sourcing, partner solutions and many more;
An offline platform for events such as roundtable discussions and networking sessions to physically bring people of the Singapore fintech community together;
And a fintech incubation platform that provides with advice, researches, and assistance to financial institutions, investors and fintech companies.

“Finance technology has over the past few years been emerging from the ‘grass root’ start up ecosystems into receiving significant awareness and more recently obtained traction within both the financial services industry at large, as well as substantial attention from the respective government and regulatory agencies,” Visser told Singapore Business Review in October.

He continued:

“These emerging FinTech innovations and developments should not be treated by the banks as a threat, or approached in a reactively manner with a defensive perspective.

“But rather perceived as a multitude of opportunities to address some of the banks’ core challenges and by act proactively the Banks should be able to capture untapped or underserved customer segments, launch more elegant online & mobile products and services and migrate legacy IT systems to more cost effective and flexible processing platforms.”

Apart from leading the Singapore Fintech Consortium, Visser, a former banker at RBS, Bank of America and Citigroup, is also a Managing Partner at IncubAsia Ventures and Board member of Bansea (Business Angels South East Asia), a mentor at Seedcamp, StartupBootcamp and an advisor to a number of early stage technology companies.

On November 12, 2015, Prakash Somosundram, co-founder and managing partner of the Singapore Fintech Consortium, will participate in a debate at the Fintech Innovation Forum 2015, at the Fullerton Hotel Singapore.

Somosundram will join Rob Findlay, founder of Next Bank, and Patrick Teng, founder, chief dealer and CEO of Six Capital, and address the following problematic: “Singapore’s status as a financial hub is under threat from Internet giants and startups looking to deliver innovative solutions and services. Can incumbents hold on to their dominant positions in corporate finance or lose out to more nimble players?”

Disclaimer: the Singapore Fintech Consortium is a basic mediapartner of Fintech News Singapore, but they haven’t asked us writing an article.

Image credit: Singapore Fintech Consortium.