Private equity fundraising remains strong in Asia, most particularly in China. While the country’s current economic slowdown is troubling many investors, fundraising activity in Asia continues to stay strong, according to DealMarket.com, a Swiss platform for fundraising that also provides deal flow management tools. The region has experienced big deals this year, including an all-time high. In September, Tesco sold its South Korean unit, Homeplus, to private equity firm MBK Partners, a deal worth over US$6 billion. According to KPMG, we will continue to see a range of deals driven by the continued growth of the Asian middle class. In…
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Fintech investment in Asia-Pacific has been on the rise. In the first nine months of 2015, there had been 122 deals totalling a record of US$3.4 billion injected in the sector, according to a new report from Accenture. Entitled ‘Fintech Investment in Asia-Pacific set to at least quadruple in 2015,’ the report is based on Accenture’s analysis of fintech investment-data from CB Insights, and aims to examine current fintech investments and predict future investment patterns. “The rapid increase of fintech investments in Asia-Pacific does not surprise us,” said Jon Allaway, senior managing director of Accenture Financial Services in ASEAN and…
The use of digital signatures is becoming more and more popular. We digitally sign company share transfers, public records, contracts, emails (PGP), and many other legally valid electronic documents. For those of you that use cryptocurrencies (paying with bitcoins an online purchase), every transaction done in the blockchain is digitally signed. A Digital Signature is unique to the person signing. This is why our digital identity is directly connected to our digital signature. Our “Public Key”, the unique identifier that is connected to our person, acts as an Identity Card number that institutions (such as banks or government entities) connect to our person…
Markus Gnirck, Co-founder Startupbootcamp FinTech, explains why we have currently a FinTech Zoo; How Bankers are transforming from suit to jeans wearer and why we need a 2 way approach… Why do we enjoy going to the Zoo so much? Because we can see animals and creatures that do not exist in our normal environment. We are curious to find out more about these unfamiliar species, see their natural habitat and learn about the way they behave and live. That is exactly what is happening right now with many financial institutions and FinTech startups. I call it the FinTech Zoo. Having been…
Released in June 2014, Dash is a mobile banking service from Singapore Telecommunications Ltd. (Singtel) and Standard Chartered Bank (SCB) that aims to reinvent the way Singaporeans access, save and borrow money, make payments and purchase insurance. Essentially, Dash consists in four mobile commerce and banking solutions that are accessible through a mobile app currently available for Android and iOS smartphones: Dash Pay, Dash Easy, Dash Advance and Dash Abroad. According to Allen Lew, Singtel’s CEO Group Digital Life, Dash is aimed at providing a solution that suits the lifestyle needs and habits of the mobile Internet generation “who are used…
Call Levels, a Singaporean fintech startup that provides real-time financial monitoring and alert services, has closed a US$500,000 pre-series A funding round led by 500 Startups with participation of veterans in the financial markets and tech industries, including Timothy Teo, an ex-GIC and JP Morgan banker, Gracelyn Ho, formerly of Morgan Stanley, and Koh Boon Hwee, a renowned businessman from Singapore. Incorporated in September 2014, Call Levels allows traders to track in real-time the price of stocks, commodities, forex and indices. The free-to-download Call Levels app, which is currently available for Apple iOS and Android devices, also provides with a…
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. 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,”…
Malaysian startup CurrenSeek is a location-based currency exchange app that helps travellers compare and locate the moneychangers with the best rates. The company claims that travellers can save up to 200% of their travel money using the service. Created by Intuitive Asset Sdn Bhd, CurrenSeek was launched in April this year and lets you discover and compare street rates – not wholesale inter-bank rates – and is social media friendly, meaning that you can share these rates, locations and directions to your friends. How it works When you open up the app, a map shows you the various exchanges…
Fastacash, a Singaporean fintech startup focused on mobile payments, has invested in MyPAY to tap into the Burmese market. MyPAY, which is developing a mobile payment system, has partnered with MySQUAR, a social network in Myanmar, to enable 1.5 million users to pay their friends and contacts and make payments at retail points. In addition to the funding, Fastacash will provide MyPAY with the technology to allow payments via MySQUAR and support the company’s go-to-market activities, including market insights and global partnership management. “With Fastacash’s technology, we are able to leverage social networks such as MySQUAR,” Nicolas Nguyen, CEO of…
Announced in August 2014 by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, Singapore’s Smart Nation initiative will lead to the city-state’s transformation into the world’s first smart nation; in other words, a hyper-connected country where the pervasive use of technology is expected to bring improvement in the quality of life of people. This digital transformation, which is expected to be fulfilled by 2030, consists in connecting “everyone to everything, everywhere, and all the time.” And by doing so, Singapore hopes to become smarter, cleaner and more efficient. “We had set our vision to become a Smart Nation that harnesses technology to discover…
Vietnam Fintech Startups: We talk a lot about how London and New York are leading the fintech race. But to be fair, fintech is hot just about everywhere. Today, we take a closer look at what Vietnam has got to offer in terms of financial innovation and what might as well be the country’s six hottest fintech startups. Vietnam has a very high mobile penetration rate, but this is not the only reason why Fintech is going to be very interesting for Vietnam. However, until now Fintech is still pretty much unknown here, but this will change soon. Here are our…
Exciting things are happening in Singapore. In case you missed it last week, MatchMove Pay, one of the hottest fintech startups in Southeast Asia, was granted a remittance license from Singapore’s central bank to tap into Southeast Asia’s juicy remittance market. Meanwhile at Sibos, blockchain startup Hyperledger won the 2015 Innotribe Startup Challenge. MatchMove Pay Gets Remittance License from MAS MatchMove Pay, a fintech startup that aims to bring online and mobile payments to Southeast Asia, has been granted a remittance license from Singapore’s central bank and financial regulatory authority, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), reported e27. The…
500 Startups-backed CoinPip seeks to disrupt the global remittances market by using bitcoin to facilitate domestic and international money transfers. Similarly to Bitspark and Toast, CoinPip enables low-cost global money transfers by leveraging Bitcoin’s blockchain. Users don’t need to have any knowledge of or experience with using bitcoin; bitcoin is simply the medium through which the exchanges take place. They never interact with bitcoin as all transfers start and end in the currency of choice. Released in June, CoinPip’s “Direct Payments” feature allows businesses and individuals to send money to the bank accounts of partners and remote workers in seven…
Mobile use in Vietnam has significantly increased Internet penetration and growth in e-commerce, a new report says. According to Moore Coorporation’s latest ‘Vietnam Digital Landscape 2015’ report, Vietnam is experiencing meaningful growth in Internet penetration, all thanks to mobile phones. In Vietnam, 44% of the country’s total population is now Internet users, three times more than in 2005. But most importantly, the number of mobile subscriptions increased by eight times compared to 2005 with now 128.6 million subscriptions, surpassing the country’s population, 90.9 million. Overall, people mostly use Internet on their mobile phones (93%), followed by computers (44%). These users,…
Personal finance portal MoneySmart seeks to help Singaporeans maximize their money by curating and aggregating product information of a number of personal financial products on a single digital platform. Founded in 2009, MoneySmart provides users with a platform where they can access simplified financial advice, as well as compare prices and features for at least 16 different personal financial products, including loans, insurance, and credit card. Its purpose: make finance comprehensible to the masses and eliminate the traditional jargon that only a handful of professionals actually understand. By aggregating and consolidating product information, the platform aims to provide the right…
Combining the oldest form of money and one of the most cutting-edge technologies, commodity-backed digital currencies have been praised for allowing users to safely store assets such as gold on the blockchain. Unlike bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies which solely rely on demand and offer, they give an intrinsic value and tangibility to a digital token. BitGold, Midas Reserv and DigitalTangible are only a few startups that are providing users with digital tokens that are representative of a certain amount of gold or silver. Now, Singaporean startup DigixGlobal seeks to do just that with digital tokens that correspond to legal ownerships…
DBS HotSpot Pre-Accelerator officially launched on September 7 at BASH, in Singapore. 11 teams have been handpicked to join the three-month program, which aims to support entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship in Singapore through experimentation, mentorship and funding. The 11 selected startups will be given S$25,000 in seed capital, working space at Block 79, as well as receive mentorship from startup veterans, DBS corporate executives and accelerators. Following the three-month intensive program, they will pitch their products to investors and accelerators. Commenting on the DBS HotSpot Pre-accelerator program, Neal Cross, chief innovation officer of DBS said: “There is two issues that we…
Singaporean remittance startup Toast has raised S$1.2 million (US$850,000) in a seed funding round led by Aetius Capital and ACE & Company, a private equity firm also known for having invested in financial comparison site CompareAsia and online payments startup TransferWise. New York-based investment firm One Zero Capital also participated in the round. Toast, which rebranded from CryptoSigma in July, uses blockchain technology to power remittances and is primarily targeting Southeast Asia. The startup seeks to solve the numerous inefficiencies with the way money is sent by overseas workers, founder and CEO Aaron Siwoku, said. “This is a local problem…
Startupbootcamp Fintech Singapore has announced new partnerships with Malaysia’s RHB Banking Group and CIMB Group that aim at giving startups in the program access to the region’s markets. “As we see fintech [taking off] across the region, not just Singapore, it is good to have a partner with a regional footprint in Southeast Asia, in countries like Thailand and Indonesia,” Marck Gnick, co-founder and global chief operating officer of Startupbootcamp Fintech said. Gnick added: “This gives our startups reach into these markets, and they can leverage the [banks’] networks.” These partnerships also highlight the need for more collaboration between fintech…
The Bitcoin protocol has caught the eye of many. Financial institutions are exploring how they could possibly use distributed ledger technology for institutional banking; startups are finding new ways to use the blockchain for anything from identification, to document certification. But still, what exactly can we do with Bitcoin? Today, we take a closer look at two startups that are utilizing Bitcoin for two completely different purposes. Micropayments Because bitcoins can be transferred easily and almost instantly in a peer-to-peer manner, many have argued that the cryptocurrency fits just perfectly for micropayments. One startup, namely ChangeTip, went viral back…