Author: Fintech News Singapore

SAP SE today kicked off the SAP.iO Foundry Singapore Fall 2020 acceleration program focused on COVID-19 recovery, Fintech and spend management. The selected business-to-business startups will help SAP’s customers extend the value of their investments in SAP Concur solutions for travel and expense management. “By helping these enterprising startups in the SAP.iO program scale, we enable our customers to benefit from the value of some of these unique solutions and emerging technologies when they become available in SAP Concur App Center,” said Andy Watson, SAP Concur senior vice president and general manager, Asia Pacific Japan and Greater China. The selected startups will have…

Singapore-based fintech BondEvalue has been approved as a Recognised Market Operator (RMO) by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). It operates BondbloX Bond Exchange (BBX), a blockchain-based bond exchange that aims to bring trading of a wide range of fixed-income securities to the mass market across the region.   BondEvalue officially graduated from the MAS’ regulatory sandbox on 1 October 2020. The move means that it has successfully concluded proof of technology and business model. It is now no longer bound by restrictions such as limits on trading volume and disclosures specific to the sandbox model.   A sandbox is a regulatory…

DBS announced that it will be hosting its inaugural women-focused virtual career fair for technologists in October to fill over 50 technology jobs in Singapore. This comes as the bank seeks to grow its pipeline of female technology talent, and to encourage more women in Singapore to build a career in technology. Dubbed ‘DBS Women in Technology’, the fully digital event seeks to proactively reach out to female talent pools in Singapore and share the career paths available to them as technologists in DBS. The job opportunities available through the event cover 11 technology roles, such as data engineers, scrum…

Indian payment gateway provider Razorpay secured US$100 million in Series D financing, simultaneously achieving the major milestone of becoming the newest unicorn in India. With this round, Razorpay welcomes their latest partner GIC, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund to its investor base. Along with GIC, the round was co-led by Sequoia with participation from their existing investors Ribbit Capital, Tiger Global, Y-Combinator and Matrix Partners. IDC Financial Insights had previously named Razorpay as one of the 10 fastest growing fintech companies in India in its FinTech Fast 101 research. Razorpay serves international brands including the likes of Facebook, Google and Wikipedia,…

Standard Chartered Bank in Singapore has partnered Moneythor, a digital banking software provider, to launch its new data-driven SC Money Manager tool. SC Money Manager aims to help customers better manage their finances by providing a suite of personalised features including a holistic overview of historic trends and patterns, expense and income insights by category, customisable budgets, automated personalised alerts and contextual nudges, within the bank’s flagship mobile banking app. Moneythor’s data-driven engine and its API were deployed to provide AI-powered data analysis across all the customers’ accounts and cards in a unified manner, and to deliver personalised and contextual…

DBS and Standard Chartered jointly led a workgroup of 12 other banks to create and conduct a digital Trade Finance Registry (TFR) proof of concept (POC) to enhance lending practices and improve transparency in commodity trade. Supported by Enterprise Singapore (ESG) and endorsed by The Association Banks of Singapore (ABS), the TFR POC aims to be an industry utility by serving as a secure central database for the banking industry to access records of trade transactions financed across banks in Singapore. This mitigates against duplicate financing from different bank lenders for the same trade inventory, leading to greater trust and…

Visa has teamed up with Stripe, a fintech company focusing on online payment processing, for the acceptance of B2B payments using Stripe Connect. This is an extension of the partnership that the two entities formed in late 2018 to enable real-time push payment. The new solutions will be on the Visa Payables Automation platform, which allows buyers to enroll, manage and pay suppliers digitally with a Visa commercial card. This new feature, which is powered by Stripe Connect, the technology company’s solution for multi-sided marketplaces and platforms, enables buyers on Visa Payables Automation to pay suppliers who are unable to accept…

Switzerland-based digital asset bank Sygnum Group and SBI Group, a Japan based financial conglomerate, have entered into a partnership to establish an early-stage fund investing in digital asset opportunities across South East Asia and Europe. Its Singapore entity, Sygnum Pte. Ltd. and SBI Ventures Singapore Pte. Ltd. will provide unique investment exposure to the innovation and growth in digital asset solutions. These opportunities will be primarily focused on financial market infrastructure and enterprise solutions being developed for the emerging digital asset economy. Investors in the fund will benefit from the complementary expertise that Sygnum and SBI bring to the table…

Validus, peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platform for SMEs, is Singapore’s first fintech to be approved as a Participating Financial Institution (PFI) under Enterprise Singapore’s Enterprise Financing Scheme. This is the first time that a fintech has been onboarded under the scheme, alongside local banks and established financial institutions such as DBS, OCBC Bank, United Overseas Bank and Hong Leong Finance. Under the Enterprise Financing Scheme, Validus will provide working capital solutions to SMEs. The government-assisted financing and risk-sharing schemes are part of the Singapore government’s initiatives to help support the needs of local businesses especially during the pandemic. These schemes offer…

Lanturn, a Singapore based corporate services startup, announced that it has successfully raised US$3 million in seed funding. The funding round was led by East Ventures and CoCoon Ignite Ventures, both early-stage venture capital firms. Joining them were individual investors including Alex Turnbull, Saki Georgiadis, Managing Partner at RVP Equity; Meiyen Tan, the Head of Oon & Bazul’s Restructuring and Insolvency Practice; Chris Kelly, Partner at White & Case in the Asia-Pacific; and Tiang Lim Foo, a venture partner at Next Billion Ventures, and a partner at SeedPlus, a leading Southeast Asian seed fund. The funds will be used to…

In H1 2020, new account creations saw the highest rate of attack across all transaction types within financial services, according to a new study by LexisNexis, a provider of computer-assisted legal and business research as well as risk management services. The LexisNexis Risk Solutions Cybercrime Report January-June 2020, which analyzed data from more than 22.5 billion transactions processed by the LexisNexis Digital Identity Network, found that between January-June 2020, new account creation in financial services recorded an attack rate of 13.1%, well ahead of payments at 4% and logins at 0.4%. New account creation fraud refers to a customer account…

Singaporean regtech firm Tookitaki won in the monitoring and surveillance category for their “Crypto-currency AML Typology Repository Management” solution at the G20 TechSprint challenge. The hackathon-style competition was launched in April to highlight the potential for technology to resolve regulatory compliance (regtech) and supervisory (suptech) challenges. The regtech firm recently announced in November 2019 that it had raised US$19.2 million during a Series A funding round. Besides Tookitaki, 2 other winners were announced by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the Saudi G20 Presidency at the Enabling Regulatory and Supervisory Solutions for the Digital Era symposium. FNA won the…

Payments issuer processor, Global Processing Services (GPS), announced its appointment of three C-level executives: Richard Hodgson as Chief Financial Officer, Shaun Puckrin as Chief Product Officer, and Jerome Gudgeon as Chief Technology Officer. The new hires bolster the executive leadership team of GPS. The payments processing has partnered with some well-known and successful fintechs on the market, including Revolut, Starling Bank and Curve, as GPS drives its global expansion plans forward beyond Europe and APAC. Richard Hodgson, Chief Financial Officer As Chief Financial Officer, Richard Hodgson is responsible for scaling the GPS Finance function as it expands geographically, bringing more…

Wallex, a Singaporean cross border payments startup backed by Ant Financial, has expanded its partnership with Currencycloud, a global payments platform, to deliver a new range of collections services for their Asian customers in Singapore. The partnership using Currencycloud Spark will enable Wallex’s Singapore and Hong Kong customers to collect funds in USD, GBP and Euro via local payment channels, enabling them to expand and be more competitive in overseas markets. Previously customers would need to use regional banks for these collections, or require international payments to be made, incurring as much as 1.5% foreign exchange charges, as well as…

Daon announced the appointment of Trilochan Sehgal as Regional Vice President, South East Asia, and the opening of a new office in Singapore. The announcement affirms the importance of South East Asia to Daon and places the company in a position to respond to the growth of digital banking in the region. In 2020, the company’s presence in Asia has already expanded to include significant new partnerships. In March, the company also announced a contract to deliver digital onboarding and mobile biometric authentication to Singapore based TONIK, Philippines digital bank. New virtual banks like Standard Chartered Bank’s Mox in Hong…

Revolut and SNACK by NTUC Income, an insurance cooperative in Singapore, announced a partnership to incorporate lifestyle-based insurance offerings. SNACK, launched in June this year, offers stackable, micro-insurance that integrates into their customers’ daily lifestyle activities. The app has partnered with EZ-link, Fitbit and Burpple so far. A key aspect of the collaboration will be to explore embedding SNACK into Revolut’s “Spare Change Round Up” feature which will give customers the option to purchase insurance coverage on SNACK. Bite-sized premiums of $0.30, $0.50 and $0.70 will be linked to daily lifestyle activities such as dining, taking public transport, spending using…

Since 2019, a wave of digital banks have arrived in Australia on a back of favorable legislation changes which took place in 2018. Today, Australia is home to five independent, licensed neobanks, in addition to a plethora of digital banking platforms. But more are expected to come, adding heat to the competition. Volt Bank was the first neobank to receive a full banking license back in January 2019, after being granted a Restricted Authorised Deposit-Taking Institution (RADI) in May 2018. The startup is pursuing a partnership model, focusing on striking agreements with different businesses to amass customers and provide perks…

Razer Fintech, the financial technology arm of Razer has collaborated with Visa, to unveil a brand-new Visa prepaid solution – the Razer Card. Users can sign up and use the virtual card at no subscription, with the option to upgrade to a Standard or Premium physical card. All card users will get cashback features with no capped limit, a gamified rewards system in-app, and can make payments at over 61 million merchant locations globally where Visa is accepted. Prior to the official launch, the prepaid card will be made available to 1,337 selected users from now till 31 December, via…

Monese, pan-European banking service, announced that it will adopt Thought Machine’s cloud native core banking platform Vault. Monese will migrate its existing customer base onto Thought Machine’s cloud native platform, as it focusses on strengthening the company’s core technology platform and its banking infrastructure. Vault’s product building toolkit, known as Smart Contracts, is said to empower banks and fintech companies to build new products rapidly while improving the onboarding and ongoing customer experience unlike banks who are constrained by inflexible legacy technology. Founded in 2014 by former Google engineer Paul Taylor, Thought Machine brings cloud native technology to core banking.…

SWIFT and Singapore’s Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) has signed a Memorandum of Intent (MOI) to accelerate trade digitalisation globally. The MOI looks at offering SWIFT’s community a more efficient and cost-effective cross-border paperless trade, without the need for multiple bilateral linkages and siloed systems. Moving manual processes to digitally enabled ones also creates opportunities to shorten trade processing times and open up possibilities for innovation such as new trade financing offerings to the trade community. Through this MOI, both parties will work to combine TradeTrust, an interoperability framework that connects various platforms for the exchange of digital trade documentation,…