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…

Self-proclaimed the ‘Tinder of crowdfunding,’ OFF3R is the world’s first mobile crowdfunding aggregator that allows users to quickly discover and review all the hot opportunities and campaigns ongoing. Taking a similar approach as the world’s most popular dating app, OFF3R promises to apply the Tinderish thumb swipe to equity crowdfunding investment campaigns to widen the deal flow funnel. The app pulls in campaign content from multiple equity crowdfunding platforms at launch to let investors maximize their exposure to businesses they might be interested in investing in. Launched in June, OFF3R, formerly Tendr, currently aggregates investment deals from 12 equity crowdfunding…

Operated by Ripple Gateway Pte Ltd, Ripple Singapore is a Ripple gateway that uses the Ripple network to acquire, store and convert precious metals into any currency. Launched in January 2014, the service is Singapore’s first major Ripple gateway and the first in the world that allows customers to deposit and withdraw gold, silver and currencies into and out of the Ripple payment network. Users can either acquire bullion directly via the company’s ‘Bullion Counter,’ or indirectly from other users. Users maintain a balance in a Ripple wallet, while bullions are vaulted in Singapore. The company has partnered with Silver…

“From payments to wealth management, from peer-to-peer lending to crowdfunding, a new generation of startups is taking aim at the heart of the industry,” has said the Economist, describing the ‘Fintech Revolution.’ And what better place than Singapore, the finance hub of Southeast Asia, to have that revolution emerge? Singapore brings a wealth of expertise, funding opportunities and market access that is beneficial for every fast growing fintech startup. Plus, the city-state is certainly not short on quality startups accelerators and incubators. Here’s a list of 10 Fintech Accelerators and Incubators that will help passionate fintech entrepreneurs take their projects and ventures…

Vietnam’s Ahamove, an Uber-like service for logistics, seeks to disrupt the current business models and address the country’s logistics sector’s “severe fragmentation and inefficiency,” according to Phuoc Tran, Co-Founder and Operation Manager at Ahamove. Similarly to Uber, Ahamove provides users with a platform where truck drivers and consumers can connect. Such a platform not only allows massive process simplification, but also allows consumers to benefit from lower services costs. In an exclusive interview with Fintechnnews.sg, Tran shares the story behind Ahamove, their purposes, the challenges they had to overcome, and their plans for the coming months. Fintechnews.sg: Can you please…

Mobile payments app MoMo is experiencing rapid growth and currently stands as the most downloaded application in the Apple Store Vietnam. According to Manh Tuong Nguyen, Vice President at M_Service, the company behind MoMo, the app has been seeing 30 to 50% growth per month in terms of transaction volume and user base. “MoMo is growing beyond expectations,” Nguyen told VNExpress. “MoMo serves over one million customers monthly who use our money transfer services and mobile payments.” As mobile payments apps are quickly increasing in number, with large tech firms already releasing products such as Apple Pay and Samsung Pay, competitive…