Hanoi-based fintech startup BankGo has launched in closed beta a service that allows individuals and businesses to search, compare and easily apply for loans with the best interest rates. Speaking to Fintechnews, BankGo’s founder and CEO Vu Viet Hung indicated that more than 1,500 people registered to the service on the launch day last week. Hung said his team has received very positive feedbacks from customers and bankers. BankGo is a financial comparison platform for personal loans (housing, car, consumer loans), credit cards, savings accounts and SME loans that aims to help customers get relevant information and support them in…

Fintech challengers have been gaining ground by offering easier, cheaper or more intuitive ways to compare and acquire the financial services that customers need. Today, the question is not whether these new players will topple the established banking hierarchy, but rather if banks are willing to lose a significant portion of their customers to these new firms. Banking and financial services leaders are well aware that their businesses are under threat and many are increasing spending to counter the menace, according to a new survey by recruitment firm Robert Half. The survey, which involved 400 financial services leaders in Singapore,…

DBS Bank has officially launched DBS HotSpot 2016, and applications are now being accepted until 1 April 2016.  This is the second run of the pre-accelerator programme for very early stage start-ups in fintech, social enterprise, and digital technology as well as innovators within the bank to develop their business ideas and seek funding. DBS was the first bank in the region to organise a wholly-owned pre-accelerator programme when it launched DBS HotSpot in September 2015, as part of its SGD10 million commitment to develop the start-up ecosystem. Unlike most accelerator programmes, DBS does not require participating entrepreneurs to relinquish…

Tech giant IBM has announced that it will open so called IBM Garages in Singapore, Tokyo, New York City and London where its experts will be able to collaborate with local developers on the design and implementation of blockchain technology for business. The initiative is part of IBM’s wider plan of pushing blockchain usage for businesses and came simultaneously as the corporation had unveiled its latest suite of services entirely dedicated to facilitating the development, design and implementation of blockchain technology for developers and businesses. Blockchain-as-a-Service IBM’s new blockchain services aim to enable developers to access fully integrated DevOps tools…

Forbes has released the first ever 30 under 30 2016 Asia Finance, a list of the top venture capitalists and fintech entrepreneurs in the Asia-Pacific region. This list includes founders and senior executives from top financial technology companies including Neurowave and Call Levels, as well as some of the world’s most successful venture capitalists in the APAC region incl. Markus Gnirck from Startupbootcamp Fintech Singapore. Pocket Sun, 24, Singapore Pocket Sun is the founder of the first cross-border community and capital firm led by and dedicated to millennial females, SoGal. SoGal currently has 4,000 members in more than 20 countries. The firm…

Millennials have never known anything but new technologies, changing technologies, adjustment and adaptation. Born between the early 1980s to the early 2000s, this generation wants to do everything on their mobile devices, a trend that had the influence to be a commerce disruptor. A survey conducted by Zogby Analytics commissioned by Fintech company Mitek found that among 1,006 respondents aged between 18 and 34 years old, 86% said that they had already made purchases or conducted a transaction from their smartphone. 11% of them indicated that they did so on a daily basis. 60% of respondents said they felt comfortable…

Inspired by Airbnb’s success story – and > US$25 billion valuation -, a growing number of entrepreneurs around the world are applying the winning model to other types of services and markets. MeetingsBooker, Zipcube, PivotDesk and ShareDesk, are just a few amongst the dozens of startups that are providing Airbnb-style marketplaces for short-term office space and conference hall rentals. Already, some of them have become quite successful. MeetingsBooker, a startup based in Dublin, is arguably the largest venue-booking online platform in the world featuring over 70,000 meeting rooms and conference centers in 134 countries. Last year, it raised US€1 million…

Please find attached the Fintech Singapore Newsletter. Every 2 weeks we will summarize the most important Fintech News from Singapore and around Southeast Asia, including Studies, Events and Fintech Jobs. We will present in this edition interesting insides about the Fintech ecosystem in Singapore and a lot of ongoing investment activities around Singapore startups. Furthermore, we offer special discounts for 2 top events and you will be surprised about one open Fintech Job in Singapore. Follow us on Twitter @FintechSIN or join the Fintech Singapore Facebook Group to stay tuned. Please recommend our Fintech-Newsletter and our webpage to your friends. (www.Fintechnews.sg) In case of any Feedbacks please send us an e-mail…

There seems to be an undeniable connection between FinTech and robotics, and it is only a matter of time until both industries collide. When thinking of the robotics concept, it is important to take its wide scope into consideration. So many different aspects of our everyday lives can be influenced and improved upon by robotics, and Singapore startup CtrlWorks is looking to bring exactly that to mainstream consumers. The product created by CtrlWorks serves as an add-on kit to transforms any wheel-based form of transportation into an autonomously guided vehicle. Similar to how GPS systems work, the add-on kit from…

Holding the promise of making investing easy, affordable and accessible to the greatest possible number of people, robo-advisors have already caused a stir in the UK and the US and are now winning market share in Asia. Infinity Partners, a high-end financial advisory outfit based in Singapore, claimed in September last year it was about to launch the first robo-advisor available in the country. The group could well be outstripped by Smartly, another robo-advisor expected to launch in Singapore in July this year. Smartly, which aims to simplify and educate users about investing, is building what the company claims to…

Digital banking has become a serious business trend as Asian consumers are becoming more and more comfortable with using mobile and Internet channels for banking services. According to a report from McKinsey, the use of mobile and Internet channels for banking has increased on average more than 35 % between 2011 and 2014. Correspondingly, the firm noted a drop in branch usage of 27% across Asia. At a few leading banks, nearly 20% of key product purchases are now completed online. In 2014, McKinsey surveyed some 16,000 financial consumers in 13 Asian markets and found “drastic” shifts in behavior, highlighting…

In a new report entitled ‘Blockchain in Capital Markets: The Prize and the Journey,’ Euroclear and Oliver Wyman explore the merits of using blockchain technology in the capital markets, a technology that could potentially provide a new approach to data management and be a solution to many of the inefficiencies afflicting capital markets. According to the report, the current methods for storing and agreeing datasets of financial obligations and ownership are highly complex, utilize fragmented IT and data architectures and suffer from a lack of common standards. Hence, the firms ask whether blockchain technology could be “the structural change the…

Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp (OCBC) is partnering with Singaporean personal finance portal MoneySmart.sg to offer a lower rate mortgage package. The deal, a limited offer running for only 15 days starting today, consists in a fixed deposit-linked interest rate plan at 36-month fixed deposit mortgage rate of 1.63% (OCBC 36FDMR: 0.65%, plus 0.98%) for the first three years on a loan of S$500,000 and above. In comparison, Singapore’s DBS Bank currently offers a fixed deposit home rate of 1.95% for a two-year lock-in period, based on its prevailing 18-month fixed deposit rate for amounts from S$1,000 to S$9,999. The OCBC Bank’s…

UK native entrepreneur is looking to provide a solution for micropayments in Southeast Asia, starting with the Philippines. With Tagcash Ltd. Inc., founder and president Mark Vernon is offering a platform and ecosystem that combines social media and payment functionalities. “We started by creating a rewards business with the idea that merchants would offer incentives to share ads on Facebook and social media based on results,” Vernon told Fintechnews in an email communication. “Small amounts of money would go into users wallets which would then be spent with other merchants etc. Traction was hard to achieve, so we took a…

Fintech in Thailand: The Bank of Thailand (BOT) is looking to boost the use of electronic and e-payment as the governor believes that these methods will be crucial to the competitiveness of the Thai economy since they will reduce transaction cost while boosting good governance. E-payment can also be used by the government to provide welfare to low-income groups more efficiently and with transparency, according to BOT governor Veerathai Santiprabhob. A report from the Nation suggests that Thailand’s central bank will announce today a new three-year strategic plan to boost the sector. “There will be many new players [in the…

With the global economy increasingly showing signs of weakness, more people are considering gold as a safe haven. Thankfully, with platforms such as BullionVault and Bitgold now available, gold is no longer a reserve of the rich and literally anyone can invest in the commodity. Founded in 2014, BitGold is a Canadian fintech company that aims to reintroduce the concept of commodity money. It provides users with a vault account to purchase and hold gold, the ability to make and receive instant gold payments, and a debit card for spending gold at traditional points of sale. BitGold currently serves some…

Payoneer brings in one place a number of payment options and allows online marketplaces and global companies to transfer fund and pay service providers located in various parts of the world in a faster manner, at lower fees and with greater flexibility. This New York-based financial services firm provides businesses with an all-in-one solution that allows them to send out payments to other companies and working professionals from all around the world more efficiently and at a cheaper cost. Payouts can be done via prepaid debit card, bank transfers, checks and local e-wallets to 200 countries and in 150 currencies.…

Lenddo, a startup that has developed an algorithm that pulls and analyzes social media data to determine credit worthiness, has teamed up with consultancy firm FK BCG to tap into the South Korean market. The two companies officially announced the debut of their collaboration on January 25, during a seminar on the reinvention of consumer finance using non-traditional data for credit scoring and social verification. The team that made it all happened! #LenddoKorea #ThankYou #Milestone pic.twitter.com/sFlK2XlfIM — Lenddo (@lenddofriend) January 26, 2016 The partnership with FK BCG, a leading consulting group in credit scoring, will allow the startup to introduce…

Asia Pacific’s e-commerce industry has been “explosive,” generating over US$567 billion in total transactions in 2014 with China contributing US$440 billion, surpassing the US with US$140 billion. In the next five years, the region will most likely set the agenda for the global online retail market, according to MasterCard Asia Pacific. Asia Pacific (APAC), which hosts 60% of the world’s population, is twice as likely to buy online rather than other groups in the world. In two to three years, MasterCard expects that the region’s middle class will expand to over 1.7 billion people in 2020 with China, India and…

Vietnam’s nascent fintech sector has a prosperous future lying ahead. While the ecosystem is still relatively small with about 30 players, the sector is one of the hottest investment trends for startups in the country. In August 2015, OnOnPay, a Hanoi-based fintech startup that allows users to top up talk time via mobile, closed “a six-digit amount” in seed funding from Captii Ventures. The deal marks the first investment from the Singaporean fund into a Vietnamese venture. According to a report from DealStreetAsia, over US$7.8 billion will be poured into the fintech market in 2020. So far, the most active…