Author: Company Announcement

ASX announces its intention to replace CHESS using distributed ledger technology (DLT) developed by its technology partner Digital Asset (DA). CHESS (Clearing House Electronic Subregister System) is the system used by ASX to record shareholdings and manage the clearing and settlement of equity transactions in Australia. It was world-leading when introduced in the 1990s, providing name-on-register functionality, electronic communications and removing paper share certificates. It continues to be a robust and reliable system. ASX is now taking the opportunity to replace CHESS with a next-generation post-trade platform using contemporary technology. Today’s decision follows the successful build of enterprise-grade DLT software…

Over the past week, Coinbase has continued to invest significant resources into scaling our backend systems to provide a reliable customer experience during periods of high traffic. Despite these efforts to scale, the continued rise of legitimate user traffic leads to periods of slowness and downtime over the course of December 6th and December 7th. The chart below shows the relative change in Coinbase traffic from our incident last week and the peak traffic period this week. December 6th On December 6th, Coinbase continued to experience high traffic as a result of large Bitcoin price movements. At 12:22 PST, one…

Federal Bank, a leading private sector bank in India, partners with MatchMove India Pvt Ltd to digitise rollout of employee reward systems. MatchMove Partner Card Program will help in replacing the existing systems prevailing in various companies for fringe benefits including rewards and loyalty schemes to employees. The system is intended to make an end-to-end digitisation of the issue and management of the various work-life benefits including service and facility vouchers. According to the Digital Payments 2020 report by BCG and Google, India now represents one of the largest opportunities for payments. With a population of over 1.25 billion eager…

Culum Capital, a Singapore-based receivables and supply chain financing provider, launches its  investor platform. Aimed at accredited and institutional investors from around the globe, the platform facilitates invoice financing to SMEs as an alternative to traditional financing sources. The platform’s user interface brings ease and convenience for investors, with a double layer of security authentication. The platform uses its proprietary credit scoring and on-going risk measurements to identify optimum investment opportunities and provide transparency. The transactions carry a short tenor of maximum 120 days, with the average transaction at 70 days. Annualised gross returns are between 10 and 25 percent,…

 iguazio a data platform powering continuous analytics and event-driven applications, announced the opening of its Asia Pacific (APAC) regional headquarters in Singapore. iguazio announced Singapore-based Grab as a marquee customer in September 2017 and is rapidly growing its customers across industries including financial services, automotive, IoT and telecommunications that require real-time data processing, artificial intelligence and machine learning. In July iguazio raised US $33 million in Series B funding from investors including Verizon Ventures [NYSE: VZ], Robert Bosch Venture Capital GmbH, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Group, Dell Technologies Capital and leading venture capitals, bringing total funding to US $48 million. Funding from the latest round…

Crowdlending platform, New Union (新联在线),  announces that it has been awarded the full Capital Market Service license (“CMS”) by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (“MAS”) and has lined up a robust deal flow pipeline of about S$2 million that will be made available soon. One of the first and largest debt-based crowdfunding platforms in Singapore, New Union provides alternative business financing for small-medium enterprises (“SMEs”) in Singapore, China, Taiwan (Republic of China), Cambodia and the Philippines. Since its inception in 2013, New Union has to-date raised S$2.6 billion for businesses in Asia-Pacific (S$127.5 million excluding China). Co-Founder and Group Chief…

Tokio Marine Life Insurance Singapore, the only Japanese life insurer in Singapore, launched the recruitment function in the latest phase of its TOMI chatbot (short for Tokio Marine Insurance). This makes TOMI the first chatbot in Singapore to support an insurer’s recruitment process, on top of being the first self-learning AI chatbot in Singapore that makes life insurance more accessible to the public. Aimed at enhancing the insurer’s engagement with today’s digitally savvy generation in recruitment, TOMI now answers more than 300 questions on how to pursue a career as a financial adviser. It also provides information that is typically…

The Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) and Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), together with SkillsFuture Singapore (SSG), six local universities, and five financial associations, sealed a landmark Memorandum of Intent (MOI) for the TechSkills Accelerator (TeSA) FinTech Collective on 16 November 2017, to jointly develop industry-ready professionals in meeting the strong demands of emerging infocomm technology (ICT) skills. The TeSA FinTech Collective was first announced by Mr Ong Ye Kung, Minister for Education (Higher Education and Skills) and Second Minister for Defence, at the Singapore FinTech Festival welcome dinner on 13 November 2017. Singapore’s first nationwide collaboration between industry and universities By aligning ICT skills taught by the universities with…

Ms Sim Hwee Hoon, former CEO of Morgan Stanley Singapore, is the fourth and final member of StashAway’s Advisory Committee. She joins Pranay Gupta, former Head of Multi-Asset Strategies at Temasek’s Fullerton Fund Management; Prof. Annie Koh, Professor of Finance at SMU and Board Member of CPF; and Prof. Massimo Massa, Rothschild Chaired Professor of Banking and Professor of Finance at INSEAD as part of StashAway’s Advisory Committee. StashAway is setting itself apart wherever possible in Singapore’s nascent robo-advisor ecosystem. In addition to aligning with major thought-leaders and key industry practitioners, StashAway owns its CMS retail fund management license from…

On any one typical work day, an OCBC Bank anti-money laundering (AML) compliance analyst would log into the bank’s transaction monitoring system and find up to hundreds of potentially suspicious transactions he or she had to review. These transactions are flagged for having fulfilled one of several “rules”, such as a sudden large transfer into or out of an account, that the system had been programmed to recognise. But this rule-based approach means the generation of multiple alerts that the AML analyst has to manually trawl through in order to ascertain which alerted transaction is to be further reviewed for…

Blockshow Asia, the largest gathering of the crypto community in Singapore will be attended by industry pioneers, enthusiasts and keen investors alike. During the 2-day event, Skyline will be accepting cryptocurrency as payment for drinks and food. The cryptocurrency that will be accepted in this early trial run the first of its kind here in Singapore will be the widely traded, Ethereum. Customers will be able to use their Jaxx and Ethereum Free wallets to pay for drinks with Ether using the COSS Pos system in which is a pilot collaboration between COSS and Skyline. Skyline operator Subaish Rajamanickam on the trial…

AsiaMalls Management signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with UnionPay International (UPI) to roll out acceptance of UnionPay QR Code payments across all six malls – Hougang Mall, Liang Court, Tiong Bahru Plaza, Tampines 1, White Sands, and Century Square when it reopens in 2018. As the first large-scale partnership between a mall manager and a global payment brand to deploy QR Code payments across malls in Singapore, this form of QR Code payments is compatible with SGQR and compliant with EMVCo standards. UnionPay International is a member of the SGQR taskforce led by Info-communications Media Development Authority (IMDA) and…

Max Money has launched its  MaxTerminal service which allows customers to remit money abroad using only their debit cards at selected retail outlets.This makes MaxMoney the first money service business provider in Malaysia to introduce a hybrid Online to Offline (O2O) model whereby personal and business transactions can be done over-the-counter or online. Max Money also launched its new portal, where customers can transfer money and exchange currencies online. The MaxTerminal service, which can be used 24/7, will see Max Money placing it’s proprietary terminals in convenience stores, sundry shops and mom-and-pop stores in business centres, industrial hubs and rural…

AGDelta was awarded the MAS FinTech Awards (Singapore SME) at the 2017 FinTech Awards on 16 November 2017, thanks to its award-winning B2B and B2B2C Digital Wealth Platform, and achievements over the past 12 months. AGDelta was one of only four winners, out of an original 300 global submissions, winning over the judges based on criteria that included impact, practicality, interoperability, uniqueness and creativity. “From the outset, AGDelta has worked to digitize the wealth management eco-system. Our goal has been to make financial investments, services and advice more accessible, relevant and safer for client advisors and their end customers” says…

ICICI Bank, India’s largest private sector bank by consolidated assets, announced the launch of India’s first voice-based international remittance service to enable non-resident Indians (NRIs) to send money to any bank in India. With this new feature in the ICICI Bank’s Money2India app, an NRI customer can instantly initiate a remittance to his/her existing payees in India with just a simple voice command to Apple’s virtual voice assistant, Siri, on his/her Apple iPhone / iPad. A first-of-its kind cross border remittance service by a bank in the country, it improves customer’s convenience significantly as it replaces a five-step process, which…

Hashkloud Pty Ltd (HKAU), a Blockchain focused Fintech company based in Sydney, Australia announced that United Commercial Bank Ltd (UCB), a full service commercial bank based in Dhaka, Bangladesh have launched Upay, a digital payments platform on Oct 17th, 2017. Upay is based on HKAU’s PaySHA Digital Payments Platform, a universal digital payments platform that uses Blockchain technology where transactional data during payments processing are cryptographically hashed and verified using Blockchain. PaySHA supports a cashless and cardless digital wallet that uses QR (Quick Response) code to deliver real time payment solutions for the customers. “The objective of Upay is to…

Prudential Singapore (Prudential) is leading a step change in the way insurance claims are made with its trial of an industry-first, machine learning-based solution that assesses claims in seconds. It sits at the core of a new customer e-claims platform which Prudential is making available to selected policyholders on a trial-basis. The first phase of the trial, set to commence in late November 2017, will focus on automating the processing of PRUshield pre- and post- hospitalisation claims from eight major hospitals. These form the bulk of the 14,000 paper bills and receipts that Prudential’s claims assessors review each month. The…

To support fintech entrepreneurs in strengthening their safety net and managing risk better, Prudential Singapore (Prudential) is partnering with the Singapore Fintech Association (SFA) to offer its members complimentary Group Personal Accident coverage for a year. This initiative is targeted at supporting young startups established in Singapore within the last five years. Such companies have less than ten employees on average and are usually run by the founders themselves. These entrepreneurs tend to overlook provisioning for adequate personal insurance coverage for themselves and their employees especially in the first critical years of operations. To help close their protection gap, Prudential…

SmartFunding Pte. Ltd. has been granted the full Capital Markets Service Licence for Dealing in Securities by the MAS, effective from 3 November 2017. The company launched its P2P lending platform in early 2016 and made its application to the MAS that same year. The award of the  CMS Licence enables SmartFunding to expand its offering from traditional invoice financing into a new asset class of SME loans, by applying a range of exemptions under the Securities and Futures Act. It also means that they have been fully validated as competent and capable in meeting the high regulatory standards of…

Smartkarma, Asia’s largest provider of independent investment research, today announced it has closed a Series B round of financing led by Sequoia India, which brings the company’s total funding to US $21 million. Smartkarma is disrupting the traditional model of investment research, which has long been dominated by investment banks. It is a model in a state of flux: banks are under pressure from regulators to improve pricing transparency and resolve inherent conflicts between their research and investment banking departments. Many investment banks are also downsizing research desks due to cost constraints, resulting in a decline in the depth and breadth of coverage…