Us at Singapore FinTech Festival
In November, we travelled to the world’s largest FinTech festival, attended by 45,000 people in 2018 and 60,000 participants in 2019 from 130+ countries!! The festival provides the chance for the FinTech community to connect, collaborate, and co-create. Whether you’re a start-up, technology company, investor, financial institution, research institute, innovation professional or just a curious individual wanting to read into the future, SFF was the place to be at.
I could summarize what we saw that week in three main topics:
- TBOT “The Blockchain of Things”. there is blockchain for payments, collections, identity, contracts, loyalty, currencies, trade, insurance, fx, and for everything under the sun. In all seriousness Blockchain is disrupting every aspect of the financial industry. Not only in SGFF but also in our own marketplace, we are seeing an evolution to this new (actually not really that new) technology.
- FOMO FS “Fear of Missing Out on Financial Services”. Every company with a client base of > 20M or more is looking to launch financial products. From Asia to Latinamerica, Financial Institutions will experience a strong competition from new players in this space -we saw many of them at the festival; those with booths and others taking notes and learning all possible shortcuts. Many surprises on our way.
- AIOS “Artificial Intelligence Operated Systems”. There is a common element around the lack of AI in “today’s” products; very few solutions, strategies, big talks, small talks have AI as the fuel that gets them going. The future is now.
There were four major underlying themes featured throughout the festival. The themes included: Sustainability; Finance and Tech; Future of Finance; Investment and Global Markets Opportunities and Exponential Technologies.
Our team was present at the event from day 1, participating in different panels, connecting with participants and working with Financial institutions at the digital transformation masterclass hosted by FMO Entrepreneurial Development Bank and IDB (Interamerican Development Bank). Participating FIs used our Digital Transformation Readiness Assessment tool to understand their current status on their transformation journey. We had an opportunity to discuss FinTech integration and the power of leveraging ecosystems and enabling Open Banking through our platform.
