From November 12-16, 2018, the FinConecta team attended the third edition of the Singapore FinTech Festival, as part of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) delegation. During the five-day festival, the FinConecta team not only connected and showcased its products and platform to over 150 FinTechs, financial institutions, consulting firms, and industry influencers, but also learned tremendously from the depth and breadth of innovations happening in Singapore, other parts of the South East Asia region, and beyond.
This year’s festival had a buzzing FinTech Exhibition of over 500 booths and attracted over 45,000 participants from 127 countries. Here are some of the highlights of what we did and learned during the week-long festival!
Our CEO Jorge Ruiz participated in the Panel “Borderless FinTechs and Ecosystems: The Global Community”
The first day of the festival wrapped up with our CEO Jorge Ruiz speaking at the panel along with Alex Scandurra (CEO of Stone & Chalk), Nasir Zubairi (CEO of Luxembourg House of Financial Technology), Natalie Ceeney (Chairman of Innovate Finance), and moderated by Sng Khai Lin, Co-founder and Chief Financial Officer, Fundnel and Women in FinTech Subcommittee, Singapore FinTech Association. It was a great opportunity to hear perspectives from thought-leaders on what they think constitutes a truly “Global FinTech Ecosystem”.
Jorge Ruiz emphasized that we needed to think about how to build an ecosystem that really helps FinTechs transcend their business and scale, and emphasized the importance of having a standardized integration process. He also shared our experiences on building a platform model that helps the financial institutions and FinTechs integrate in an easier way by using a standardized process.
MOU Signing Between Monetary Authority of Singapore and IDB
The second day was highlighted by the MOU signing ceremony between the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and the IDB Lab at the Latin America & Caribbean booth, to formalize the collaboration between MAS and IDB towards a shared goal of bringing more financial inclusion to Latin America as well as connecting with ASEAN and other parts of Asia. Both Irene Irias Hofman, CEO of IDB Lab, and Andrew Shaw, Senior Advisor of FMO, shared their enthusiasm of building and facilitating the collaboration between FinTechs and financial institutions. With the support of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, we are hopeful that the collaboration between the two sides will be taken to the next level and more synergies will be realized across multiple continents around the world. We are honored to be part of the journey by offering our platform as the intermediator.
IDB featured FinConecta’s Platform during the Financial Inclusion in Latin America Panel
Financial inclusion continued to be a major topic for this year’s conference. It was really great so see a huge amount of investments and efforts that have been dedicated to address the issue of financial exclusion in emerging markets. On the third day, the Inter-American Development Bank hosted a panel discussion around how to use FinTechs to maximize the potential of digital finance and create a more balanced and inclusive financial ecosystem in Latin America.
Irene Arias Hofman, CEO of IDB Lab, highlighted that FinConecta’s middleware platform made the integration process much easier for banks as the more heavy-lifting part of the process, building APIs, was facilitated by our platform. As the platform grows, she foresees that more banks and FinTechs will get onboard with this digital transformation initiative. We are very grateful to count on IDB Lab’s continuous support with our platform and endeavor.
Two-Days of Innovation Lab Crawls
For the last two days of the festival, the FinConecta team together with the IDB delegation embarked on a journey to visit the innovation centers of Capgemini, OCBC Bank, PayPal, KPMG, 80rr FinTech Hub, and DBS Bank. The team really immersed themselves with the innovation scenes.
