5 New FinTech Products And Services Launched At The Singapore FinTech Festival (SFF) 2022

The seventh edition of the Singapore FinTech Festival (SFF), organised by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and Elevandi, was held from 2–4 November 2022. The SFF serves to bring together the global FinTech community to engage, connect, and collaborate on issues relating to the development of financial services, public policies, and technology,

This year’s theme was on “Building Resilient Business Models and amid Volatility and Change”. It featured over 450 organisations, including global financial institutions, regulators, and FinTechs, showcasing the latest innovations and developments in the FinTech space.

Given the multitude of new products and services launched at the Singapore FinTech Festival 2022, we highlight 5 of them that would interest local small businesses.

#1 [email protected] Digitalises Banker’s Guarantees And Insurance Bonds

[email protected] was launched by the Ministry of Finance (MOF) and MAS as a simple and secure digital process for businesses and individuals to provide a banker’s guarantee or insurance bond to government agencies within a day.

With [email protected], businesses and individuals can do away with the current practice of applying for a paper guarantee from a financial institution (FI), collect it when its ready, and deliver the guarantee to the government agency, to discharge their contractual or licencing obligations. Instead, businesses and individuals can apply for the eGuarantee from over 20 participating FIs through their websites or email for direction submission to 17 government agencies. More FIs and agencies are scheduled to come onboard [email protected] by end 2023.

Deputy Prime Minister Lawrence Wong said of the new initiative in his opening address that “this collaboration will lead to a significant reduction in the time and effort needed to process these guarantees, and ultimately benefiting the individual and business users”.

#2 Airwallex Partners With Atome Enabling Merchants To Accept Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) Payment Options

Merchants on Airwallex will be able to offer Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) as a payment option to shoppers across Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, through Airwallex’s partnership with Atome.

This gives merchants an opportunity to increase their revenue while also diversifying their payment options. Founded in 2015 in Melbourne, Airwallex empowers businesses of all sizes to accept payments, move money globally and simplify their financial operations through its platform.

Airwallex intends to expand its collaboration with Atome and soon enable its merchants(in Australia, Europe, Hong Kong, Singapore, and United Kingdom) to offer BNPL as a payment option to shoppers in Japan, the Philippines and Thailand.

#3 Cake DeFi Launches Enterprise-Grade Defi Solution For Institutions

Institutions looking for an avenue to invest in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) products have a new option with the launch of Cake DeFi Enterprise. With its new B2B business vertical, Cake DeFi wants to meet the growing demand for institutional DeFi services and encourage crypto portfolio diversification.

Founded in 2019, Cake DeFi, which operates and is registered in Singapore, is a fintech platform that provides access to decentralised financial services and applications by enabling users to generate returns from their crypto and digital assets. It has more than 1 million retail customers from over 190 countries around the world, managing over US$1 billion in customer assets.

Cake Defi Enterprise’s enterprise-grade DeFi solution for institutions is built upon the three unique selling points of self-custody, complete transparency and simplified fund management. For a start, Cake DeFi Enterprise will launch DeFi services such as Liquidity Mining, Token Swaps and Lending with the suite of services to expand over time.

#4 Rapyd’s First-Of-Its Kind Multi-Currency Treasury Solution Simplifies Cross-Border Fund Management For International Businesses

Rapyd, a leading fintech platform for global payments payouts and businesses everywhere, launched its multi-currency Treasury Solution, which is the first for the Asia-Pacific market. The new solution is a collection of cash management features that optimise the cost and effort of global payment operations. It allows businesses engaged in cross-border trade to simplify their global financial relationships.

The multi-currency Treasury Solution enables international businesses of any size to manage their funds globally without the complexity, frustration and added expenses of managing multiple banking relationships, payment providers and fund flows across countries and currencies.

Some benefits of having a Rapyd Virtual Account include collection of funds in over 100 countries, including getting paid locally in 40+ countries and over 25 currencies without the need to open and manage multiple overseas bank accounts; concentration of funds by aggregating multiple accounts across the globe into a central multi-currency account located in Singapore; and disbursement of funds to suppliers, employees, and partners in 190+ countries with Real Time Payments, Local ACH, SWIFT and other local options. This allows businesses to achieve 70-90% cost savings compared to traditional methods.

#5 Standard Chartered Unveils New Payouts-As-A-Service Solution For E-commerce Hubs

Payouts-as-a-Service (PaaS) is a bank-grade fintech solution that Standard Chartered launched on the first day of the SFF. It lets digital businesses easily manage one-to-many payments to parties in their ecosystem. The service is made available in 5 major e-commerce hubs across India, Malaysia, Singapore, the UAE, and the UK.

By integrating with the Bank’s PaaS APIs, clients would be able to embed and automate payments on their digital e-commerce marketplaces and platforms by providing details of transactions as they occur. This include details such as a purchase or sale made on an e-commerce marketplace and preferences of who, when, how and how much to pay that can be either pre-set or provided as and when necessary. The Bank then programmatically executes the payment contract based on these parameters, without requiring clients or their counterparties to issue separate payment instructions.

This enables the Bank’s corporate and institutional clients to enable complex pay-out constructs such as split, scheduled, conditional or clubbed payments. It also translates to a significant reduction in payment administration overheads and saves time, which businesses can use for other higher value activities.

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