Regulation is the new black - Singapore Fintech Festival 2024

Welcome to day one of my reporting from the world’s biggest and best Fintech Festival.

It’s my third time here and the scale, energy and money at this event never ceases to amaze me. SFF has become my annual corporate strategy offsite - it’s so inspiring to see so many Fintech companies here (over 10,000 exhibiting) and with 60,000 attendees over the 3 days I get to meet plenty of new people as well as some old faces too.

I arrived in Singapore on Monday and had impromptu dinner with the MD of a VC focused on Fintech. We both held similar views that there’ll be increased interest in 2025, but investing will still be discerning.

The key themes I have taken from Singapore so far are Regulation, Partnerships and payments (I’ll include digital assets here)

I’ve spent some real quality time with clients this past few days and they seem to echo these themes. It’s refreshing that there’s a real focus on delivery and solving problems.

However the main stage speakers are understandably still obsessed with buzzword Bingo.

Wise Exemplifies the Maturity of Fintech

I got to spend some time with the Wise team on my visit. Wise profits are up 57% this year and after many years building traction in Australia, they’ve now hit the 1 million customer mark with $1bn in deposits.

Wise Platform is IMO a shining example of embedded finance done well - yesterday they announced a huge partnership with Standard Chartered. I’ve been cautious around the premise of embedded finance mainly because it is so complex, especially from a treasury, compliance and risk perspective. So many Fintech’s seem to be making promises they can’t deliver.

Wise have invested over five years and have hundreds of people to build and deliver the Wise Platform solution to clients like NU Bank in Brazil and UP Bank in Australia. I’m massively impressed by the solution they have built - a white label platform enabling partners to offer instant cross border payments (they class under 20 seconds as instant.)

I spoke with several of Wise Platforms clients and I’ve rarely heard customers give such glowing endorsements.

I had a bet two years ago that embedded finance would struggle to take off in 2023, based on the blueprint of Wise it could be time?

International reach

There’s 20 plus countries exhibiting at Singapore Fintech festival and a renewed interest in Australia, especially in payments - did you know Australia has the fifth largest remittance outflows in the world? Bigger than India!

That stat blew my mind. So payments companies in particular are looking at Australia again as a place to invest. Things are looking better as we head into 2025 for sure.

For such a small state Singapore truly does punch above its weight when it comes to investing in ideas and innovation. It truly is an international hub.

There’s a feeling amongst many of the people I’ve spoken to that the Middle East is the place to be in the next decade, (Singapore and Australia are losing talent to the region.) But SE Asia still has huge opportunities. The challenge for Fintech’s is the complexity of multi-region regulation. It’s no surprise that the companies solving for this are surging ahead.

For me Singapore remains the benchmark for Fintech innovation and we should see some big moves in digital assets/tokenisation over the next 12 months.Sat in the media room today, the crypto bros from Blockheads were besides themselves watching the US election results come in!

I’ll hopefully have another report tomorrow and some video footage from the event to share with you.

Dexter