ATTENDING THE 2023 SINGAPORE FINTECH FESTIVAL
Last week, I attended the 2023 Singapore Fintech Festival (SFF), the World’s largest fintech business promotion and networking event (and therefore festival), hosted at Expo in Singapore. SFF is annually organised by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), Elevandi and Constellar, in collaboration with The Association of Banks of Singapore.
Over 60,000 people attended the festival! Not only were there company (i.e. large multinationals, SMEs and startups), multilateral & bilateral and national trade delegation stalls promoting some highly intriguing and cutting-edge Fintech products & services, but there were also a wide array of panel speaking sessions comprising of political leaders, corporate and not-for-profit (NFP) captains of industry, along with senior figures in the multilateral & bilateral sector.
In the process of attending these panel speaking sessions, along with meeting many insightful corporate, multilateral and NFP representatives, I learnt the following three key takeaways from this year’s SFF:
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already well-underway as a mainstream integrated mechanism for Humanity’s work whether in Fintech and in any sector, particularly in the labour force. Albeit some concerns regarding AI “replacing” humans in employment, AI can in fact be contrarily deployed as a key tool in enhancing the work of human employees in any big firm and MSE, along with entrepreneurs too! Several panel speakers stressed that humans will always be needed to factcheck AI and more so, make sure that there is always an organic friendly interaction with a heart in any customer service interaction, business processes, particularly in project planning, implementation and outcome assessment.
ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) principles and compliancy are critical to any Fintech and other business practices to provide shared value between companies, their customers and shareholders. Because of Humanity’s collective concern in addressing the current environmental woes prevalent on our planet, mainstream investments in sustainability and eco-friendly ventures are burgeoning. Therefore the “E - Environmental” component, along with ameliorating “G - Governance” is now a mainstream practice in ESG endeavours. However, many of the panel speakers and company representatives have acknowledged the “S - Social” component of ESG, especially in terms of appreciating the strong correlation between poverty alleviation and environmental preservation & resilience through for-profit sustainability ventures.
Digital Inclusion is becoming the next “big thing” for Fintech, as investors and companies in the space recognise the potential in tapping into investments and fintech banking services to provide digitised financial inclusion for the World’s poor – i.e. the Bottom-of-the-Pyramid (BoP) demographic, which is estimated by the World Bank to be numbered at roughly 4 billion people, constituting a global consumer market size of US$5 trillion.[1]
A special thank you to the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), Elevandi, Constellar, The Association of Banks of Singapore and therefore Singapore for organising such an amazing festival. I met some amazing people and learnt so much pertaining to all things Fintech!
