After sieving through close to 400 applications across 44 countries, The FinLab, Singapore's first corporate fintech accelerator, selected 8 innovative fintech businesses for its second cycle of acceleration.
The FinLab, a joint venture between United Overseas Bank Ltd (“UOB”) and SGInnovate ("SGI"), helps identify, develop and support innovative businesses keen on growing and expanding into the ASEAN markets.
The FinLab is the only accelerator that had 3 fintech businesses from our 1st cohort receiving recognition at last November's Singapore Fintech Festival. Attores and Turnkey Lender were nominated in the MAS Fintech Awards, with Turnkey Lender winning 2nd prize, and CardUp was selected as 1 of 19 teams from 655 global submissions to be part of the Global Fintech Hackcelerator.
Just recently, Attores, a business that focuses on developing and deploying smart contracts, announced a Proof-of-Concept with Ngee Ann Polytechnic, an Institute of Higher Learning, to publish students’ education certificates on the blockchain.
For The FinLab's 2nd cycle, the startups again boasts complementary approaches to disruption and innovation: from areas of financial inclusion and capital markets, to bringing convenience to users and enhancing compliance in finance.
Financial Inclusion
The HelloGold mobile app lets customers buy physical gold with as little as RM1 and then pledge the gold as collateral to borrow at lower rates. It solves the problem for those who want to save in gold but can't afford it, and for those who want to borrow money but don't have the right credit score.
And just as traditional gold investing is given an innovation boost, Quber leverages on technology to provide smart financial management tools. Engagement is the cornerstone here, and through this, Quber aims to help impart and ingrain financial literacy for all who use their platform.
Convenience to Users
Introducing convenience to daily consumer transactions is Aimazing, one of the winners of the MAS Fintech Awards 2016. Aimazing enables platform agnostic contactless mobile transactions with their patent-pending Soundwave Data Communications Technology.
With the prevalence of social chats, PayKey enable bank users to securely make P2P payments within any social network and messaging application, through a payment keyboard which is integrated with the bank’s mobile app.
Capital Markets
Bonds is the only asset class that has not moved to fully leverage the use of technology like FX and stocks have. BondLinc aims to bring transparency and efficiency to bonds trading for institutions, relationship managers, traders and clients.
TransFICC, on the other hand, alleviates the pain faced by banks when having to integrate with multiple fixed income eTrading venues, by introducing a low latency, robust and scalable consolidated
API. TransFICC's one API for eTrading connects to them all.
Compliance
The advent of increased technology use is coupled with an increasing need for compliance especially in the financial industry. To reduce fraudulent activities in business workflows, Tookitaki provides a machine learning platform designed for banks and financial institutions. They bagged the first prize for the Singapore SME category at the MAS Fintech Awards 2016.
Last but not least, Chynge is a RegTech that uses an AI.Compliance.bot to ensure that cross border payments are compliant, safe, transparent and fast for all parties involved in each transaction.
The FinLab continues to support and groom our portfolio companies, past and present.
