FOMO Group, a Singapore-based financial holding group, today announces that it has completed the acquisition of CapBridge Pte Ltd (CapBridge), a capital markets service and asset custody firm, and 1X Exchange Pte Ltd (1exchange), a private securities exchange company. With approval from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) on the acquisition, FOMO Group has secured Capital Markets Services (CMS) License and Recognized Market Operator (RMO) License in Singapore. This deal bolsters FOMO Group's leading position as a fully-integrated, regulated and licensed digital payment and digital asset solution provider in Asia.

CapBridge is a digital online investment syndication and distribution platform with CMS License that offers accessibility to capital markets products, including securities and collective investment schemes, along with custody solutions. It is also an exempt financial adviser and is able to issue analyses and reports on investment products. 1exchange is an RMO-licensed private securities exchange that offers cost-effective listing venue designed for SMEs, corporates and institutions.

Founded in 2015, the FOMO Group provides one-stop digital payment and digital banking solutions to facilitate global collection and global payout for merchants, corporates and financial institutions. This acquisition expands the FOMO Group's capability to offer value-added products in the capital markets space, which aligns with its strategy to provide a full suite of solutions to its existing clients as well as to bring new clients into the ecosystem, accelerating business growth.

In light of the continuous development in the classification of digital assets, a more forward-looking and future-proof compliance strategy is necessary for businesses within the industry. With a vigilant and proactive regulatory approach, FOMO Group acquired capital market licenses in addition to its existing Payment Service Act (PSA) licenses. The attainment of CMS and custodial service license and RMO license further strengthens its ability to provide secure, robust and compliant one-stop solutions to SMEs, merchants, corporate and institutional clients, while maintaining a competitive advantage in the industry.

Louis Liu, Chairman of FOMO Group, said, "We are excited to bring CapBridge and 1exchange into FOMO Group. Given CapBridge and 1exchange's demonstrated track record and their strategic investors such as Singapore Exchange and Hanwha Group from their previous Series A, the acquisition empowers us to forge a fully integrated financial service ecosystem, offering our clients a comprehensive suite of value-added products. Furthermore, we have proactively structured our business strategy to align with the ever-evolving global regulatory trends and enhance our compliance capabilities. Therefore, the acquisition of both CapBridge and 1exchange highlights a significant achievement for FOMO Group."

Johnson Chen, CEO of CapBridge Financial Group, added, "This strategic combination with FOMO is a major milestone for our team. By integrating CapBridge's robust capital markets solution with FOMO Group's ecosystem, we are poised to revolutionize the capital markets space. The new enlarged, integrated and regulated ecosystem will improve accessibility, transparency, and efficiency for companies seeking liquidity solutions as well as investors searching for opportunities in the capital markets. Importantly, the combination of services that can be provided by CapBridge, 1exchange and FOMO Pay will lead to more innovative solutions and drive future growth opportunities."

As one of the leading global financial hubs, Singapore has clear and rigorous regulatory standards aimed at safeguarding the financial market's integrity and the overall economy, which enables businesses like FOMO Group to thrive while maintaining the highest level of integrity and accountability.

"As we celebrate our 9th anniversary this year, FOMO Group takes pride in commemorating this significant milestone alongside yet another remarkable achievement through this acquisition. Under Singapore's well-defined regulatory framework for the sustainable growth of the fintech industry, we maintain our steadfast commitment to offering compliant value-added financial services to clients and partners," said Louis Liu.

We’re excited to announce the launch of our new Best Execution solution, designed to help investment managers worldwide address regulatory requirements while reducing cost of ownership. The solution streamlines and automates the process for gathering quantitative and qualitative data needed to support clients’ best execution analysis and reporting. Firms can utilize this technology to help meet global regulatory requirements for SEC Rules 110-1102, FINRA rule 5310, MSRB Rule G-18, and MiFID II compliance.

Available today, Best Execution is the latest module added to our award-winning ComplianceAlpha^® integrated RegTech platform for financial services firms. The offering is available as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), that complements and integrates with ComplianceAlpha’s Employee Compliance and Market Abuse Surveillance solutions, as well as with third-party systems. This solution helps global firms facilitate the exchange of critical data and reduce the cost and time to complete required regulatory reports.

“The fiduciary duty of investment managers and advisers includes seeking the best execution when placing orders for clients,” said Patrick Conroy, Partner at ACA. “Regulators expect firms to demonstrate that they are consistently taking all sufficient steps to obtain the best possible results for their clients, including evaluating the execution performance of transactions. Our new ComplianceAlpha Best Execution solution helps clients meet these obligations by evaluating not only the cost of services received from all their financial counterparties and service providers, but also the quality of those services.”

“ACA’s Best Execution solution outlines a specific set of recommended tasks for conducting a compliant best execution report. In addition to performing a transaction cost analysis, it allows the firm to rank brokers on responsiveness, breadth of services, and other factors,” said Jordan Schwartz, Partner at ACA. “These qualitative capabilities are a differentiator for ACA enabling clients to quickly identify potential conflicts of interest and flag related records for investigation. Integration with other ComplianceAlpha modules, like Market Abuse Surveillance, facilitates the exchange of data and implementation.”

The best execution regulatory framework builds on existing global best execution regulations, including Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFID II), which states that investment firms must take all sufficient steps to obtain the best possible result for their clients when executing a client order, providing full disclosure and transparency items including price, transaction costs, speed of execution, likelihood of execution, and trading venue selection.

Best Execution regulatory requirements:

In December 2022, the SEC proposed Regulation Best Execution, establishing a regulatory framework for brokers, dealers, government securities brokers, government securities dealers, and municipal securities dealers. The regulation includes a need for firms to assess the execution quality of their customer orders at least quarterly, with policies and procedures that describe how they comply with the best interest standard.

While the UK no longer requires regulated firms to prepare certain best execution reports (Relevant Technical Standard (RTS) 27 relating to venues and RTS 28 for firms), the regulatory obligations to seek best execution for clients remain and form a central part of Treating Customers Fairly. The EU also deprioritized supervisory actions on non-publication of RTS 27, though the RTS 28 obligation for EU firms remains in place.

Chief Product Officer at ACA Group, Annie Morris shares, "With the launch of ACA's Best Execution solution, we reaffirm our dedication to meeting our clients' needs by streamlining the review of trade execution quality and ensuring regulatory compliance. By integrating quantitative and qualitative data, we empower our clients to make informed decisions, evaluate broker performance, and fulfill their fiduciary duty diligently."

Key features:

Clients can quickly identify potential conflicts of interest related to their best execution review. The solution also assists with reviewing factors such as Transaction Cost Analysis (TCA), broker and trading counterparty surveys, conflicts of interest, research provision arrangements, and other agreements.

Key features of the offering include:

• Workbench – A repeatable sequence of tasks to help firms create a more compliant and defensible best execution review.
• Survey Manager – A flow to create custom broker surveys and manage the results.
• Quantitative Metrics – Full Transaction Cost Analysis (TCA) KPIs and other metrics to compare to surveys and other noted broker-related activities.
• Items of Interest – Identification of relevant outliers during Best Execution review.
• Flexibility – Configurations for the Workbench, Broker List, and Survey Manager templates.

Best Execution is the latest addition to ACA’s suite of integrated and complementary RegTech products, allowing firms to customize solutions to meet their needs. These include Market Abuse Surveillance, eComms Surveillance, Employee Compliance, Control Room, Marketing Review, Compliance Management, AML KYC/CIP, and eLearning.

Cordada, a private debt platform that caters to lenders and fintechs serving small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Latin America, has announced its partnership with Thought Machine. Cordada will use Thought Machine's cloud-native core banking platform, Vault Core, to develop highly personalised financial products for SME lenders and fintechs across Latin America. Cordada will use Vault Core as SaaS hosted on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Cordada will migrate existing products and services onto Vault Core and leverage this technology to design, test, and deliver high-quality financial products that empower lenders of all sizes to fund the next generation of SMEs. Currently operating in Chile, Peru and Mexico, Cordada will use Vault Core to expand its services into new Latin American markets. 

Cordada chose Vault Core to support its customer base with a comprehensive suite of lending solutions, based on dynamic and personalised credits secured with portfolio collateral. With Vault Core, Cordada will effortlessly create financial products by leveraging Thought Machine’s global Product Library – a collection of pre-built smart contracts ready for launch. Cordada can customise these products before launch or modify them if required. This capability enables Cordada to offer highly personalised and localised products to its customer base while supporting multi-currency assets.

“We are extremely impressed by the flexibility and power of Thought Machine’s technology. Vault Core will enable us to create highly differentiated financing products quickly and effortlessly without depending on the Thought Machine team. This, in turn, will empower the next generation of SME lenders to develop modern solutions as they tackle the great challenge of bridging the $1tn financing gap for SMEs in Latin America," said Andrés Prats, co-founder and CEO at Cordada.

Paul Taylor, founder and CEO, Thought Machine, comments: "Running on Thought Machine technology, Cordada will empower lenders of all sizes and provide high-quality financing options to SMEs across Latin America. We look forward to Cordada enhancing its product offerings and delivering a new era in SME funding for Latin American businesses."

Thought Machine’s client roster includes Lloyds Banking Group, Standard Chartered Bank, Intesa Sanpaolo, and Curve, among others worldwide. The company’s recent partnership announcements with C6 Bank in Brazil and Cordada further reinforce its commitment to expanding its presence in Latin America.

In an exciting collaboration, STARZPLAY, one of the region's top three subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services, has announced a strategic partnership with TPAY, the leading payments provider in the Middle East, Turkey, and Africa (META). With this partnership, customers will be able to make their subscription payments using their mobile phone numbers, to access STARZPLAY’s premium sports and entertainment content. 

With an initial focus on expanding its presence in the MENA region, TPAY will enable STARZPLAY to accept subscription payments from 9 million viewers via Direct Carrier Billing (DCB). The partnership will commence with Orange Tunisia, followed by Sudatel Sudan and Chinguitel Mauritania, with plans to expand across more countries in the region. 

Işık Uman, TPAY Group CEO, commented: "Partnering with STARZPLAY strengthens our position as the region's preferred payment processing partner of choice for merchants, especially those in the streaming vertical and beyond. We are proud to have built a platform that can eliminate all the complexity of cross-border settlement. We also provide faster payment cycles, compliance, and risk management, allowing our partners to remain focused on growing their business in the region." 

Raghida Abou-Fadel, Senior VP of Sales & Business Development at STARZPLAY, said: "We are excited to announce our partnership with TPAY which will enable us to instantly deliver our premium content to all entertainment and sports fans across the MENA region. By teaming up with TPAY, we can ensure a seamless and secure payment experience for our customers while continuing to expand our footprint in the region." 

The Middle East Media and Entertainment industry is expected to grow at a CAGR of 9.4% during the forecast period, 2023-2028. The market size is predicted to grow from USD 39,05 billion in 2023 to USD 61,2 billion by 2028. The industry has been one of the first business sectors to steer digital disruption, and its transformation is far from over. STARZPLAY will continue to strengthen the industry with a focus on expanding its presence in the region by diversifying its offerings to include premium sports coverage (football, basketball, boxing, and more). 

The adoption rate of financial technology in the Philippines among the population aged 15 years old and over through mobile apps may increase to 72.2% or 59.3 million users by the end of 2023, according to a new report from consumer credit service Digido.

The maximum growth of this indicator is expected to come from the Payments & Transfers segment (+17.6%), followed by E-Wallets (+4.9%), Digital Banking (+4.3%), Digital Investments (+3.7%) and Digital Lending (+0.9%).

Last year, the adoption rate of fintech services among the population aged 15 years old and over in the Philippines reached 69.3% from 64.4% in 2021. Similar to the region as a whole, the largest contributor is the e-commerce sector, with adoption among adults close to 100% in the Philippines at the end of 2022.

Of the 867 actively used fintech applications in the Philippines, the Digital Banking and E-Wallets segments are the most popular — with 163 (18.8%) and 134 (15.5%), respectively, followed by Payments & Transfers with 104 (11.9%), Wealth Management with 86 (9.9%) and Digital Lending with 84 (9.6%). 

The Payments & Transfers segment exhibited the highest download growth rate at 11.3% per month from 2018 to 2022, followed by Business Management (10.7%) and Financial Advisors (8.4%).

In terms of user growth in the past five years, main contributors to the development of the fintech industry in the Philippines are E-Wallets (+1026%), Digital Lending (+330%) and E-commerce (+222%).

“The findings from our report indicate that the inertial movements towards the “fintechization” of the population is going from strength to strength. The country’s fintech infrastructure is also showing high adaptability to ever-emerging challenges, mainly due to a large domestic market and progressive government support,” Digido country manager Farit Shakirov said. “As it stands, there remains opportunity for the fintech industry to maintain momentum and build towards a more vibrant ecosystem by cultivating further trust in their services by providing seamless, communicable user experiences and fruitful collaborations.”

Homegrown humanitarian organisation, Singapore Red Cross, has included cryptocurrency as a newly-accepted form of donation, partnering with Triple-A, the first crypto payment gateway licensed by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), ahead of Singapore’s National Day. 

With Triple-A's white-label crypto payment solutions, the Singapore Red Cross can now receive cryptocurrency donations from supporters, to deliver humanitarian services to uplift the vulnerable, particularly in Singapore. All crypto donations will be converted into fiat currency and settled via bank transfer within one business day, ensuring the funds are readily accessible to support the organisation's humanitarian initiatives. 

Singapore Red Cross will accept donations in various cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Tether (USDT), and USD Coin (USDC). The process is simple, as all crypto wallets are supported through Triple-A. 

Mr Benjamin William, Secretary General and CEO of Singapore Red Cross enthused, "Cryptocurrency donations have become increasingly popular due to the efficiency of processing them and their global accessibility. By accepting digital currencies, we open our doors to a new segment of donors who are tech-savvy and wish to make a difference through their digital assets. Enabling cryptocurrency donations also opens more opportunities for the new generation of donors who are au fait with digital currencies to consider philanthropy and helping the vulnerable.”

"We're honoured to partner with the Singapore Red Cross in enabling cryptocurrency donations and empowering donors to support humanitarian causes with digital assets," said Mr Eric Barbier, CEO of Triple-A, "Crypto payments offer faster, more secure transactions, reduce administrative overheads, and ensure that the funds reach those in need promptly,”

The new payment option is now live on the Singapore Red Cross website, allowing donors from around the world to contribute using their preferred cryptocurrencies. Donations can now be made through the Singapore Red Cross’ website. 

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