It’s now doable to open a brand new bank account or apply for a bank card or loan with just some faucets on our smartphones. Many individuals now have entry to fashionable monetary providers, akin to immediately transferring funds, from the consolation of their dwelling or workplace. They don’t have to go to a bodily department location to deal with their banking wants, as a result of most duties will be accomplished on-line.
Digital banks or purposes to launch a digital banking platform have develop into more and more frequent throughout Asia. Singapore is reportedly awarding two full digital bank licenses and three digital wholesale bank licenses. There had been 21 digital bank purposes that had been submitted to the nation’s regulators, however solely 14 have met the minimal eligibility necessities.
A number of the purposes which have met primary necessities for a license embody Ant Group, Seize, Sea Ltd, Singtel, Temasek’s Heliconia Capital Administration, and Razer.
Singapore may be an excellent location to supply digital banking providers as a result of solely 2% of the city-state’s almost 6 million residents are unbanked. Which means that most individuals residing within the nation could be ready to start utilizing all-digital platforms and providers, as a result of they’d have entry to the web via their smartphones or computer systems.
Nevertheless, there are nonetheless 4 in ten Singapore residents (or 40%) who’re underbanked, which suggests they’re not as well-served as shoppers residing in different developed nations. It’s doable for digital banks establishing operations within the nation to department out into different Southeast Asian markets, as a result of 70% of adults (appr. 296 million residents) are underbanked.
Singapore’s three main conventional banks, together with DBS, UOB, and OCBC, may not but be involved about competing for market share with a number of the newer digital challengers.
The three incumbents have been transferring ahead with their very own digital transformation methods. They’ve continued to announce updates throughout these difficult instances, when many bodily enterprise areas have shut down as a result of COVID-19 outbreak.
As reported in March 2020, Singapore-headquartered DBS Bank, a multinational banking and monetary providers company with over $330 billion in complete belongings, had facilitated a commerce financing settlement via vCargo Cloud’s CamelONE commerce finance portal (TFP).
Earlier this month, DBS Bank partnered with the Authorities Expertise Company of Singapore (GovTech) to check out the SingPass face verification know-how system.
Digital banking providers may now be simply accessed in Singapore through OCBC’s SingPass which doesn’t require remembering or coming into entry codes. As lined in June 2020, ByteDance, developer of TikTok, may compete for a digital banking license to be issued by the Financial Authority of Singapore.
As reported lately, Copenhagen Fintech, a Denmark primarily based group supporting monetary know-how, is teaming up with the United Nations Improvement Program (UNDP) and several other different organizations with a purpose to assist Nordic Fintechs with launching operations in Singapore.
