Singapore, 4 November 2022… The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and the Singapore FinTech Association (SFA) announced the award winners of the Global FinTech Hackcelerator and the SFF Global FinTech Awards, at the Singapore FinTech Festival (SFF). The winners, comprising financial institutions, FinTechs and solution providers, were recognised for their innovative solutions that can help to accelerate the pace of digitalisation, innovation and sustainability in the financial industry.

Global FinTech Hackcelerator

1.The theme for this year’s Global FinTech Hackcelerator is “Accelerating A Greener Digital Future”, with dual focus on Web 3.0 and Green Finance. The winners of the Global FinTech Hackcelerator were selected at Demo Day, held during SFF on 2 November 2022, where 17 finalists pitched their innovations to an international industry panel. Please refer to Annex A for the details of the competition and the judging panel. The top three teams are (in no order of merit):

Company Name Solution Name Country FQX eNotesTM Switzerland norbloc Fides Sweden WeavInsight WeavAir Singapore

1. FQX’s solution offers a highly efficient infrastructure that provides on-chain settlement of tokenised debt securities. It enables cheaper issuance fees and increased capital efficiency.
2. norbloc’s solution offers a digital onboarding platform that covers the whole know-your-customer (KYC) lifespan from data collection, management, and validation to data sharing and monetisation.
3. WeavAir combines cutting-edge AI analysis with new data sources like satellite imagery to gather accurate and real-time data which enables decision makers to achieve their ESG targets faster and more efficiently.

SFF Global FinTech Awards

1. The theme for this year’s SFF Global FinTech Awards is “Embracing Digital, Charting the New Normal.” The 36 winners across nine award categories were selected from a total of 223 submissions. The winners were chosen by an international panel comprising industry experts across multiple domains. Please refer to Annex B for the details of the competition and the judging panel.
2. The winners for the SFF Global FinTech Awards 2022 (presented by MAS) are:

Award Category Placing Company Name Solution Caption Singapore FinTech (Singapore Founder) 1st Metaverse Green Exchange Pte. Ltd. MVGX Carbon Suite in the fight towards sustainability 2nd Validus Auto working capital (AWC) loan underwriting in just one minute 3rd AsiaVerify (UNSD Information Technology Pte Ltd) Asia’s leading entity resolution technology ASEAN FinTech 1st FlexM Pte. Ltd. Reviving offline payment retail digital solutions during the pandemic 2nd Know Your Customer Digital solutions for seamless client onboarding 3rd Mambu Cloud banking platform to empower Islamic banks to transform Singapore Financial Institution 1st BondEvalue BondbIoX: World’s first fractional bond exchange 2nd Standard Chartered Bank Banking-as-a-service solution 3rd ICBC Singapore ICBC innovative blockchain services Global 1st Mastercard Turning purchases into meaningful action with Priceless Planet Carbon Calculator 2nd Valocity Global One Smart Platform – Digitising the end-to-end property decisioning process 3rd Stemly Stemly Cashflow planning solution with sustainability strategy

3.The winners for the SFF Global FinTech Awards 2022 (presented by SFA) are:

Award Category (Individual) Individual Name Company Top 10 FinTech Leaders Andrew Gazal ESGTech El Lee Digital Treasures Center Pte. Ltd. Kelly-Ann McHugh MyComplianceOffice Pte. Ltd. Manish Bhai UNObank Inc. Natalia Mykhaylova WeavInsight Pte. Ltd. Nick Wilde Thought Machine Pte. Ltd. Rajaram Kannan BondEvalue Pte. Ltd. Sanjay Uppal Finbots AI Solutions Pte. Ltd. Seong Ouk Choi Sentbe Pte. Ltd. Shi Alice Chen ESGTech ASEAN FinTech Leaders Cristina Amor Maclang GeiserMaclang David Chen Atome Financial Eddy (Kok Hoe) Wong VSure Group Salim Dhanani BigPay Sohini Rajola Western Union Award Category (Corporate) Company FinTech Employer of the Year Mastercard SC Ventures | Standard Chartered Singlife with Aviva Partners of FinTech Atome Financial Thunes YouTrip Knowledge Enterprise BondEvalue Chainalysis Chintai Network Services 

1. Mr Sopnendu Mohanty, Chief FinTech Officer, MAS, said, “We are very encouraged by the innovative, cutting-edge solutions presented by the winners and finalists of this year’s Global FinTech Hackcelerator and FinTech Awards. The winning entries have demonstrated strong potential to tackle real-world problems, while allowing the financial sector to harness the tremendous benefits of new technologies in their journey towards a greener digital future. Our heartiest congratulations to all the winners of the Global FinTech Awards!”
2. Mr Shadab Taiyabi, President of SFA, said, “Innovative technologies continue to hold tremendous potential in boosting FinTech offerings and shaping the broader financial sector. Through the Global FinTech Awards and the Global FinTech Hackcelerator, we want to celebrate and give recognition to individuals and enterprises that are making a positive impact on the FinTech ecosystem and at the same time, encourage and foster a culture of continued innovation within the FinTech sector.”

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Annex A – About Global FinTech Hackcelerator 2022

The Global FinTech Hackcelerator, powered by Oliver Wyman, publishes high-priority business challenges and invites FinTech solution providers with a market-ready solution from around the world to submit their applications on how they intend to solve these challenges with their proprietary solutions.

The competition comprises two parallel scouting programmes – the Local and International Partner Programmes. The Local Programme tackles problem statements originating from the finance industry in Singapore and globally; and the International Partner Programme comprises FinTech challenges organised by international partners.

Local Programme

Organised by MAS, the programme seeks to unlock the potential of FinTech in accelerating the development of Web 3.0 and Green Finance, in Singapore and the region. MAS collected over 50 problem statements from financial institutions and industry players.

The Web 3.0 problem statements focus on embedding blockchain technology to overcome scalability and implementation challenges, as well as expanding decentralised finance to enable the development of real-world use cases. The Green Finance problem statements focus on enhancing investor and financial institution’s ease of monitoring commitments and measuring impact of loans and investments against their sustainability goals.

10 finalists were shortlisted by a panel of industry experts to join a 10-week programme to work with an assigned Corporate Champion, who provided mentorship and guidance to refine the solution to the institution’s or industry’s context.

International Partner Programme

The Global FinTech Hackcelerator’s International Partner Programme features independent competitions and programmes run by selected international partners around the world. Selected Partners include:

• European FinTech Hackcelerator by Accelpoint and the Polish Investment & Trade Agency
• F10 Climate FinTech Incubation Program and Klaytn Web 3 Incubation Program powered by F10
• FinTech for Tomorrow Challenge by Finance for Tomorrow
• Finnies 22 by FinTech Australia

Seven winners from the programmes run by international partners were fast-tracked into the finals of the Global FinTech Hackcelerator.

Rewards for Finalists and Winners

All 17 finalists from the Local and International Programmes received a S$20,000 cash stipend. They are also eligible for a fast-tracked application for MAS’ Financial Sector Technology and Innovation (FSTI) Proof-of-Concept grant (up to S$200,000). The finalists presented their solutions during the Global FinTech Hackcelerator Demo Day to an esteemed panel of judges and the top three winners received S$50,000 each in prize money.

Winning Solutions of the 2022 Global FinTech Hackcelerator

Company Name Solution Name Description of Company and Solution Country FQX eNotesTM FQX AG is a Zurich-based FinTech Startup that aims to revolutionise short-term financing for businesses by providing the world’s most efficient and sophisticated tokenised debt infrastructure. 

Both traditional and decentralised finance have substantial flaws in themselves. While traditional financing is battling with inefficiencies, fragmentation, and intermediation, DeFi lending offers no access to institutional investors, comes often with legal uncertainties, and tends to be over-collateralised. FQX solves these issues by offering a hub for tokenised debt powered by eNotes™, blockchain-based debt securities. When compared to other financing tools, eNotes™ excel through their modularity and global transferability, based on a standardised legal framework.

The cutting-edge financing and securities infrastructure of FQX provides on-chain settlement and promises cheaper issuance fees, increased capital efficiency, regulated debt securities, processing within minutes instead of weeks and lastly very competitive Annual Percentage Yield.

Switzerland norbloc Fides norbloc is the first company globally to have successfully implemented a blockchain-based data sharing platform at scale with large international financial institutions and governmental bodies (+450k customer files currently residing in the ecosystem). 

norbloc’s flagship platform, Fides, connects financial institutions and government entities in an ecosystem where KYC data is validated and shared, thus mutualising the burden of KYC and removing data silos.

One single KYC file per customer is maintained in the ecosystem, ensuring that all participants have access to the latest, up-to-date data. Financial institutions have efficiency gains as duplication of effort is removed and less effort is spent on onboarding. Regulatory compliance improves as there is an audit log at data field level indicating the changes made, when they were made and by whom.

Sweden WeavInsight WeavAir Lack of accurate real-time data on ESG risks and climate change carry significant impacts on financial performance of assets and threaten infrastructure. WeavInsight leverages new modular sources of data and cutting-edge analytics technology to provide ESG KYC and parametric ESG intelligence platforms, that are accurate and fast to implement. 

By combining networks of sensors, satellite imagery and drone data capture systems to track Greenhouse Gas emissions, safety and other operational parameters, the company provides million times more data than is currently available to financial institutions and regulators. By doing this, the company provides unprecedented advantage of extremely accurate data, while making it available in real time.

The solution makes use of in-house proprietary machine learning models to provide best-in-class transparent insights, that are tailored precisely to the customer needs. WeavInsight helps assess new clients based on the ESG and climate risks and supports real-time monitoring the evolution of customer impact targets and ESG risks, reducing the cost and time required to make accurate decisions by at least 10-fold.

Singapore

Demo Day Industry Panel for the Selection of Winning Solutions

Name Title Organisation Darian McBain Advisor MAS Sean Kennedy Head of Digital, Finance and Risk Practice, Asia Pacific Oliver Wyman Manuel Jaeger Head of Crypto and Co-Founder, ADDX ADDX Vivien Jong Chief Digital Officer, BNP Paribas Wealth Management BNP Paribas Abhi Bisarya Chief Product Officer Crypto.com Gautam Mukharya Chief Risk Officer HSBC Nic Dreckmann COO & Head Intermediaries Julius Baer Yip Shue Heng Managing Director, Head of Digital Transformation Division, Asia MUFG Ian Sikora Executive Director Open Space Ventures Kevin Hardy Senior Vice President, Head of Singapore and Southeast Asia State Street

ANNEX B – About SFF Global FinTech Awards 2022

There are a total of nine award categories and the winners of the awards will be announced at SFF 2022. Entries can be submitted based on the following categories:

MAS SFA

For corporates

• Singapore FinTech (Singapore Founder)
• ASEAN FinTech
• Singapore financial institution
• Global

For individuals

• Top 10 FinTech Leaders
• ASEAN FinTech Leaders

For corporates

• FinTech Employer of the Year
• Partners of FinTech
• Knowledge Enterprise

The Awards will be hosted entirely on API Exchange (APIX), a cloud-based innovation platform which allows firms to source for FinTech solutions for specific focus areas and for these solutions to be curated, contextualised, and validated.

Judging Panel for the 2022 SFF Global FinTech Awards Winners

Full Name Title Organisation Alex Manson Head of SC Ventures Standard Chartered Amit Anand Founding Partner of Jungle Venture Jungle Venture Anton Ruddenklau Head of Financial Services Advisory KPMG Brian Thung Managing Partner, ASEAN Financial Services EY Chitra Hepburn Head of APAC ESG & Climate MSCI Inc. Connie Leung Senior Director, Financial Services Business Lead, Asia Microsoft Cornelia Andersson Global Head of Sustainable Finance and Investment London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) Darian McBain Advisor Monetary Authority of Singapore Edward Bizaoui APAC Head of CIB Markets Technology and Singapore Technology Centre Lead JP Morgan Frank Desvignes Global Head of Innovation AXA Next Labs Gautam Mukharya Chief Risk Officer, Environmental, Climate Risk & Innovation HSBC Ho Kok Yong Partner Deloitte Jeff Lin VC Investor, Senior Principal Iglobepartners Lawrence Chan Group CEO Nets Mark Munoz Managing Partner at Vectr FinTech Partners Vectr Ventures Mathew Wood APAC Head of Digital and FinTech Partnerships VISA Phil Jenke Venture Lead OBI SQUARED Ventures Pranav Seth Chief Digital Officer Techcombank Rainer Lo Government Relations Lead in Asia R3 Rama Sridhar Executive VP, Digital & Emerging Partnerships, New Payment Flows, Asia Pacific Mastercard Sopnendu Mohanty Chief FinTech Officer Monetary Authority of Singapore Victor Alexiev Global Head of Venture Incubation Citi Ventures Wilson Huang Director, Innovation Hub Bank of Singapore

Board of Director of Turtlemint (Insurance)

[1] The top three winners will receive S$50,000 each in prize money.

[2] The prize money for each of the top 3 winners of the respective award categories is as follows: 1st Place: S$150,000; 2nd Place: S$100,000; 3rd Place: S$50,000.

[3] Examples of real-world use cases include addressing data privacy and fraud issues to ensure security for users, as well as solving for market efficiency shortcomings.

[4] Examples of problem statements aimed at helping corporates and SMEs meet their sustainability goals include leveraging on technology to create sustainable benchmarks in order to rate companies’ performance on a green scale.

[5] The SFA awards have been further streamlined this year, with the previous “Women in FinTech” and “FinTech leaders under 30” categories now incorporated under the “Top 10 FinTech Leaders” category.

[6] APIX (https://apixplatform.com/) is a flagship product of the ASEAN Financial Innovation Network (AFIN), a not for-profit entity formed by MAS, the International Finance Corporation and the ASEAN Bankers Association. Its objective is to support financial innovation and inclusion around the world.