Singapore FinTech Festival concludes today after a weeklong line-up of fruitful discussions. On Day 5 of the Singapore FinTech Festival, facilitating trust in data sharing, digital identity, financial and digital inclusion as well as payments interoperability were some of the common themes that ran through the sessions.
Some of our key takeaways from the experts:
Data is the lifeblood of the digital economy. Businesses are increasingly focused on using data intelligently and innovatively. Data sharing opens up opportunities for the broadening of use cases and the improvement of products and services offerings. As an example, FinTechs providing digital consumer credit are able to leverage on third party behavioural data, such as data from telecommunications providers and e-commerce platforms, as proxies for traditional credit bureau data to build better credit risks models. From a Singapore perspective, the regulator has put in place various frameworks to facilitate trust in data sharing between businesses, such as the APEC Cross Border Privacy Rules (APEC CBPR) System, the Data Protection Trustmark (DPTM) Certification and the Trusted Data Sharing Framework. Industry players also expect to see an increased use of intermediaries to facilitate the data sharing process.
A strong foundational digital infrastructure is vital in supporting the growth of the digital economy. Digital identity is one of the pillars of digital infrastructure. How digital identity is designed has differed between countries (centralised or decentralised; public or private), depending on each country’s legal framework and attitude towards privacy. Other pillars of digital infrastructure include data exchange systems; an architecture to manage authorisation and consents; and common payment rails or networks to enable interoperability across payment solutions.
Finally, collaboration between FinTech companies and financial institutions including banks will be key for the acceleration of digitisation in the financial sector. Technology and attitudes have shifted as banks are now increasingly finding new ways to collaborate with FinTechs in order to deliver value to customers and accelerate growth.