Just in the last few years, global MNCs have set up more than 30 FinTech innovation labs or research centres in Singapore. The FinTech start-up space has become a lot more vibrant. More than 400 FinTech enterprises have set up base in Singapore. We have start-ups experimenting with new ways to pay, save, invest, buy insurance, and plan for retirement. No innovation ecosystem is complete without physical spaces to facilitate experimentation and collaboration. Last year, we saw the launch of LATTICE80, Singapore’s first FinTech innovation village, occupying two whole floors of 80 Robinson Road. Well, the entire building at 80 Robinson Road will now become a FinTech innovation hub. It will be named 80RR – that’s 100,000 square feet dedicated to housing FinTechs, right in the heart of the financial district! Open Architecture A Smart Nation needs an “open API economy.” APIs are the “connectors” that allow systems to talk to one another, enabling service providers to harness information from multiple sources and produce holistic solutions for customers. MAS has been encouraging financial institutions to develop and share their APIs openly, so that they can work with other service providers to give customers a richer and more seamless experience. We started the ball rolling last year. With the Finance-as-a-Service API Playbook, banks have a common guide to identify and develop APIs. And with the Financial Industry API Register, FinTech start-ups have a one-stop shop to explore the open APIs that have been made available.
Because different banks were acquiring the same merchant so that they could offer the merchant lower on-us rates for their cards dipped in their own terminals. This was good for merchants, and even for the consumer as the merchants passed on some discounts to them. But there were hidden costs: Cashiers had to be trained on different terminals, customers at self-checkout lanes fumbled with which terminal to dip their card into. So we set out to study the market, see which merchants had more than one POS terminal, prioritise them by the volume and value of transactions that they handled, and worked closely with their acquirers one-by-one to on-board onto a single terminal that can accept all schemes that use chip and contactless near-field communication (NFC). Today, the process is still underway, but you can already see these UPOS terminals deployed in supermarkets, convenience stores and petrol stations – these are merchants that we visit daily, if not weekly. Besides addressing the challenges I mentioned above, this has certainly made the self check-out experience a delight. 17. Second, Singapore Quick Response (SGQR) code. Besides chip and contactless NFC payments, many mobile payments are optical via a Quick Response (QR) code. Just as we started to tidy up the POS terminals at merchants, we started to observe a proliferation of payment QR codes as each e-payment company deployed its own QR code sticker at each merchant’s cashier. We identified the problem early and immediately formed an industry task force comprising payment schemes and acquirers.