Tharman Shanmugaratnam: Promoting innovation in finance in Singapore Speech by Mr Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Chairman of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, at the Launch of the Singapore FinTech Festival, at the Asia Society, New York City, 12 April 2016. *  *  *  I’d like to thank the Asia Society for hosting us this evening, for the launch of the Singapore FinTech Festival. The Festival will take place over 5 days in November this year in Singapore, bringing together technology players, financial institutions, FinTech players and regulators. We are launching the festival in New York City, and that is not as surprising as it may first seem. It says something about how we view innovation in finance. It is an inherently open system. Innovation is about ideas and enterprise flowing between cities, and connections between players everywhere. We can’t predict how those connections will unfold, but we know that there’s no neat geography that will define financial innovation. It’s also why we shouldn’t focus too much on the rankings of different financial centres at this stage of the game. You know what they say about the rankings of colleges and universities. If you rank very well, the rank is extremely important. And if you are not ranked well, they are unimportant, irrelevant, and they don’t get to the heart of what you are really trying to do. Well, we are nicely on both sides of that.
Such as the infrastructure for centralised addressing for real time mobile payments. And the efficient and secure storage of data in the cloud. And critically – no one has done this very well in in an organized way, having open APIs, whether private or public APIs in each of our established players. Open APIs can spur innovation in banking and finance. There will be tensions as we go forward with FinTech, tensions inherent in a new wave of innovation, that we must accept and manage. First, the tension between new players and established players, or the tension between disruption of existing players and collaboration with them. Many FinTech players see themselves as disrupters. But there’s also a fair bit of collaboration that’s taking place. Established financial institutions have been partnering or acquiring new, smaller players with new technologies. Acquiring them either as a defensive mechanism or as a way of bringing disruptive technologies within their own organisation with the hope of strengthening what they offer customers. It’s hard to say how this will play out in the years to come – hard to say whether the disrupters will indeed disrupt the existing financial business in a significant way. I think it’s too early to say. In China, we have some major FinTech players, they are no longer new now, those like Alibaba and Tencent. They have become established names. Elsewhere it hasn’t made too much of a difference yet. It is early days.